In the week of the feast of St Andrew

The pressures of modern ministry can be extraordinary. This week has felt like one of those times. My father's funeral was on Monday (not taken by me, thank heavens) and my new duties in the diocese are starting to form. The charges are taking big deeps collective breaths before Advent starts this weekend. And there is just so much to do!

The pressure also comes with trying to support children at home and school, and to let them be 'normal' teenagers, whatever that might be. And My wife and I have to fit in our time and space. It's not an easy task, and it's one that I have seen and heard of as being far too much for people, mere humans, to carry.

So where is God in all this?

In every person in need who phones when answering that phone call is the last thing you want to do, in every sender of an email that makes you want to pull your hair out! In the ferry folk who don't wait for you to nearly get onto that ferry, but set off when you are 200 yards away. God's also in the faithful folk who turn up and keep on turning up. He's also in the colour of the moon, or the frosting of ice on the pine trees in an icy drive. God is everywhere in all we do and all we are.

But it is important to remember that he has always been there, and will always be there, no matter how much work we may do, how many people we may deal with, how many petitions we may sign. God was, and is and will be. Blessed be God. I will try to hold on to that, in the weeks, months and years to come.

Blessed be God.

Two southern provinces and their clergy...

A little while ago the Church of England just failed to pass a measure that (as its principal function) would have allowed women to become bishops in that church (the Anglican provinces of York and Canterbury).  It was nail-bitingly close, and one of the houses just didn't quite make the 2/3 majority needed.

Why care? As a Scottish Episcopal priest, it won't affect life.  We are allowed women bishops up here already.  At that point the complacency ends.  We haven't had one, although there have been attempts (we vote for bishops up here). Staggeringly few women are even in the few senior posts in the church, the deans and the provosts.  Only ever 2 female provosts and one female dean.  Not a particularly good track record.  But it takes years for a change to flow through a church, especially one that is contentious from a theological or traditional view.

I was ordained in England, and have many, many friends in ministry there.  Some of them are wrapped up in the campaign for women's episcopal ministry.  They will be hurting very much this evening.

But the vote was much more subtle than just the straightforward issue of gender justice, as Kelvin points out. The continued issue of maintaining a sanctuary for traditionalists who don't wish to accept the ministry of women bishops has also been rejected.  That was a live issue when I was still in the C of E, and I found myself taking a rather hardline against any compromise, and signing petitions etc. against such measures.  Go and see how green the grass of non-conformism or the ordinariate actually is, I muttered.

But how pyrrhic a victory is rejecting compromise at the expense of delaying female bishops for further years?  It is a hard, hard place that many English clergy will find themselves tomorrow morning.  Many of them have tweeted 'Ashamed to be Anglican,' and rather than pedantically correcting them, I share some sympathy.

Our house in Scotland is equally not in order from a gender justice point of view: no sanctuary for traditionalists, a canonical structure that allows female bishops: and we have still not made it...

And as for the issue of some other moratoria.  We'll let that lie for the moment.

A virtuous woman...

St Margaret of Scotland.  Saint.  Political refugee.  Englishwoman in Scotland.  Hungarian-rooted Anglo-Saxon.  Wife of a king.

The reading from Proverbs known for 'Who can find a virtuous woman?' is set in the Scottish lectionary.  Rather full of references to home-making and domestic bliss.  Getting her children up 'happy.' Not very PC - to aspire to the good favours of her husband.  I've read it at a funeral or two, but it seems to jar to the modern mind.

But she was a holy, rooted woman, who touched the lives of all those she met for good.  From North to South Queensferry, to Dunfermline where she was queen, she cared for the ordinary people, because God cared for them.

She is universally popular in our churches.  A window from Dunoon on the left, from 1938, and a window on the right from Rothesay from 1907 place her in the affections of these two west coast congregations.    Who can find a virtuous woman?  We seem to have done so...

Out of Great Silence...

I have a lovely DVD at home, called 'Into Great Silence' filmed in a Carthusian monastery in the Alps.  Nothing really happens in it, just the monks of the place live their lives in silence.  They get to talk on, if I recall, Sunday afternoon.  Sunday afternoons were rather playful and gossipy.  I much watch it again - it must be three years since I last did so.

Today I've just ended my time in a 48 hour silent retreat with folk from the diocese.  Maybe a little top heavy: the retreat leader (lately the warden of a theological college), the bishop, the dean, the cathedral provost, the congregational development officer, plus a retired cleric who was incredibly involved in selection and training for many years in England.  Out of a group of 12 people.  But, in silence, you don't really notice.  Meals shared in silence, sitting in the common room of a college on an island, worship the only 'official' spoken words.  It is a good, comfortable time.  I like silence.  I find that useful things bubble up.

I'm not much good at just being silent and still.  A new ipad (which I'm using to write this) and the temptations of work, email, Twitter and Facebook are all there.  Wifi and some limited mobile phone signal make this temptation present.  Is it realistic to shut out all distractions? I don't believe so.  Things that need to be done bubble up, exchanges with people who have been long neglected on Twitter (I blame Tweetdeck, harder to update followers), sharing the fact of a silent retreat with others back in the world.  All this feels legitimate, with leaving behind duties, visits, the business of parish and family life.

