20160911-dedication-pm-fr-andrew-sempell

Sermon to Christ Church St Laurence, Sydney The Reverend Andrew Sempell Rector of St James

At Solemn High Mass on the 171st Dedication Festival 11th September, 2016.

“Being a Blessing and not a Curse” Readings:

1 Kings 8:22-24, 27-30; 1 Peter 2:4-10;

Psalm 122; Matthew 7:24-29.

I thank Fr Daniel for his invitation to preach this evening, and bring greetings from the people of St James’ King Street. Our two parishes share much in common and it is good to recognise our links tonight.

The Needs of the People I would like you to use your imagination. The scene is a small room heavy with heat and humidity; a fan turns lazily near the ceiling, barely creating a breeze on the two men sitting below. It is Buka Island at the northern tip of Bougainville Province, in PNG. Having completed my Army deployment with the Peace Monitoring Group, I am saying farewell to the Roman Catholic Bishop, Henk Kronenberg.

The people of Bougainville are very religious and around 70% of them are Roman Catholic. Since the crisis in the 1990s there have been no resident Anglicans, so when I was there I chose to worship with the local Catholic Parish. Wherever I went on the island I found the local clergy and people most welcoming, but they didn’t seem to understand that an Anglican is not a Catholic (well at least not of the Roman variety).

I had been asked to say Mass as well as concelebrate in many places, which created some confusion when I explained that I could not say Mass in their rite because I am an Anglican. I was explaining this to the Bishop when he stopped me.

“You Australians annoy me” he said – this is a phrase I heard often on Bougainville.

“You need to understand that the Catholic Church in Bougainville was established by the Germans and not by the Irish! We are a missionary diocese, and the needs of the people always take precedence over the needs of the institution. You should have said an Anglican Mass.” This was a novel suggestion to me at the time. The ecclesiastical rules were broken often enough in the Army, but I had never heard a bishop speak in this way. I was intrigued.

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The scene now moves to Australia. Five years after my time in Bougainville I was attending a meeting of Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy at Wellington, in western New South Wales. The two diocesan bishops had talked about how our churches should cooperate as much as possible with each other and then asked us to break into small groups to discuss the matter.

In our group, an elderly Irish priest who came from a remote western parish drawled, “I’ve never heard so much rubbish in all my life. Cooperation! Why haven’t we had intercommunion between us the Anglicans and the Uniting church for the past fifteen years? But you can’t tell the bishop that, because he would put a stop to it.” The needs of the people took precedence over the needs of the institution.

A third scene is in the mountains to the west of Sydney. In a village stood an unused church building. The local clergy had given up holding services there because of insufficient numbers. This was partly a result of the aggressive behaviour of one former Anglican rector, who had sought to deny people access to the ministries of the church because he disagreed with the way they held their beliefs. He called them ‘hobby Christians’ and was keen to exclude those with whom he disagreed.

The church building was eventually sold and bought by the local community, which restored it and re-commenced services. They invited clergy of various denominations to conduct worship and the church became a focal point for the community, however the local Anglican parish was not represented in this group. The needs of the people took precedence over the needs of the institution.

Rowing into the Future A friend of mine once used the phrase ‘rowing into the future’ to describe (in this instance) the practices of church schools in Australia. Not being a rower, I was unsure what he meant, however he described how rowers are always looking backward at where they have come from rather than where they are going – indeed, they can do no other. It is a good metaphor for the church in general, for we look to the past to understand the present. It therefore makes us very conservative and sometimes has the effect of locking us into past-defining moments that can be informing and identity-creating on the one hand, but also fixating and debilitating on the other.

A recent secular instance of this links with today being the fifteenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Since that moment the western world has been on a trajectory of reaction to the rise in international terrorism. It has become defining of who we are and consumed our attention, our politics, and our resources. This event has become crucial moment of our times around which much of the life of society turns.

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Likewise, a Dedication Festival is an opportunity to look to a significant event in the past while also considering the present and looking to the future. You know your story better than I, and don’t need me to recount it, but Christ Church St Laurence (like St James) exercises a unique ministry in the city of Sydney. Even our buildings, your stones and our bricks, exercise a ministry of refuge to people in need. As one businessman in Phillip Street said to me, “When I am stressed and need to find a quiet place, I know I can go to your church and not be followed in by anyone else!”

