Fr Simon Evans Vicar of S Martin's Ruislip
Thank you for asking me to come. I am still a bit mystified about why I am here because in my experience it is always important people like Bishops or people who know what they are talking about who speak on these sort of occasions and I don’t fit into either of those categories. I brought a couple of things to hand out to you but I am not going to give them out to you just yet because if you are like me you will spend the whole evening reading them and not listening to me which will be more interesting but I would feel my time was wasted so just out of sheer self-indulgence I am going to give them to you at the end.
I haven’t come to blow my own trumpet because I don’t put down what happens at St Martin’s Ruislip to me, I think that there is nothing more unattractive than ‘the successful clergyman’ and certainly that wasn’t what I believe I was trained to be. I think we have stumbled across some things at St Martin’s Ruislip by accident and I’ll explain about that in a little while. I haven’t read any of those clever books either like ‘Mission Shaped Church’ or ‘The Healthy Church’s Handbook’, or any of these other dreadful-sounding evangelical publications that pour out of Church House Publishing these days. The whole thing for me has been a complete turn off. But perhaps you have read them and I ought to read them. However, what I propose to do tonight is to tell the story of the last eight-and-a- half years at St Martin’s Ruislip and to record a few reflections that I have heard other people say; to try to draw a few conclusions and especially as I feel these conclusions relate to us as priests in our priestly ministry; and then to give you a hand out and then to escape.
In February 1996, having been invited away from my very happy existence in a big council estate in the Diocese of Portsmouth, I found myself being inducted as Vicar of St Martin’s Ruislip. It is a medieval parish going back at least to the Doomsday period, with a long historic link with the Benedictine Abbey of Bec in Normandy for about 400 years. A beautiful medieval church in what was once a village is now swallowed up in suburbia; at first Tudor-bethan-metroland but now a mixture of council housing as well as owner-occupier middle class occupancy. It still has a High Street and it still has a lot of those things that we remember from our childhood like Scouting groups and Guiding groups. The Ruislip Gramophone Society and the Ruislip Bowling Club, and all these other extraordinary manifestations still go on. The church has had a catholic tradition in a fairly English way since not long after the turn of the twentieth century. Bishop Edwin has been and preached a Holy Week there just before I arrived.
When I arrived the Electoral Roll was only 343 but we have kept up two Sung Masses on a Sunday; two of them sung. Well they are both of them sung now. One of them was bleated in a rather unpleasant way. We have the Prayer Book Mass at 8 o’clock and the weekly Masses with quite large numbers; usually in double figures, sometimes in the 20’s and 30’s. For one and a half years there I was the only priest, assisted on my day off by one of my predecessors who is in retirement living down the road, so that made life bearable. It was very divided and very unhappy. Horrendous power groups vying for power and an unhealthy culture of keeping the lid on everything, and resistance to change by small groups. The churchwardens weren’t on speaking terms with each other and it was a very unpleasant sort of atmosphere that I picked up when I arrived there. But we had to find ways of blowing all of that apart and healing and putting it all together. One of the things that I realised immediately on arrival was that the pastoral load, with a population of 16,000 and that large electoral roll, was going to be impossible, I had very quickly to develop lay people in pastoral care and so within months, with a fair amount of consultation and careful choosing of people, I was able to set up a pastoral visiting team and to establish a life of prayer and to try to teach people about the daily office; things that could be sustained without depending on me necessarily - and a prayer support group. I want to mention those things because I think that a prayerful and pastoral foundation is really vital.
As I look back over the last eight and a half years I can see three quite distinct phases. When I had been there about a year-and-a- half, in my second Lent, we had a Lent Course called ‘Recharging St Martin’s’. We had the image of a battery being re-charged and a hand-picked group of lay people and I devised a Lent Course which was really a Parish consultation exercise. The congregations were divided up into thirty-two geographical groups with a leader chosen from each group, trained by me. They met three times during the period of Lent at a mutually convenient date and they looked at the church under three headings: the first was Spiritual Growth, Teaching and Learning; the second one was Becoming Eucharistic People and the third one was Witnessing and Communicating. When we got all the results of this consultation together, each group had suggested specific targets that we should be working towards. It set the agenda for the Parish which we are still really living with and still working through, which the PCC then was obliged to accept. It meant that all power groups and all people who pretended that they spoke on behalf of this very large and diverse community were blown completely out of the water. When you have got thirty-one out of thirty-two groups saying that they must have a sound system in the church, and they must have a nave altar, and they must have an accessible liturgy, it is impossible to deny that that is what people want.
