Presidential Address by the Right Reverend Robert Atwell

EXETER DIOCESAN SYNOD

7 October 2017

Presidential Address by the Right Reverend Robert Atwell

On my retreat at the monastery of Le BecHellouin during August, I rediscovered some words of St Augustine about being a bishop. Writing at the end of the fourth century, he said that the job of a bishop is (and I quote) ‘to rebuke agitators, to comfort the faint-hearted, to take care of the weak, to confute enemies, to look out for traps, to teach the uneducated, to waken the sluggish, to hold in check the quarrelsome, to put the conceited in their place, to appease the militant, to give help to the poor, to liberate the oppressed, to encourage the good-hearted, to endure the spiteful and’, he adds almost as an after-thought, ‘to love them all.’ So that’s all there is to it.

Whatever the expectations people have of bishops and whatever your own experience of the Exeter Episcopal Team, we were all much encouraged by the Clergy Conference last month at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. The faint-hearted were encouragedand we were all inspired by a fresh vision of our amazing God. It was our first diocesan conference for five years at which we welcomed Bishop Julius and Archdeacon James from Thika, and Bishop Michael and Archdeacon Bill Schwartz from Cyprus & the Gulf, our link dioceses. Their presence brought a welcome international dimension to our discussions. The conference was entitled ‘Alive to God’, and with the help of some distinguished speakers we explored the way our three diocesan priorities are shaping the life of the Church in Devon. Jane Williams led our Bible studies on the psalms; Joanna Collicutt who is on the staff of Ripon College, Cuddesdon spoke on prayer; Mike Lloyd, Principal of Wycliffe Hall, spoke on the importance of apologetics in an age that is invariably hostile to faith; Peter Lord Hennessey, a familiar voice to many of you from his political commentaries on Radio 4, ensured that we kept in touch with the real world; and the novelist Catherine Fox proved to be a very entertaining after dinner speaker.

Overall the conference represented a welcome infusion of energy for which I give thanks. And thanks are particularly due to Archdeacon Christopher and Philip Sourbut, our Director of Mission and Ministry, who between them headed up the planning group and put together what, by the quality of the feedback, was judged to be first class conference. Please join me in showing your appreciation of them and those who worked with them.

I hope the clergy present will bear with me if I repeat a number of the themes I outlined in my opening address at the conference, but I think it important that we are all on the same page. I began not with theology, but with biology. In biology the term ‘irritability’ refers to an organism’s capacity to respond to different external stimuli. Put simply, an organism which exhibits no response is deemed dead. Change irritates, and how we respond to it is a mark of our maturity andindeed our liveliness. In the words of Cardinal Newman, ‘To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’

Sadly, when it comes to the Church, not changing is often the preferred option because it makes few demands on us. Inertia is attractive, even if ultimately death-dealing. By contrast, the process of change and adjustment although life-giving, in the short term is invariably painful. And that’s precisely where we’re at in the Diocese and more widely in the Church of England.We’re going through a period of profound change. Not everyone likes it and there are some who actively resist it. But for good or ill, it’s where we’re at.

There’s no escaping the fact that being a Christian today is challenging. At root is the sheer difficulty of communicating the excitement of faith to a generation that has problems with religion.A senior executive at the BBC remarked that the British public has such poor religious literacy these days that a modern audience would be baffled by the Monty Python film The Life of Brian because it would not understand the Biblical references. I have no magic solution to offer in the face of anaggressive secularizingculture. What I do know is that first, Christianity isn’t any less true just because it’s less widely believed; and secondly, whatever the next ten years may bring, God isn’t going into liquidation.That said, there’s no escaping the scale of the challenge confronting us.

It’s why each of us needs to allocate our energy wisely in ways that will bring life to us personally as Christians, life to our parishes and mission communities, and life to the local communities we serve. We either rise to this challenge or we run fromit.I’m inviting you to rise to it and journey with me in faith and love as we seekthe guidance of the Holy Spirit. Let me give you a few statistics to illustrate what I mean about the way things have already changed and the changes that are further down the pipeline.

How many beneficed and licensed clergy are there serving in this Diocese? Answer: 197. How many were there twenty years ago in Bishop Hewlett’s time? Answer: 408. We have to change the way we imagine ministry, particularly in our rural areas. Rather than just keeping things going, we need to create a model of Church fit for this century. Staying the same is not an option.

