​There’s an empty space at All Hallows this morning. Thanks to all who gave our lovely Vicar Mark a good send off yesterday, such a mix of sadness and celebration as we gave thanks for his ministry here.
So, what next? A lot of people have asked when the new vicar starts or who we’re getting. Unlike most organisations, Church doesn’t work like that.
The job of Vicar isn’t just a job, it’s a relationship. The people left behind need time to mourn and to adapt. It’s a time to take stock and rediscover who we are before we think about the appropriate next step.
In the first place, the ‘powers that be’ will also think about what our future might be, including if we will even get a new vicar.
If they decide we will, the Church council will start work on a Profile of the parish and a Job specification which will have to be approved by the Bishop (with possible re-writes) before an advert can be created to go in the Church press. This certainly won’t begin before the autumn and can take some time. There could be a good few months of this before that advert appears.
Assuming there are applicants the interview process can begin. Some churches have had to go back to the beginning and re-think as no-one has applied.
Once a candidate is successful, he/she may have to give up to 3 months’ notice to the parish where they are working.
If things run smoothly, it is still likely to be over a year before we get a new vicar.
Meanwhile, All Hallows will be run by people who attend there, with the oversight of the Area Dean (Mark Fraser, Vicar of St Luke’s). Sunday services will continue, sometimes taken by a visiting minister, others by our lay minister or a few times members of the congregation.
The congregation has a firm commitment to the community around us, so don’t imagine we’ll fade into the background. The absence of a leader can give others the chance to flourish and we have already started seeing signs of this as we prepared to go into vacancy.
The future is both daunting and exciting at the same time ….. watch this space!

As this will be my last annual meeting in the parish, I have written my reflections on the past seven years as Vicar of Lady Bay. Image © Paul Oliver | Dreamstime.com

Work with St John’s College
I was appointed to a dual role, not two separate half-time jobs, nevertheless the demands of balancing the two halves of that role have been acute. Busy periods of teaching and marking have often coincided with major festivals or other busy periods in the life of the parish.

More demanding of energy, however, has been the significant institutional challenges the college has faced during my time there. A once-thriving Church of England evangelical ordination training college with a national reputation has now no ordinands or onsite independent students at all and a teaching staff a third the size it was when I joined. My own post will become redundant when I move on, leaving only one full-time person working in distance learning (the remainder working in teaching youth and children’s ministry).

Efforts to develop a sustainable business in distance learning are ongoing but are proving challenging, especially with a London-based college (St Mellitus’) opening a training centre in Nottingham at the invitation of the Bishops of Southwell and Nottingham and Leicester.

Strategic priorities
The parish role to which I was appointed had some very clear priorities in the job description:

• Pioneer patterns of missional church;
• Build bridges to and in the community 
  (with those outside the church to be my ‘greatest concern’);
• Building a leadership team and worshipping community;
• Enabling contemporary worship and witness.

In addition, I was to be a resource for pioneer ministry within the Diocese, and, as Vicar of the Benefice, to oversee worship, pastoral care and governance, with support provided for week-by-week liturgical ministry in both churches – St Edmund’s and All Hallows’.

A retired priest was recruited for St Edmund’s, but the support for All Hallows’ never materialised. It was thus up to me to lead services at All Hallows’ in addition to these other priorities.

‘Pioneer patterns of missional church’
I applied for this post on the basis that the demands of the dual role could only be sustainable if they could be combined into one role where leading mission and training students would be achieved in one and the same way. In my first two years, I thus concentrated on developing a proposal for college and diocese for what would become the Community Mission Pathway (CMP). In 2014 we recruited the first cohort and six students made Lady Bay their base for practical learning in mission and ministry in the context of together forming a ‘new monastic’ mission community. They and their families helped to create a centre of gravity for Don’t Forget Your Cornflakes!, enabled broader pastoral reach and helped to develop new relationships and mission opportunities in the parish.

There were some severe challenges along the way, but I was prepared to run an adapted version with a second cohort when the first students graduated in 2016. The PCC also indicated its enthusiasm to host students again, but St John’s structural problems meant we were unable to recruit any students to the new contextual training pathway. From this point forward, the two components of my dual role have diverged, making it increasingly difficult to sustain either.

