HOLY TRINITY CHURCH SOUTHCHURCH

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2010

April

          The following is the Rector’s Report given at the Annual Parochial Church Meeting held in the church            on 25th April:-

Rector’s report to the APCM 2010

Don't you just love those management speak expressions? Hit the ground running, after that is you've woken up and smelled the coffee.” Thinking out of the box” . “Being in the zone”.” Blue sky thinking”. The school I'm a governor of recently held a Town Hall meeting. I though this was something that happened down the Civic Centre. But it means a meeting where everyone gets a chance to say their bit. A sort of 360 degree review. But that's another story.

The management-speak phrase that really fits this 360 degree review, though, is the one about the elephant in the room. The enormous issue or problem that nobody really wants to acknowledge is really there. Well, there is an elephant in this room all right and I will be returning to it before long. But before we address it let's have a look at what else is in the room apart from that elephant.

I'm not going to give you the old-style review of the year because that is now done very effectively by Mike Penry in preparing for the PCC the annual report which is available for you. But I do want to reflect for a moment on what a church like this one is there to do.

I think that it (and the sooner I replace "it" with "we" the better) it is there to further the Kingdom of God. We don't create God's kingdom, the place, context in which his loving grace is revealed, only God can do that. What we do is provide him with the resources to do it. It was St Theresa of Avila, the medieval Spanish mystic and out-spoken nun, who said that God has no hands now but ours. If the Kingdom is to come in earth then Christians have to be the builders of it.

That means the first job of a church is to model the Kingdom. To show people something different. To be a different sort of community that holds different values in many respects from what we mistakenly call the "real" world out there. The church powers that be may have wholeheartedly adopted some of the jargon and tools of business management. But this is not, for example, a meeting of shareholders or the AGM of the bowls club. It is the family of God r sustained and challenged by word, scripture and sacrament, seeking to further the Kingdom of God.

This morning in here we celebrated the fact that this family of God now has 14 new full members. One of the drawbacks of a congregation as big even as ours in this sort of church with its range of services at different times is that often people don't know even what other members of their family look like never mind knowing their names. Another drawback is that because there is a range of Sunday service times and styles we might be liable to think that this is about our choice. That we can come to what we fancy when we fancy it or when we haven't got a place in Fred's car going down to Brighton. Our choice. Not God's call. Not what the Prayer Book calls "our bounden duty and service".

I believe that that style of being church, a style inherited unreconstructed from the early 1950's, I believe that style is finished. This or any other church will not survive, never mind thrive and grow, that way. I also believe that we have been sheltered from the effects of this change for quite a long time.

My father was, as many of you know, also a priest. He was an Archdeacon during those momentous years in the late '60s and early '70s when the Church of England hauled itself into the 20th century in its liturgy and worship and also in its structure and especially its finances. He said that when he spoke to Diocesan Synod about coping with these challenges he felt a bit like a farmer standing in front of his herd of cows holding an empty milk pail and saying, "Come on, dears, you know you can do it." No-one should underestimate the genuine challenge now to church members.

We are blessed here at Holy Trinity with considerable resources. A beautiful building. A great musical tradition which Roger and the choir work very hard to keep up. New growth in among others those 14 confirmands, about 14% of our congregation. I am greatly supported by an excellent Associate Priest and Reader. We do not need to feel despondent and powerless and we don’t need to buy all that stuff about declining congregations unless we read too much of the Daily Mail. And it is a great honour for Holy Trinity and a privilege for me to have been invited to act as Chaplain to Cllr Ann Holland in her year as Mayor. There will be a civic Service here in June, our always splendid 9 Lessons and Carols will become the Civic Carol Service, and there will be other chances to celebrate this church’s contribution to our community during the year.

So we are not about revival. We don't need resuscitating. But we are about renewal. About travelling on and travelling on together. Our aims and objectives for the year are therefore designed to resource that journey and to move us on in faith and commitment to Jesus.

