PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
DIOCESAN SYNOD, 2009

Once again I welcome you back to Cologne, and to the Kardinal Schulte Haus, which is now becoming a familiar meeting place, and where the powerful chapel dedicated to Edith Stein is an ever present reminder as we worship there day by day of the cost of Christian discipleship, and what the way of the Cross can mean. As I said last year the reality of a Diocese is something which comes alive when a Bishop visits a congregation. It also comes alive on these occasions of meeting. In any Diocese the parish is the local expression of the church, but when a parish does not see beyond its boundaries it can become narrow and even petty in its focus. Parochialism is never to be commended. In our unique and vast Diocese – which no one dreamt up according to some master-plan, it simply grew historically – the temptations of congregationalism are always present. It is therefore exciting to come together from across so many parts of Europe each with our own stories to tell of Christian life and worship, and to have these days set apart for discussion, meeting, prayer and reflection. It is good that we are beginning on this Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elisabeth, for that is a Feast of Meeting – as Bishop Jeremy Taylor put it – ‘what a collision of joys was there!’ – may that indeed be so for our own meeting this week.

We welcome a number of guests during this Synod – unusually three bishops: the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, to speak to us on ‘Christian Hope in the Modern World’, Bishop Graham Cray, the new leader of ‘Fresh Expressions’ to help us engage with possible new ways of being church appropriate to our Diocese; and the Bishop of Stockport, Robert Atwell, who will be leading our Bible Studies on the Book of Jonah. Bishop Robert will also be available for any members of the Synod who would like to take the opportunity for confession or counselling – something which the vast extent of our Diocese can at times make difficult. It is also good that we will be able to hear from Canon Gary Wilton about his work as the Church of England representative to the European Institutions. It is a special delight that during this Synod Frances Hiller, Bishop David’s Lay Chaplain will be ordained as a Distinctive Deacon, a reminder of the significance of this ministry which is only gradually being recovered in our Church. This will be on Wednesday evening at All Saints’ Church in Cologne, when the preacher will be the Revd Canon Dr Jim Garrard, Precentor of Ely Cathedral. Protecting our Children remains important for the Church of England and for our Diocese. It will be good to welcome Chris Lees, our Child Protection Officer during this Synod. Proper safeguarding can sometimes seem unnecessarily bureaucratic and burdensome, but we need to be seen to be responsible in this area in every one of our congregations. Having had occasion to note the situation in some of our ecumenical partner churches we are in some ways ahead of the game, and the recent shaming and tragic reports on past child abuse in Ireland in church institutions call us to a proper vigilance. The perceptive Roman Catholic weekly, The Tablet, said that this is the latest in a series of moral earthquakes suffered by Catholic Ireland, and went on to speak of ‘the arrogance of an almighty Church too powerful for its own good.’ The abuse of power plays an important part in this, and no church, no congregation, is immune from it. Members of Synod may like to know that the files held at Worth and in London have recently been reviewed as was agreed for all dioceses by the House of Bishops, and the Diocese is grateful to the Church Commissioners for making funds available for this work to be done.

At every institution and licensing and ordination (as we shall hear again on Wednesday) those entering on new ministries have to make a Declaration of Assent. That declaration affirms that The Church of England is part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, worshipping the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It professes the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the Catholic Creeds, and to which the historic formularies of the Church of England…bear witness. That declaration reminds us that the faith which we profess is not something which we invent for ourselves, or in which we pick and choose. I am always amused by the story of the man who during the Reformation thought he needed to be re-baptised because his original baptism had been by a dubious priest in a corrupt church. He looked for the perfect Christian to do it, but could not find one that measured up to the standard he was seeking. There was only one thing to do therefore, he rebaptised himself! If you look for the perfect church you will never find one, and every movement in church history that has tried to do that, has failed. St Augustine in the early centuries, faced with the perfectionist Donatists, said that only at the Last Day would he find the church ‘without spot or wrinkle.’ The Declaration of Assent also reminds us that the Church is and must be first and foremost a worshipping community. Its very lifeblood is doxology, praise and worship, of the God who is a communion of love, and a communion into which we are drawn – which is why during this triennium of our Synod I have called us to ‘live the Trinity.’  The faith which our Church professes is a biblical faith – it can be no other – for the Scriptures are the Church’s book, witnessing to God’s revelation of himself in Christ. And that faith is ‘set forth’ in the Catholic creeds, which distil the faith revealed in the Scriptures. Our Christian faith, our Christian church, is credal.

The Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church have been keeping the year of St Paul over the last year, marking the putative 2,000 anniversary of St Paul’s birth. In the Letter to the Ephesians Paul speaks of differing gifts within the community of the Church, gifts and ministries which are given for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. The different ministries in the structure of the Christian community are given to serve human flourishing; a human flourishing which Paul speaks of as the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Eph.4.12-13). And a little later he speaks of how we are by speaking the truth in love…to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ. We belong to each other as a living body, and a body has a single life but a differentiated structure. The animating principle of the body of Christ is the life-giving Spirit, and it is good that again this year we are meeting in the week following the Feast of Pentecost.