So all sorts of things came out of that experience we had a programme and prioritised the tasks and worked through it. Again, everyone had a sense of ownership in an amazing way, and with that, a part in the decision-making of the community, and wanting things to happen. I had experienced something a bit like that in my council estate parish’s role towards the end of my time there.
Then about three-and-a-half, or four years in we had a ‘Fan the Flame’ renewal week. You may have heard of them they were developed by Bishop Lindsay Irwin. Fr Ron Robinson came and spoke to the PCC, who decided to go ahead and to support it. That again was a great watershed moment because if you know the Fan the Flame process it really requires the lay people to take ownership of the spiritual development of the Church and to run it with the support but not the involvement, and certainly not dependant on, the clergy, I remember that some of the more neurotic of the team members of the team who were leading it kept coming up and saying ‘O Father, Father are we allowed to do this, can we do this, can we do that?’ and I kept saying to them ‘I am looking forward to being surprised, I don’t want to hear about it’.
So it all happened and I was amazingly surprised each night of the Mission Week and they surprised themselves. Everyone was surprised. It was a wonderful occasion and then there was a very important follow-up process that everyone has to engage in. The PCC has to adopt the outcomes. Out of that we now have seven groups of lay people meeting to look at the Gospel for the coming Sunday and applying it to their lives.
Also a financial Stewardship programme was undertaken about a year and a half or so afterwards, which was far more successful than they had ever experienced or I was expecting. I can put that down directly to the spiritual stirring up and renewal of the Fan the Flame experience. The numbers of people at weekday Masses and the number of people wanting to learn about prayer, wanting to develop their spiritual lives, has grown. The number of penitents has grown; the number of people coming here to Walsingham has grown; the number of young people going to Taize has grown and the number of people going to Caister has begun to grow as well. It has awakened a thirst for growth and the other thing that happened was that we had quite a significant musical development and a broadening as a consequence of all of that, and various bits of lay ministry and vocations bubbling up at various times. Not priests. We have had one person just turned down by ABM. A woman now going to be a permanent Deacon. She is at S Stephen’s House, but mostly a lot of lay people taking on things. We are now at the stage where the electoral roll is 585. Which is staggering. I think it is pretty realistic because I can put a face to most of them. The big problem is just coping with those numbers and not knowing people and for the first time in my life having to live with the fact that I hadn’t been at everyone’s home and I don’t know them all in their home context I find that very painful.
The third phase which I suppose we are just entering into now, which I think is going to be very important in the future is that the electoral roll has grown in a way I think is realistic. We know most of the people on it, but our communicant numbers are not growing in anything like the same way. Our communicant numbers remain at about half - about 300 on a Sunday - which is big, I know, and people say St Martin’s Ruislip is like living in Narnia - so we now have to look at that and I know that when I go to the next place it will be real and not Narnia - but what does it mean when the electoral roll is growing and the communicant numbers aren’t?
The statistics that come out of bob Jackson’s ‘Hope For The Church’, if you read it, talk of this one hundred and fifty glass ceiling. If the congregation gets to one hundred and fifty it can’t grow any more because people can’t feel that they belong to it, and that seems to be what has happened to our 9.15am Mass. So we are now at the stage, of thinking about whether we should plant a new congregation. When we should do it and where and how is still under discussion. But it seems to me we have just got too big to belong to and we are going to have to do something quite radical to help a new ‘smaller’ feel to be re-established.