And here’s the problem. In spite of giving energy for almost twenty years into developing mission communities to release the ministry of lay people and embody a generous partnership in the Gospel, we are still in danger of substituting ‘I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church’, with ‘I believe in holy and energetic clergy’. We have to encourage and enable our lay people to own their baptism into Christ.

We need to grow new models of ministry alongside traditional models of church. We need a more mixed economy in the Diocese if we are to break new ground. To that end we will be experimenting with different types of training curacies and appointments, including developing interim ministers who have the capacity to go into a group of parishes and turn them round when things have got stuck.

According to the County Council, Devon is changing. Families are continuing to move out of our villages into urban areas with the result that our villages are becoming older. How are we going to engage more imaginatively with this ageing population and resist the narrative that sees older people as a problem? The University of the Third Age is now one of the biggest organisations in England. We need to learn a trick or two from them and think outside the box.

Speaking more generally about mission, I suspect that what works in a seaside town like Dawlish may not necessarily work in the villages around Holsworthy or in downtown Plymouth. Any suggestion of a ‘one size fits all’ diocesan strategy is doomed to fail. One of the purposes of our Diocesan Synod is to help one another understand the complexity of our situation in Devon as we seek to re-present Jesus Christ afresh to this generation.

To this end we are re-thinking the role of our Mission Community Development Team. From next year we are aiming to have four advisers, one based in each archdeaconry, three part-time plus one fulltime adviser to act as coordinator. Each adviser will be responsible for building a local team to serve their archdeaconry. The team will be composed of both ordained and lay people with complementary gifts and expertiseto work with you and your PCCs to release the mission energies of the Church. We have listened to your plea for resources which are not Exeter-centric, and we think that a model of teamwork which is locally rooted will be more nimble and more effective.

Let me share some more facts with you.Fact 1: What is the average age of the population in Kenya? According to Bishop Julius, the answer is 19. What is the average age of the population in UK? Answer 40. What is the average age of congregations in the Church of England? Answer 62.5

Fact 2: What percentage of the population in Devon over the age of 65 attends church? Answer: 6.5% What percentage of the population in Devon aged 25-45 attends church? Answer: 0.6%

‘Young people are the windows through which the future enters the world,’ says Pope Francis. Except that in our county, like in many places in Britain, the vast majority of young people do not engage with the Christian faith and have nothing to do with the Church. We have lost an entire generation. Thank goodness there are some churches that are bucking the trend, but if we don’t wake up to thisreality we will all be dead.Let’s take a leaf out of Jeremy Corbyn’s book and use social media to engage with a younger crowd. We need a rich mix of initiatives and stepping stones to faith, suited to a younger generation and the local context of a mission community.

Ido realise howdifficult it is to nurture a young Church when all they experience is an ageing one.But there is also a level of self-deception around which we need to challenge. In theory, everyone encourages youth ministry. In my experience, however, most parishes and clergy want nothing to do with it. Time and again I detect a ‘leave it to others’ attitude. Parishes lament the absence of children, families and young people, but when push comes to shove many are comfortable with the status quo and don’t want to change. On too many church doors in Devon hangs an invisible notice which reads: ‘Do not disturb’.

It’s no good us moaning that young people in particular and the public in general aren’t appreciative of what the Church of England is offering and they need to understand and to change. They won’t. If farmers kept growing fields of pumpkins year after year, convinced that there was a market for them but were unable to sell them, they would go out of business. Farmers are business people. They aren’t daft. They grow what they can sell. According to St John’s Gospel, the first question Jesus asked when he saw two men following him was, ‘What do you seek?’ What are looking for? We too need to check out our non-customers and find out what they want. If we don’t, we will end up out of touch and beyond our sell-by date. The Church will wither on the vine. And that’s not what God wants. God wants us to grow, and growth is an outcome of the quality of our life in Jesus Christ which is why prayer must be top of our list of priorities.

We need to spend less energy on our internal affairs and more in re-connecting with the people of England. Facts are friends and, according to the latest Social Attitudes Survey, for the first time the majority of the British population no longer declare themselves to be Christian. Faced with that fact, God is asking us to do things that are out of our comfort zone, me included, and it’s scary. This Diocese needs to be a learning community with the Holy Spirit as our tutor; in St Benedict’s phrase, we need to become ‘a school of the Lord’s service’.