But more broadly, what is the story of the Anglicans Church in Sydney? There are too many stories to cover them all, but I would like to look at the past 60 years. In my lifetime (and I suspect it is the same for most of you), I have seen the church participation rate plummet from around 50% of the population to under 8%. That means only around 8% of people in Sydney actively participate in the life of a church through regular worship. We seem to like surveys in the church (and there is another one coming up next month), but perhaps rather than surveying ourselves and what ‘we’ want, we would do well to ask what the other 92% think. But I digress.

What people look back to and focus on provides an insight into their motivations and agendas in the present. More particularly, the church gives expression to these things through its theology, ecclesiology and practices; all of which change as the gospel is reinterpreted within various cultures and for different times. Yet, like most institutions, the process of change often comes down to the exercise of power.

Change can sometimes be ugly – leading to conflict, persecution and chaos.

I must say, however, that I was impressed with the introduction of one change here at Christ Church St Laurence many years ago. I was here on the Sunday that Fr Austin Day introduced the use of An Australian Prayer Book by saying, “As from next Sunday, the tradition of this Parish will be…”. If only change were so easy everyone said “Yes Father” and it was so. To have a tradition before it has happened is something unique – but then this is Christ Church St Laurence!

On the other hand, a feature of radical change in the church is that it tends to come from marginal groups and individuals rather than power blocs. It is usually a ‘bottom up’ approach that arises as a ‘movement’ rather than through any formal structures.

The early church itself, monasticism, the reformation, evangelicalism and tractarianism all began as movements emerging from the fringe of church life rather from the centre of power. This is yet another example of the needs of the people taking precedence over the needs of the institution.

Twilight of the Institutions So do we dare look forward and imagine a future church? As the world faces up to the passing of the modern era, the church likewise has to consider what is appropriate for its current and future mission. We are betrayed by scandals concerning the abuse

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of children, poor governance, negligent financial management, and intellectual disingenuousness. Unfortunately, similar to the rest of society, we are often far too success driven, materialistic, narcissistic, and consumerist to be authentic Christians.

Over the past thirty years, there have been numerous outreach programmes developed and applied with limited success; such as the Church Growth Movement, the Decade for Evangelism, Fresh Expressions, and in Sydney our home-grown Connect 09.

Most have been top-down approaches led by strategy experts (along with the bishops) and nothing much has changed. In fact, decline has continued steadily.

We have to ask ourselves, are we just being doggedly faithful to our perceived calling, or are we simply naïve and missing the point? In this post-denominational, post-Christian world, perhaps we need to look at the needs of the people.

Hugh Mackay’s latest book, Beyond Belief describes a growing number of people in Australian society who describe themselves as ‘Spiritual but not Religious’ – most of whom are the 92% on non-church goers. This group have a belief in God (or possibly a spiritual realm) but reject institutionalised religion, especially when it is prescriptive, authoritarian and obscurantist.

Reading Mackay’s book and others, such as Keith Mascord’s Faith Without Fear, it strikes me that we need to revisit our theological and ecclesial understandings if we want to create a foundation for mission in the twenty-first century – more of the same does not work. In recognising this, it is also noted that there are many pressing spiritual concerns for Australians in our own time, such as: • care for the natural world order (or environmental sustainability), • the importance of relationships and justice, both in our community and across cultures (including acceptance of LGBTI people and refugees), • identification of what binds us together as human beings rather than focussing on what divides, and • a basis for hope and purpose into the future (which is genuine, equitable and for the good of all).

To achieve this, we will need to accept that God is bigger than this institution we call church, as King Solomon said: “Even the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27). Moreover, we will need to understand that we have a calling that is for the benefit of others rather than ourselves in which we lead people ‘out of darkness into light’ (1 Peter 2:9). Finally, we need to return to the true rock, which is Christ in word and sacrament, who makes us uncomfortable and challenges us to be authentic in our following.

By being filled with God’s Spirit and committed to Jesus and his teaching, we should seek to be a blessing to the world and not a curse. In this way, the needs of the people may take precedence over the needs of the institution.