We plan to develop the Sunday evening service so that it combines the best traditional and modern worship. We want to continue the full Choral Evensong once a quarter, dated in advance so we can put the word around and invite people in to what is nowadays a rare experience but something we have as it were specialised in. Among other aims, and you are invited to read those and pass back to me any views on them, is a planned Quiet Day, time out if only briefly to listen to what God may be "saying" to us. We also among other things wish to get the word round locally about Back to Church Sunday. To be a success that will of course need the Church (i.e. you and me) there to welcome people back into.

The main thrust of this is to flag up (you can't beat these management - speak expressions) to flag up that the time is here to stop going to church and start being the Church. We are not there to compete with Britain's Got Talent to entertain the population and make it feel better. We are here to serve, as our last hymn just now said, the one "by whom the words of life were spoken, and in whose death our sins are dead."

This brings me at last to the elephant in the room. That elephant is our financial position. At present our expenditure greatly exceeds income and we cannot continue without addressing that. The Treasurer's report in a few minutes will fill you in on all this. What we do about it is going to be the big challenge for the coming year.

I don't want to get into details now. That is for later. But I would like just to say four things about money.

1. By far our major financial commitment is the Parish Share. We aim to meet this in full. I have never yet been the vicar of a church that wouldn't pay this and I have always been very proud that this church has always paid in full In diocesan management-speak we are a Platinum Parish. I believe that if we proceed in faith (and what else are we surely about if not that?) and accept the challenge to give realistically then God will provide the resources.

2. The Parish Share is not a tax paid by "us" to "them". It is our contribution to ministry costs here and in other places in the diocese with fewer resources than we have. But there is work that needs to be done about the allocation and we shall be seeking to limit the increases.

3. We cannot use restricted funds (the money from the glebe land windfall some years ago) for ordinary expenditure. It can only be used for specific things mainly to do with the building. People need to know this otherwise they will believe we have access to this money when we haven't.

4. Last and most important. In the church world of the 1950’s, the world that I am suggesting is long gone, inherited resources of one kind or another paid much of the bills. So the larger congregations of those days (not necessarily larger for particularly good reasons) were able to get away with putting the odd bob or two in the plate when and if they came to church. We are now in much more challenging times. The biggest challenge to our faith nowadays is what we do with our money. The challenge is to put God first in our personal budget and not at the end of it. It is to give a proper proportion of what we have.

Maybe that's enough of that for now. We shall have as a family of God here to address this. So I do feel a bit like the TV announcer who says on Saturday night that if you don't want to hear the football results leave the room now. I know we don't like talking about money in church, though of course we talk about it in the "real" world all the time. I know people feel offended when asked to give more, though we don't feet that way when invited to spend our money in that “real” world. But the hard fact remains that unless we do this we shall not be able to pay for God's work here.

One last biblical quote. No apology for that because we have to take the risk of living by what the Bible says. So, the feeding of the 5,000. The disciples want Jesus to send the people away. He says, "You give them something to eat". They say, "We can't afford it". ("Are we to go and buy 200 denarii worth of bread?", that is 200 day's pay's worth.) So Jesus says, "How many loaves have you" “Go and see". Give me what you have got”. That is, of course, what they did. And the rest, as they say, is history.

There's a fashion now for contextual theology. What does this scripture mean in our own context? What does it say to Holy Trinity Southchurch in 2010? I invite you to come with me in faith, and find out the answer to that one.

Michael Ballard

April 2010

 May

Our regular Coffee Mornings in the Parish House to raise funds for the Church are held on Wednesdays between 10am and 12 noon.  On the first Wednesday this always includes a Cake Sale.  As well as tea, coffee and toasted tea cakes we also have an excellent Fair Trade stall and  a White Elephant stall.

On Saturday 22nd May a concert will be held in Church at 7.30 pm in memory of Keith Gush.  The music will be sung by the church choir and friends.  It will include the Faure Requiem and some of his other favourites.  There will be cheese and wine served at the back of the church.  There will not be a charge for admission but there will be a collection in aid of Myeloma UK.