Paul writes – This is the final of my series of posts emerging from the 2007 Waikato Anglican Clergy School. There have been a few highlights for me this year, but one of the real highlights, thus far, was time spent in the US in conversation with CofE Bishop Graham Cray from Maidstone in England. Graham was the chair of the working group who published The Mission Shaped Church. Graham also contributed an essay (The Post-Evangelical Debate) to an excellent collection of essays published under the same title as his essay (check out the price for a second-hand copy of a book which you can get second hand here for $7.00). Anglicanism has some wonderful enabling bishops, and Graham Cray is one of them.
Following on from clergy school last week, it was interesting to re-watch and listen to Graham again as he was interviewed in Lambeth Palace by Alan Roxburgh earlier this year. If you have broadband have a watch here; it nicely compliments what Steve Taylor was sharing at the clergy school. Thanks to my new Canadian friend Bill Kinnon for his experience and skill in working with sound and images. Also available here is an Mp3 interview (listen or download) with Steve Taylor by Alan Roxburgh.
Change can be scary; is scary… but the share weight of stories that Graham was able to tell about creativity and change in parts of the CofE, left me excited and hopeful. The Spirit was blowing and new life was (and continues) to emerge among this very old denomination. A “mixed ecology” approach means that the traditional and the new co-exist… there’s a symbiotic relationship; both the established and the new need each other.
Here are a few quotes from Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801 – 1890):
Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather that it shall ever have a beginning.
Growth is the only evidence of life.
If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards.
If we insist on being as sure as is conceivable... we must be content to creep along the ground, and never soar.
Let us act on what we have, since we have not what we wish.
Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.
To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.
For further reading, I'd highly recommend Steve's book The Out of Bounds Church, and The Missional Leader: Equipping your church to reach a changing World by Alan Roxburgh. This latter book has good material on the change process. Oviously, The Mission-Shaped Church (mentioned above) is a needful read as well.
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