Superintendent’s Pastoral Letter – October 2022

Dear Friends,

First, let me thank you sincerely for everyone who prayed for our eldest daughter Derrina and her husband Simon, and your lovely cards gifts, and wishes on the arrival of our first grandchild Talitha Ruby Alice Thomas on 4^th October. Not everything in life goes quite according to plan. One moment we think we’ve got eight weeks until our little grandchild arrives; the next, after our daughter Derrina fell rapidly ill, we’re suddenly welcoming into the world a very tiny, but hugely precious baby girl…. ‘Talitha’ means ‘Little Girl’ in Aramaic ( Jesus’ spoken language). We cannot express how proud and blessed we feel right now… God’s name only to be glorified. Thank you again!

As some of you may have heard me saying since I joined you that I would like to spend my first six months to listen to you and get to know you better and see where God is leading us…to become a Listening and Praying, Missional Church community.

Are we sitting at the feet of Jesus? In attempting to understand what a listening Church might be, we can also look to another Mary in the Gospel, the sister of Lazarus and Martha. When so many people today seek value and self-esteem primarily through activity and achievement, Mary shows us that are other factors more fundamental than “being anxious and troubled about many things” (Luke 10, 41). As opposed to her sister, Mary sits at the feet of Jesus and listens to his teaching. Sitting at the feet of the teacher is the pose typical of the disciple.

The Church may perhaps have ended-up doing too much – often not for the wrong reasons – and have run the risk of becoming over attached to its works and structures and buildings. One of the challenges for the  Church is to move from being a doing Church to being a listening and praying Church. We must never be obsessed with doing. There must always an element of abandonment in our activities, of seeking first the kingdom knowing in faith that these other things will be ours as well (cf. Lk.12 31). Listening to the Word of God must lead to discernment and also the capacity to let go of what is not essential in order to allow the essential newness of the Gospel to emerge within us.

Going out into the deep. The Gospel Luke 5, for example, showed us how it was only when Peter abandoned his own instinct (based on his long experience as a fisher) and listened to the apparently less rational intimation of Jesus that he realised what he wanted and in a way which surpassed every expectation. I am not against reason. But there may be times when we become entrapped in our own carefully negotiated and facilitated strategies which may not necessarily encourage us to take the risks of going “out into the deep”!

A listening Church will always be a discerning Church, a Church which scrutinizes always the authenticity of its doing. I am a great admirer of the great founders and foundresses of the religious congregations of the nineteenth century who addressed the educational and healthcare needs of their people, here in UK , on continental Europe and in the New World. They were great doers – whose traditions many of you keep alive today – but they were very often also mystics, who were driven into their caring work by their deep understanding both of God’s love and of the human condition.

How does being a listening Church affect our task as evangelisers? Evangelisation lies today at the heart of the mission of the Church. Evangelisation means announcing, in word and deed, the goods news of Jesus to all. This means announcing that good news anew within in our believing communities, as well as to those who have never heard the Gospel, to those who no longer participate in Church life and to the future generations.

Teachers of prayer and of life.  Prayer is at the heart of evangelisation. This changes our attitude to everything else in our lives. One of my favourite characters in the Gospel is John the Baptist. He was a Jewish saint. The text I like most is when the disciples of Jesus turn to him and say “Lord teach us to pray the way John the Baptist taught his disciples to pray “. It is as if the disciples of Jesus were jealous of the disciples of John! We need today true teachers of prayer, those who can teach others to pray and who are recognised in that way by society as true teachers of life. Religious communities must transform their houses more and more into schools of prayer.

A listening Church – You will have noticed that when I speak of a listening Church I tend to stress the dimension of listening to God’s word.  When we listen faithfully and attentively to the Word of God, we learn a new style of living. It is the life style which we learn from Jesus Christ himself. We have to recover the notion of charity and love in the fundamental dimension of gratuity in our relations with others. That is the remarkable thing about love: we love gratuitously, we do not ask anything in return, just as Jesus loved us first. Listening to the word of Jesus will inevitably lead us away from any form of self-certainty and arrogance. It will lead us deeper into that fundamental dimension of Christian life which is self giving, gratuitous love.

This will involve openness to listen to each other and especially to the needs of those who are weakest and most vulnerable. It will mean learning what love and compassion mean, in the family, in community – including within our own church communities.

A listening, compassionate and humble Church should be a people not hardened by the toughness of modern life, capable of bringing that simple compassion and hope which our sophisticated modern world needs more than ever.

What does God want to say to us? I don’t know. But I know he has something to say. Do we care to listen?