‘Building a leadership team and worshipping community’
Closely linked to the initiative described above, has been the invitation I made to the parish, on behalf of diocese and college to enter into the three-year Partnership for Missional Church process. Its aim is to embed spiritual disciplines (also called ‘holy habits’) in the life of an existing congregation so that it can become increasingly ‘missional’ in outlook. My aspiration was that PMC would in effect encourage the whole congregation to become the ‘leadership team’ for mission in Lady Bay.

There have been some good outcomes – it has helped the congregation recognise and value even more highly its existing partnerships and connections, with residential homes in the parish and through existing events such as All Hallows’ Eve. At the same time, it is fair to say that some serious shortcomings in communication mean that the spiritual disciplines have not caught the imagination of the congregation and instead resistance to anything labelled ‘PMC’ has become firmly embedded.

My long-frustrated attempts to broaden leadership in All Hallows’ to include newer members in the leadership team alongside the more established finally had some success for a time last year. This endeavour was brought to a rather abrupt end with the departures of Tim Cardinali-Wood and Michael Campbell-Edwards at the end of the year.

‘Building bridges’
Alongside the existing connections identified above, I have been able to take a lead in building two significant relationships with other organisations in the community. I have worked sensitively with Lady Bay Primary School, offering a positive and respectful Christian presence that enhances the life of a school community that is very protective of its secular identity and ethos. This culminated in my being invited to join the Governing Body by the Headteacher and Chair in October 2016. This was valuable and enjoyable work.

My vocal, public support for the opening of the Framework Hostel on Trent Boulevard, while it generated some hostility, nevertheless also opened the door to a very positive relationship with the hostel; its staff and residents. In the longer term, participating in liaison conversations with neighbours has also overcome much of that initial hostility, both that directed towards me and that towards the hostel. As a result, members of All Hallows’ and other churches have been welcomed in offering practical love and care to those vulnerable young people and those working with them. 

‘Enabling contemporary worship and witness’
It was my judgement that the traditional pattern of worship in All Hallows’ would not suit young families (then including my own) who are by far the largest component of the local population, but that also it would be too much change too quickly to ask the traditional congregation to adopt a more informal contemporary style from day one. Thus Don’t Forget Your Cornflakes! was born. It was initially successful and provided an accessible form of church, especially for families seeking baptism and thanksgiving.

Without the promised ministry support, however, this necessitated a change in time for the traditional service and in order to facilitate my own essential pastoral contact with both groups, I invited members of the more established congregation to have their after-service refreshments in the hall at the same time as newer members were gathering for DFYC. In addition to the change of time itself, this proved a step too far for some and we lost some members right at the beginning of my time here.

Following the departure of the CMP students in 2016, DFYC became more challenging to sustain in terms of resourcing it personally and in terms of fluctuating attendance. An experiment with an afternoon version (Don’t Forget Your Jimjams!) saw even less reliable attendance and this separate, weekly all-age endeavour was wound up at the end of 2017.

This opened up the opportunity to experiment with bringing the two groups together ¬– the remnant of the DFYC/DFYJ community and the former 9:30 A.M. traditional congregation – to form one Sunday morning congregation, meeting at 10:00 A.M. with a mix of a traditional structure with contemporary elements (music, liturgy, etc.) including the use of a screen and projector instead of hymn and service books. It is my judgement that the format overall is working reasonably well, though there are still some challenges around accessibility for both groups.
At the same time, Messy Church has started up without needing any initiative or input from me. It appears to be growing well after just a few months and shows real promise in creating an accessible space for young families in a much more sustainable way than I managed to achieve with DFYC in its time.

It is a matter of deep regret that we have not been able to more sustainably establish All Hallows’ as a safe space church for LGBT people in the south of Nottingham to the extent that I and others have wished.

‘Resourcing pioneer ministry in the Diocese’
In addition to all the responsibilities already in the role, a wider diocesan brief was always going to be difficult to fit in, but there was some early success in my participation on the East Midlands region ‘FEAST’ (Fresh Expressions Area Strategy Team) and in my joint leadership of a mission review in Bilborough with Sarah Clarke (then still Vicar of Clifton). I also facilitated some network gatherings for pioneer ministers employed by the Diocese at St John’s and at the Vicarage.

