Parish Vision Sunday, 16 September 2007

When I arrived at college more than twenty years ago I found stuffed into my pigeon-hole (alongside summonses to see my tutor, invitations to join the Communist Party and flyers for the university Morris men) a publication called The Little Blue Book. This was full of biological and anatomical information designed to guide the innocent undergraduate through the perils and snares of the fleshpots of Cambridge in the mid-1980s (rather tame and unlikely fleshpots, it must be said). The Little Blue Book was received with derision. It treated its audience with contempt and told them nothing that they did not already know.

Today we launch our very own Little Blue Book. My hope is that it does not provoke among you the response that its similarly coloured but otherwise unrelated predecessor provoked among my contemporaries, even if the appearance of a new Vicar with a new Plan invites comparisons with (on the one hand) Stalin’s megalomaniac schemes and (on the other) the worst sort of modern management culture, all jargon and targets with nothing of merit or substance.

What our Little Blue Book, our Mission Action Plan, does is identify four priorities for the life of the Parish in the next five years, and make creative suggestions about what we might do to realize them. It is not my personal scheme. It has emerged through the combined efforts of PCC members (thanks to them) working together. It is not utterly comprehensive. There are of course areas of our life upon which it does not touch. It is not yet complete. It will need your input and approval. Finally, it is not a museum piece in waiting, to be agreed with rapture one week and then left to gather dust the next. It will be a living document, to which we return for strategic guidance, and which we will revisit and refresh whenever necessary.

It begins, of course, with worship, which is at the heart of our common life, and it sets us the challenge of offering all who come here the possibility of an encounter with almighty God. Worship can strike a spark in people’s souls; it can bring them to their knees, turn them around and send them out transformed. Different kinds of worship achieve that common end for different kinds of worshippers. We serve a diverse and eclectic community, and what this parish has learned is that one size does not fit all. Some encounter God through the fine music of this Eucharist, and some through the preaching (or they used to, at any rate). Some encounter God through the less-than-sedate welcome of the Family Eucharist and through the space that it makes for every individual, whatever their age. Both acts of worship are valid; neither is a junior partner; each plays its own part in our mission, and we must ensure continually that each is of the highest possible quality. Hence the trial change in timings of which you are already aware.

Our diversity is our strength, but so too is our unity. The Plan recommends that we should occasionally worship together as a parish family, in a new liturgy that attempts to reflect our breadth and strength, and that gives us all the new experience of belonging together. And because we believe that worship can have a profound effect upon the worshipper (and particularly worship offered in surroundings such as these) we want to look for new ways of allowing people to experience it, whether in seasonal Choral Evensong or a candle-lit jamboree for children at the beginning of Advent.

Growth in faith, the nurture of the spark that worship strikes, has a distinguished pedigree in the parish, and the Plan wants to develop it, placing a fresh emphasis on our learning instead of on your instruction. Growth in faith is not the ecclesiastical equivalent of taking up flower-arranging or acquiring a fourth classical language. It is not something done for our personal entertainment; and it is not something optional. It is an integral part of the pilgrim journey of every baptized person; it is part of our formation as the people of God, of our growing together into the full stature that our heavenly Father wishes and wills for us. An opportunity for growth is vital at every stage of faith’s journey, particularly so at its beginning, or before its beginning, in the realm of exploration and questioning. If we don’t provide those opportunities then someone else will and we will be missing a trick. This will sound familiar, but such opportunities must be different for different people: opportunities for reading and study, of course, but also for conversation and shared laughter, through our being together around a glass of wine as well as together receiving from the chalice.

If the spark is lit and if the flame is fed it will shed light all around. It will shed light on the miseries of injustice and exploitation that disfigure God’s world, and so it will pose a challenge. The third priority of the Plan is the role of our Church in the World. When Jesus returns to the synagogue in Nazareth he reads from the prophecy of Isaiah, and declares its promises fulfilled in him: release for captives, sight for the blind and liberty for the oppressed. That is our task too: the Church, I have always believed, exists to change the world, not just the condition of men’s souls. So perhaps we might become a more environmentally conscious Church, taking seriously our stewardship of creation corporately and severally. Perhaps we might better recollect our obligations to the worldwide Church through a genuine partnership with another congregation in a less affluent part of the Communion. Perhaps we might select a local project with the young or with the homeless and use our resources to make a real difference to it. Perhaps, surrounded as we are by embassies from every corner of the globe, we might play our part in the struggle for human rights and human dignity. Perhaps we might build the kingdom of heaven in Victoria and Belgravia; perhaps we might make a start, at the very least.

And undergirding everything is our fourth priority: our resources, our building, our staff and our finances. Without attention to these then all our hopes and dreams will crumble: with appropriate attention then there will be nothing that we cannot achieve in God’s name. We want to budget for year-on-year increases in our income from giving, and for year-on-year increases in our giving away. Thus will we fund the realization of our hopes, demonstrate our commitment to the self-giving way of the cross, play a full part in the life of the Diocese, and secure our future.

So let me offer you a vision of the Church that we might be a few years from now:

- a Church with more than one substantial and growing congregation, out of which vocations to accredited ministry are grown regularly;
- a Church whose liturgy and worship are a beacon for the national Church, to which pilgrims come in search of the transcendent God;
- a Church which is a centre for the spiritual growth of those who are its regular members and those who are not;
- a Church that has profound links into its geographical setting and sponsors a midweek worshipping presence in Victoria Street;
- a Church acknowledged as an agent in its community’s transformation.

Together, through the grace of God, we can make the vision a reality. Amen to that. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Sunday 16 September 2007,
Parish Vision Sunday