Synods can often be concerned with structures and organisation. That is understandable and necessary, but we need always to remember that structures and organisation are necessary like the skeleton in a body, but without the life-giving Spirit, churches are like the dry bones in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel. The renewal of the Church is always a work of the Spirit. In the creed we confess that the Church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic – and what we confess about the church in the creed follows immediately from our confession of faith in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life. Those marks or notes of the church are all interconnected and are essential to its life, and when any new thing is proposed we need to measure that new thing against those four marks. Because grace perfects and does not overthrow nature, I believe we can also see in a more muted form those same marks or notes as belonging to any human society. Every society has to work at holding together in unity, to be concerned with the integrity of human life, to be open to all, and with some mission and purpose. But for the Church of God all of these are held together in Christ, who is the pattern of holiness, whose mission from the Father we are called to share, whose offer of redemption and salvation is universal, but who demands of us transformation into his likeness.

Because Christ is the measure of the Church’s life there is an inevitable tension between the church and the society in which it is set, and to which it has a mission. In 1799 the German theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, addresseda series of Letters on Religion to its cultured despisers. There are many such cultured despisers today, and many who start from a different understanding of human nature than the Christian who sees the human person as made in the image of God, and called to grow into his likeness, that likeness that we see in Jesus Christ. So in the various manifestations of secular culture we cannot simply read off from the norms and patterns of that culture to Christian virtue. John Calvin, whose 500th anniversary of birth we remember this year, taught a doctrine of ‘total depravity’ – I was always grateful when I learned that this was not a doctrine of sin and the fall that meant that we were black through and through (though some oppressive forms of Calvinism turned into that with appalling psychological and spiritual consequences), but that fallen human nature is flawed and suffers deprivation in its totality. We need the grace of Christ to enable us to choose aright, and that right judgement in all things for which yesterday’s Pentecost collect prayed will not simply be something that arises automatically out of the culture and society in which the church lives and moves and has her being. I have frequently said that secularism takes many forms, some more virulent than others, and that it is too simple to say that Europe today is secularised – it is far more complex. Yet there is no doubt that militant secular challenges to religious faith are more strident than for many years and Christians need to be robust in giving an account for the faith that is in them. Only recently I came across a comment by the Estonian Lutheran theologian, Umas Petti, in which he summarised the considerable secularisation of Estonian society in these words: ‘Educated and rational people as w all like to regard ourselves don’t believe in stories about fairies, Father Christmas, or God. In the second place, we don’t need the guardianship of any institution like the church.’

Because the church can never be just the religious facet of the state, as it has sometimes been in the past, it has to be conscious of its own roots and identity. How we understand the church becomes important, as do the major questions of the relation of the church to culture. As communications shrink the world there are inevitably questions for Anglicans about how we can act as a world-wide communion, about how we can be attentive in North America to our neighbour in Nigeria, and vice versa, and about how the one transforming life of Christ can be expressed in different cultures and contexts. As you are well aware the Anglican Communion has been wrestling with these questions of identity, and they were a central concern of last summer’s Lambeth Conference, which both Bishop David and I attended. Opinions differ as to how far the structure of indaba groups enabled the necessary dialogue between bishops whilst at the same time preventing the kind of resolutions that are surely needed in many areas, not least that of ecumenical agreement. The proposals for an Anglican Covenant were given a fair wind and the statement it provides about the common faith of Anglicans and the responsibility of provinces to each other are a necessary step in providing the framework needed for us to live as a global communion.

Questions about the church and its ordering are at the heart of ecumenical agreements, about the structures of the Anglican Communion, and about the debates about women and the episcopate, which were the focus of a difficult debate at the General Synod last July, and a rather better one in February. This Synod needs to know that there is now a revision committee dealing with the preparation of legislation, which is facing a number of different and difficult issues, partly arising from the different ecclesiologies held by different groups in the Synod. In due course this Synod will have to give consideration to whatever the General Synod following the work of the Revision Committee sends to Dioceses. When that happens it is vital that we have an informed debate.

We too have our own challenges which have been tackled with admirable engagement by the Strategic Review Group which we set up last year. I want to pay tribute to the two working groups led by David Gowan and Ann Turner who have produced such valuable and substantive papers for us. There will be more to say about that when we come to the sessions of this Synod which engage with them, but I have no doubt of their importance.

As we begin our Synod business let me remind you again of what should characterise both this Synod and our diocese by returning to St Paul’s words I have already quoted from his Letter to the Ephesians, that, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied….makes bodily growth and builds itself up in love.

+Geoffrey Gibraltar