With the change of diocesan leadership however, and with a new strategy focused on top-down church planting and grafting initiatives, those of us committed to developing bottom-up Christian communities have found ourselves increasingly swimming against the tide. Support and enthusiasm for those of us designated ‘pioneer’ ministers has declined and some lay roles that have been reviewed have been made redundant. What I have to offer is no longer a good fit for this Diocese and this has, in part, precipitated my move.

Significant learning
It is fair to say that while there have been some successes, and while I believe I have been faithful to the role I was licensed to fulfil under God, my main feeling after seven years is one of disappointment.

Some of that has been due to circumstances beyond my control – structural changes in theological education nationally and regional as well as diocesan leadership and strategy, for instance, but inevitably one has to ask: what could I have done differently?

The single most significant learning for me in the past seven years relates to the issue of trust. Were I to have my time over again, I would invest much more time and energy in building relationships of trust. There was of course suspicion about my role before I even arrived, with some openly saying that I had been sent to close the church. That made it even more imperative to take the time and trouble to get to know people better than I did early on and to do much more to make it clear that all I have wanted to do has been born of love – love of God, love of God’s people in the church and love of all God’s children in Lady Bay.

For some more longstanding members of the congregation, I believe, the church had become a refuge of familiarity in a world of change and more specifically a community that had changed and was changing beyond recognition. To invite change in this last safe arena was always going to be a big ask. For such an invitation to be accepted would require confidence that the one asking is someone who loves you and has your best interests at heart.

Communication is key to building trust and in this environment of anxiety about change, I didn’t always take the care I might have to clearly communicate, especially about the reasons for change. I did try to communicate at times, of course, but without the grounding of a relationship of trust, it is difficult not to ascribe ulterior motives to someone who is asking something difficult of you. Narratives of suspicion abound in the fertile ground of mistrust. Ironically, it was my desire to be plain-speaking from the outset that may well have undermined trust even further. My now infamous and somewhat crass comment early on that I was not ‘here to be your Vicar’, rather than, as intended, communicating a different focus, style and approach to my predecessor, was heard instead as ‘I don’t care about you’.

For that, I am sorry. I don’t know if there would have been a different outcome with a different approach, but this lack of investment in trust has certainly been very difficult to overcome and made me a ‘Marmite’ figure for some in the congregation. I hope and pray that such division will not persist after the conclusion of my ministry in June. My learning has been profoundly costly for me. I suspect it may be for others too. Trust is a two-way street in the end. I hope that following my departure you will take the risk of trusting each other again and offering trust to whomever, if anyone, might follow me.

Future ministry and direction
There have been hopeful signs from the Area Dean and others that serious consideration is being given to future ministry in Lady Bay and Holme Pierrepont. It is my belief that the Bishop will not invest the serious subsidy that would be needed, even to support a half-time priest, unless he sees the possibility of growth and renewal in the church. That would most likely involve sending a group of people from another church or churches to create the core of something new, alongside what is already established.

​I believe it will be vital for whomever comes after me that I am not a continued presence or irritant in the parishes and thus hope you will understand why I will not sustain contact except with personal friends after my departure. That said, I will continue to pray for you all. May God richly bless you

This is a copy of the sermon preached by the Revd Mark Rodel
​on Sunday 10 March 2019 at the High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire’s Legal Service at St Mary’s Church, Nottingham.

Readings Isaiah 58: 6-12 and Luke 15: 11-32

+ Prayer

I wonder what it was like for you when you first properly left your family home. I’m not talking about your first overnight stay away from your family home, but when you left home to make somewhere else your more-or-less permanent residence.
Thinking about that might be especially poignant for you as it is for me. Maybe, like me, you’re at a time in your life when now your children are beginning to leave home and you’re walking that difficult line of being a parent to adult children; trying to judge when to advise and support and when to hold back and let them take the risks that will lead to success or important learning.