And the unreal sense that all that has continued in this 60 hours or so on an island.  The problems that family face, illnesses, the fallout from church events, spiritual and practical.  The family continuing with their school, work, eating, watching TV.  It all continues, even as we 12 on the island were silent and a little chilly in the Victorian cathedral next door.

Tomorrow is back to 'normal' but with a sense of peace and recharging, I hope.  The theme, 'Hope in small things' was helpful and encouraging. The artwork and scripture and poetry was evocative and powerful.  A good time!

Matters decanal...

It was announced this week that their is a new Dean of the diocese of Argyll and The Isles: me!

This is a great honour and a great challenge too!  In Scotland a Dean is like an English archdeacon - except you keep on working as a parish priest!

There is lots to do, much help that I hope to be able to bring to the bishop and the diocese - but always trying to be aware that ministry is HARD WORK - and it was hard work 'just' being the priest for my churches in Cowal and Bute.

So, if it's what you do, please pray for me, and the family, and the diocese (they probably need them the most!)

Trust on the edge?

I often find myself here, fingers poised over this keyboard, wondering if I can actually blog about all the stuff that's going on: the people, the issues, the ways forward, the problems, the conflicts.  In practice it usually makes me pause, then go away and do something less dangerous instead.  Talking about church in a blog (in almost any way) can be a risky thing to do...

But to reflect that we can live in a edgy way is good: read this guest post on friend's blog by a friend.

The churches where I serve are not established in any sense of the word: neither formally, as part of a state church, as there isn't officially a state church in Scotland (some of my Church of Scotland colleagues may argue this...), nor in a we-have-lots-of-money-and-are-clear-where-and-who-we-are sort of way.

One of my English colleagues with whom I Google+ met this week (see piccy below) has started at a new parish - and he described them as having lots of money and tradition, wanting to grow, but not knowing how. He has an exciting time ahead as he takes them on their journey (prayers for him!).

But the contrast here feels extraordinary.  We have no money, not in a significant sense.  Our existence is precarious. Our master-plan is to try and offer an encounter with the living God to anyone who is seeking it.  That's not an easy thing to try do in the geographical and financial fringes of a country, with dodgy buildings, midges and the rain!

But we are in a spiritual heartland, out here in the fringes.  Jesus met people on the fringes of society (St Matthew's day today - the repulsive outcast tax-collector - transformed into a follower, and, if you wish, an evangelist) - so being on the fringe is good for church mission.  You don't take your (still greatly valued) tradition too seriously, you are open to new possibilities - that's life on the edge.

But being edgy can make people anxious - I guess the answer is to strike a balance between confidence in where and how an institution is going, and a certain looseness and edginess about going that way.  The best model I can find must be ... yes, you've guessed it: Jesus and his disciples.  Did they know where the project was going? No.  Was it a safe, established, comfortable project? No.  But an encounter with the living God was made again, and again.  And they trusted him in this journey, wherever it might take them.

Trust and edginess - those must be the perfect partners for Christian mission!

Diaspora memories captured...

I love the fact that people make pilgrimages to our churches - two sets of families in the past week, one to Bute (grandfather married and lived there) one to Dunoon (grandparents buried there).  They are usually people from England who have emigrated south with family/work/wars.  But they come up, often on a coach trip, to visit these important places of family pilgrimage.

The Bute visitors were there for the third time - second time during my stay here.  I'd spoken to them on the phone last year, but met them in the flesh for the first time.  They left a home-made book about their grandfather (Thomas Wilson), his life, death (falling from a gang plank in a new Zealand harbour in 1954), their journey, health and encounter with Bute. I blessed them and there were lots of tears.

The Dunoon visitors turned up while I was pottering about. moving boxes into church.  Flora Fraser (nee McAllister) had put up a plaque in memory of her husband John, killed in 1918 when his ship, HMS Montague, collided with the USS Manley off Ireland (Google said all that, not the gravestone).  29 years later she died, and was buried in the same lair (what they call a plot in Scotland) - beside her brother Samuel's lair, near the door of the church.  Her family were at the burial, and this was who was visiting.  Daughter & son from England, and son from Canada, over for the first time in decades, plus several partners and grown up children.  They had a look at the register with the record of Flora's burial - we didn't get round to Samuel's marriage etc.

Their memory to capture: on the funeral in Feb 1947 it was so snowy that the hearse couldn't get up the drive at Holy Trinity, so the pallbearers with coffin and all the mourners had to pick their way up the icy hairpin bend to get to the (no doubt freezing cold) church.  I can just imagine it, the black coated figures, the breath hanging in the cold air, the slips and scuffles with no words said.  It has stayed with them for the 65 years since it happened.

There is a distinct diaspora of the Scottish churches, just as there is of Scotland: economic movement, fluidity of society, never mind things like clearances from older times.  And we can meet and relate and engage with this diaspora wherever they may be, esp. with new technology!