So that is a sort of history, that is the story of what has been going on and I realise that it is mostly ex-working class but aspiring middle class suburbia which I suppose is prime Church of England territory, and there is a Church School and people want to get their kids in, so there is all that dynamic going on underneath. But I think there are things that I can recognise from the council estate parish I was in before in Portsmouth and I am sure there are things that we need to look at in the story.
The second thing I want to move on to is a recent Willesden Area Clergy Study Day about church growth, which was laid on by the Bishop of Willesden, Pete Broadbent, about church growth and in particular trying to encourage mega church. Pete Broadbent is full of all this stuff that drives me mad - about ‘fresh expressions of church’, ‘new ways of being church’, and if we all just run parishes we are somehow dinosaurs. Now Scott was one of the people who were speaking at that and he was very engaging and very encouraging. The other person who spoke at the end of the conference was an evangelical called Mark Melluish who is at St Paul’s, Northfields in Ealing, who I quite respect in lots of ways but who has these things like café church and liquid church and ambient church and jazz church and night club church and all the things you don’t need a priest for. Just people get together - and I don’t know what they do but anyway!! He has a mega church and apparently his church has about 2,000 people in it he reckons. This is the Church of England we are talking about!! He gave this talk which had all the horrendous management-speak that we all hate and deplore but actually when I listened to it I recognised what had happened to me and to us at St Martin’s Ruislip and he gave four things.
First of all he said if you want your church to grow and to be strong and healthy you have to have a common vision. You have to set up systems and programmes which will serve the vision and that will be accountable to it. I recognised that was exactly what had happened to us in the S Martin’ consultation process, that somehow we had managed to get all these people to have a common vision, to own it and to make the church accountable to it. So suddenly all these people had wanted to belong to the church; wanted to see things happen; wanted it to grow; wanted to be part of it and wanted to be making bits of it happen. That was brought on also with Fan the Flame, because the process that comes out of Fan the Flame is again a vision-forming exercise which the congregation do and the PCC has to adopt. So that was something that was a bit spooky for me.
The second thing he said was that you have to develop an outward-looking focus and that again was one of the issues that we looked at, as it happened, in our ‘re-charging St Martin’s’ campaign. We had quite specifically looked at the way we appear to the outside world, what we were giving to the outside world, rather than expecting them to support us, and what needs there are in the local community and what needs there are further afield. We supported somebody in establishing a charity in Romania and have now formed some quite close links with a very grim town in Eastern Romania. Seeking to relate to things around us and trying to be imaginative.
The third thing that Mark Melluish said was that you have to create community and this is really crucial especially when you have a large group of people, and of course the evangelicals have the cell church formula where everyone meets in small groups. The ordained minister, the priest, is redundant. With our sacramental life it is quite hard for us to relate to all that sort of stuff. But nevertheless community is created by groups meeting for study or groups meeting for prayer or groups that have pastoral tasks like visiting; communities created by the social life of the church; by founding small groups for people to get together and to get to know each other more deeply, and have fun together, and communities created by the way our buildings are as well and the way we are in our worship, and also before and after the liturgy . Creating community is vital.
The fourth thing he said was that in his church everyone has a job; no one goes to his church without having a job. You are on a rota for something or you have some role to play and that everybody must understand their role, their place and their contribution to the whole and their value in it. Evangelical churches have cell groups, Alpha courses and all such things that probably make us cringe but we do have a liturgical life. Now it seems to me that liturgical ministry gives us almost endless possibilities for involving lay people; in serving, reading, interceding, being eucharistic ministers, taking communion to the sick - and that is something we don’t usually develop sufficiently. If I look at my own life as a priest I know that I have failed there in lots of way.
So, four things that he said that I recognised had some value. It had been worked in some way in the catholic context and can be therefore be worth knowing about.
I have just got two more little sections to do and it is all coming to you in a handout in case it is getting a bit bewildering.
Somewhere during this horrendous Willesden Clergy Study Day somebody also gave some rules of thumb about church growth and breaking through the one hundred and fifty glass ceiling. I jotted them down.