Maybe you’re beyond those years and you’re watching your children having children of their own and trying to create the safe, secure and loving homes from which their children will too one day step out. Thinking about adult children leaving home is a good way into our Gospel story today. After the story of the Good Samaritan, the story of the Prodigal Son, as it’s known is perhaps the most well-known of the stories Jesus told.

Because it’s familiar, we perhaps miss some of what is really happening. We might first-of-all be tempted to see it as a morality tale aimed at young people. Today we celebrate and give thanks for all that we’ve inherited from the past, most especially in our justice system.

In the light of this, we might think this story is about the dangers of breaking with convention and trying to go our own way, but I don’t think for one minute that this is what Jesus is getting at. It’s clear from its context, that this story, along with the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin that precede it, is addressed to the Pharisees and Scribes, who in verse two of this chapter are ‘grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’’

It’s the older, grumpier brother that Jesus has in his sights in telling this story; more of him in a minute. This is ultimately a story about forgiveness and how it works. It invites us to reflect on how we respond on those who have lost their way, even if that be through their own poor decisions. In reflecting on that, we might find some guidance and help on how we might relate to each other and how justice might work in our society beyond the criminal justice system. In short, it offers us wisdom in how to treat each other and makes some demands of us.

Let’s look then at this young man who loses his way. What might be lost on us, but would have been shocking to Jesus’s original hearers, is the implication of the younger brother’s words to his father. What he is in effect saying in asking for his inheritance now is: ‘I wish you were dead; I wish you were dead.’

How many of us in those moments of relational difficulty have heard or possibly even said such profoundly hurtful words? The utter rejection of his home and its values at the start of this story is truly scandalous. As becomes clear as the story unfolds, this is someone who has utterly lost their way.

Like many of the people so many of you here today have encountered in the criminal justice system, this is a young person who through a succession of bad choices has met with personal disaster. It has cost him, and it has cost his family deeply.

He was wealthy, well-fed and popular. He ends up homeless, hungry and alone. This is where we reach a crucial moment in the story; the moment when the young man comes to his senses. In the experience of so many, it is only when reaching rock bottom that such a realisation can follow. It’s only at this moment when desperation outweighs shame, that he can think of returning home to the father he wished dead

And now we turn our attention from this wayward son, losing his way and then coming to his senses. Now we take a moment to regard his father. It has been said that this parable might be better called the parable of the running father than the parable of the prodigal son.

Those hearing Jesus tell this story for the first time would have been scandalised not just by the insult spoken by the son, but by the dishonour the father brings upon himself. For any man of status in first-century Palestine, to run was disgraceful. It was degrading. It was a dishonour. But this man runs to greet his son on the road as soon as he sees him.

He runs to offer him forgiveness. What this suggests to us is that in any act of offering forgiveness there is an inevitable loss of face, a self-abasement. In offering forgiveness, the father willingly and freely abandons his status and dignity.

We might notice too that the father does not wait to hear the words of sorrow and repentance. The son’s appearance on the road home is enough. The father’s forgiveness and love overflows and is not dependent on any expression of regret. So often we regard forgiveness as a transaction; as if it were something we might offer in response to remorse. This story invites a different stance, one where forgiveness is freely and unconditionally offered. That’s not to say that remorse, regret and repentance are not important, but that they are the states of mind and heart that enable us to receive the forgiveness freely offered to us, rather than the precondition that invokes grace and mercy.

This all might put us in mind of the story of Shamima Begum – a young girl arguably groomed, trafficked and raped, but also, in the terms of this story, one who turned her back on her country, who perhaps even wished us dead and made some devastatingly bad choices. We might wonder what response this story would suggest to her situation as she attempts to turn back to the road that would lead her back to the home she once rejected.

The response to her, as to many others who have rejected what was good about home, have made bad choices, have come to their senses and have turned back might have more in common with the older brother in our story today.

So now, finally, we turn our attention to him. His response to the joyous abandon and generosity of his father is completely understandable. It is where many of us most naturally stand. How often have we seen others we regard as undeserving receive those things for which we have faithfully and law-abidingly striven? Those Pharisees of Jesus’s time, like this older brother, did not see in the welcome of sinners a dawning of a new era of grace, but the abandonment of principles of justice they held dear.