It’s why in partnership with Truro Diocesewe are responding to our changing context by re-shaping SWMTC and the ministerial training and formation it offers. Philip Sourbut andJonathanRowe, Philip’s opposite number in Truro Diocese, have been appointed joint-Principals in succession to Christopher Southgate. Mention of Christopher gives me the opportunity to record our thanks as a Diocese for his leadership of SWMTC in recent years, and for his colleagues on the staff. There is a whole retinue of clergy and readers in the Diocese who hold him and SWMTC in considerable affection and we honour that.In parallel with this development, St Mellitus SW opened its doors in Plymouth for the first time last month under the leadership of Dr Donna Lazenby, its first Director, andJames Grier will be serving as honorary chaplain to the first cohort of students. This is an exciting and welcome development. We hope that these two training institutions will complement one another and be better placed to equip a new generation of ministers, lay and ordained, for Devon and Cornwall.

During my 39 years of ordained ministry there hasbeen significant changein the Church of England in relation to money. In fact there’s been a financial revolution with more responsibility for paying the clergy and their pensions being devolved to parishes. Finding the money locally to meet rising parish share is a challengefor many parishes, and that is true right across the country. As you will gather from Giles Frampton’s presentation of the budget this morning, money is tight and hard decisions lie ahead as we wrestle with clergy deployment. Nothing is written in stone and I want to invite you to be part of the conversation. As you know, we are in the midst of a review of our parish share system and the working group will be making their preliminary report to us today.

On the cash front, there is at least good news from the Church Commissioners. They have reported another year in which they have outperformed similar funds. As a result they are able to distribute more grants to more dioceses than would have been the case if their investments had merely performed in line with the average.In case you haven’t picked up on this, the Commissioners are moving from a policy of subsidy to one of investment. Exeter is one of the poorer dioceses in the Church of England and we are no longer going to be subsidised by the National Church. This is going to be an additional financial challenge for us. The good news is that we are already beneficiaries of the Commissioners’ financial success in their support of our ‘Growing the Rural Church Project’ and this autumn we want to begin the process of applyingfor some more money from the national Strategic Development Fund for mission in the poorest outlying estates in Plymouth. Every effective renewal movement in the history of the Church has begun not with the richest and most influential, but with the poor and marginalized which is why I invite you to give your support to this initiative. When we put the poor first, the whole Church benefits. A Gospel proclamation that answers the questions of the poorest citizens of this country will transform lives anywhere.

And there is more good news. As a Diocese I am pleased to report that we have emerged from our first Peer Review (which is the nearest thing the Church of England comes to an Ofsted) with flying colours. I am determined that the Diocese should embody good management and that includes planning for a balanced budget without selling assets or slashing posts.The time has come to review our administration and the way we do our business, with our various synods, meetings and committees often involved in an endless carousel of consultation. Stephen Hancock, our new Diocesan Secretary, is just the right person to tackle this plate of spaghetti and in a moment I’m going to invite him to introduce himself. We look forward to working with him in the months and years ahead.

Let me also bring to your attention two other important appointments. Last month it was announced that the Queen has graciously given her consent to the appointment of Jonathan Greener as the next Dean of the cathedral. Jonathan is currently Dean of Wakefield Cathedral where over the last ten years he has done sterling work in reviving its fortunes, remodelling its interior and growing its congregations. His installation will be in the afternoon of Sunday 26thNovember and if you would like to come, please be in touch with the cathedral office. The cathedral has been through a rough patch these past two years and it is good that the state of flux is over. We can now look forward with confidence to a new beginning. In this context I want to pay warm tribute to Canon Mike Williams who has been serving as Acting Dean and who in a remarkably short time has transformed the financial and administrative life of the cathedral. We owe him and his colleagues ahuge debt of gratitude.

Looking ahead to next spring there is another change with the retirement of Martin Follett, our Registrar. We will have an opportunity to sing Martin’s praises at our March Synod, but I am delighted to announce the appointment of his successor, Alison Stock. Alison is a solicitor with Stephens-Scown here in Exeter and we look forward to her picking up the legal baton from Martin next year.

‘Change and decay in all around I see: O thou who changest not, abide with me.’ I hate to think the number of times I’ve sung Abide with meat funerals. Many people do instinctively link change to decay, but to repeat the words of Cardinal Newman I quoted earlier, ‘To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ Life is all about change. Sometimes when we contemplate it a facile contrast is drawn between maintenance and mission. I’ve praised the virtue of flexibility and change, but part of the mission of the Church is to embody the things that do not change and sustain the memories which help us know what to live for and how to live wisely.