The first thing is that churches grow bigger by getting better and that was certainly my aim when I went to St Martin’s. I had no idea it was going to grow; I didn’t go there intending for it to grow - I went there to try to help it to get better, and the consequence of that was growth.
The second rule of thumb: don’t just concentrate on our strengths which we all like to do; be brave enough to address weaknesses. One of the things that I remember doing as a SWOT analysis with a group of people in my first few weeks there. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. They all found it amazing - actually to be able to talk openly about their church, and they loved doing it. Churches grow by getting better, don’t just concentrate on strengths; address weakness.
And thirdly: multiple leaders. Share leadership - and that is vital.
Just some final reflections on us as priests in a catholic context and how we see ourselves as priests and how we are as priests in relation to our people.
Firstly I believe very strongly - and I don’t apologise for saying that - I think for too long we have treated our lay people as our supporter’s club. I see it in priests around me, I see it in my own life. I wonder if often the sub-conscious message that we give out again and again and again in so many ways is that the laity are our supporters’ club. Really the priest is there to support and empower and enable the lay people and we really have to turn the culture which has for too long characterised the catholic movement of the Church of England on its head if we are going to survive at all and if we are going to be a power or a voice in the future.
Secondly, I believe we have to take risks and be prepared to take risks in empowering and consulting with and involving our laity and letting them then run the church more and encouraging them, forcing them to if necessary. Perhaps we find that unpalatable, perhaps we think that they will come up with ideas that we don’t like, that won’t be catholic and won’t be kosher. But we need to take the risk because if we don’t we will die anyway, and in fifty years time there will not be anything much of a catholic voice in the Church of England. If you look at any renewed or alive Roman Catholic parish it is alive and working because of the renewal of the laity. If Fr Scott were here he would say that is the one thing that we have to do is renew the laity. In addition, all of the way that we do our liturgy must be involving, we must break with prissiness or correctness, well, to an extent of course, and try to be imaginative in involving people and celebrating their ministry. One of the things that my colleague came up with last year and which we have tried out, was to use the major festivals to celebrate the ministry of the lay people in the liturgy. So on the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Gospel is proclaimed to Mary by the Angel Gabriel the good news is first announced, we invited all the people who are lectors to the church and we had a little simple liturgy in the middle of the Mass to celebrate their ministry. They all came out and gathered round and we had a party for them afterwards. On Ascension Day we invited the people who intercede at church and those in the prayer group to come, as we celebrated Christ the ascended Lord, through whom we offer our prayer and on Corpus Christi, all the Eucharistic ministers. It was something very positive, and I am sure there are lots of ways in which if we just take a bit of care, we can make the liturgy connect more with what we are trying to encourage in our churches. I think we will do that again because it worked and it was appreciated.
We need to take great care with our children’s nurture and liturgical life and make sure that our confirmation training is actually preparing them for Eucharistic life and not something that is separate, as so often it is. It was when we had the discussion about whether to admit children to communion before confirmation that we suddenly realised that actually that wasn’t issue for us. The issue was ‘Are these children being prepared for Eucharistic life; to regard participation in the liturgy as the normal way of being a Christian’? and it has revolutionised the way we do our confirmation training for young people as well as for adults.
Finally, we need to involve lay people in planning liturgy and in all our parish planning. If Fr Scott were here he would be agreeing and saying ‘the renewal of the laity is the key to the future’.
Finally I have brought just two things that you can take away. I have tried to set out some of the things that I have said in this handout here which you can all have and I have also brought copies of the Fan the Flame brochure in case you haven’t seen it. This is something that Ron Robinson, the secretary of Fan the Flame hands out to members of PCCs. So that is available for you if you want to look at it.
I have also brought one copy - because it is the only copy I have - of a book that Jeffrey John produced before he became notorious, called ‘Go For Growth’. It is a strategy for incumbents of smaller parishes in the central and catholic traditions. It is really good and it is practical. The only downside is that it is published by Affirming Catholicism but it is still worth reading despite that. It is very very practical and very positive and deals with the issues that we all have to face as parish priests.