Perhaps we, like them, and like the older brother, find this all a bit much, a bit too hard to take. It’s a natural and in many ways proper response. But this story invites us to imagine another world where grace, forgiveness and love abound, where the undeserving who turn towards home are welcomed with open arms.

I don’t imagine Jesus meant this to be a prescription for systems of national justice, such as our own criminal justice system. That way could lie chaos and the breakdown of law and order. But alongside the criminal justice system there is the wider issue of what justice looks like in our culture and society. To put it more simply, there is the issue of how we respond as individuals and communities to those who have lost their way and turned back. Will we shun and shame them, or will we, inspired by love, be prepared to lose face and run to offer them a welcome?
This might all feel beyond us. It is. To err is human, to forgive divine, after all. But maybe, at the last, there is hope in a different reading of this story. What if instead of seeing the prodigal son as a sinner, we see him as Jesus himself, taking his leave of heaven and coming to be with us in our pig sty; spending the riches of heaven with abandon and finally returning home, penitent, not on his own behalf, but on behalf of all of us, all of us who in ways perhaps obvious, and perhaps hidden, have lost our way?

It is this Son, profligate with the riches of heaven, who meets us in our humanity and transforms it; who makes it possible for us to do what is impossible to muster from within: to forgive as he forgives. May we receive this forgiveness in our own lives and offer it to one another joyfully. Amen

What is the chief end of man?
Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

These words are from the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647. It was written during the Civil War in an attempt to bring theological unity between the English and Scottish Churches. It was not ultimately adopted by the Church of England, but still has something profound to say to us, even if it is expressed in patriarchal language (presumably they thought the chief end of woman was to make the sandwiches!)

It's attempting to address that most basic, far-reaching and profound of human inquiries; why are we here?

As we continue to reshape our worship at All Hallows' in Lady Bay, this is a live question. It's no less urgent for St Edmund's in Holme Pierrepont. Discerning our purpose, our ‘chief end’, is crucial to thinking about what we do when we gather. What might be a little lost for our generation in reading the awkwardly gendered language of the catechism is that this is a communal question. It affects our individual actions, but this is a question about what is the purpose of humanity, what is our collective vocation? If the church is meant to embody the vision of an ideal human society, we must seek to understand what is God's answer to that question.

Glory is one of those words that puzzles me. It's used again and again in our liturgies, and I think we have an unconscious sense of what it might mean, but to try (as I frequently do) to explain it in terms a child of primary school age could understand is a challenge. The best I've been able to do so far is to say that it has something to do with reputation and something to do with reflected light. If that's true, then ‘glorifying’ God means living in such a way that we reflect the light of God and to speak well of God.

‘Enjoying God forever’ means that our ultimate purpose is, as the theologian Sam Wells puts it, to ‘be with’ God. He contrasts this with doing for, doing with and being for; all good, he says, but the greatest is being with. The character of that being with is of our enraptured bliss; boundless joy – ‘pleasures forevermore’ as the psalmist puts it (Psalm 16:11)

Our gatherings then, are to be a reflection, a foretaste, of our ultimate gathering in God’s presence, to be characterised by joy and the reflected light of God and where together we ‘speak well’ of God. Whether we do this in the simple language of children or the poetic majesty of the Book of Common Prayer is less important perhaps than our collective intent; what is it we believe we are doing when we come together.

How we approach our gatherings is a matter of choice before it is matter of experience. Our fumbling attempts to express our hearts to God, even when using words beautifully crafted in previous centuries, can feel at times a little lower than heaven. But what we are attempting is perhaps even more important than what we achieve.

In worship, just as in this life there needs to be space for failure as well as success, sadness as well as joy, lament as well as celebration but in all these experiences, in our ‘being with’ God, and with each other, we recover our identity as human beings and find the possibility of true fulfilment. That is why it is so important that our gatherings at inclusive, welcoming and open, that we listen to the experience of all in our midst, the stranger as well as the friend, the newcomer as well as the old hand, the misfit as well as the fits-well.

I pray we may deepen our welcome and our hospitality to each other and to all as we meet week by week.
​
peace
Mark