Where is your Church now and Where do you want the Anglican church to be in 2019;
At the parish level, our Church is in a good place with new young families participating in the life of the Church, bringing with them energy and excitement. We are trying to focus outward instead of inward. Both these realities indicate health. Nationally, I think we are struggling to carry out our ministry in the face of too many internal struggles.
My prayer for the Anglican Church in 2019 would be that we are no longer spending our time and energy on these internal struggles but that we would recognize that we have a call to extend our energy for the healing of the world. However, we cannot advocate for justice while maintaining unjust structures in our own Church. In those areas where bureaucracy impedes ministry, I pray that we would change, dismantle, or streamline those structures so that we encourage and enable our clergy and lay people to minister to one another. In a world where ‘church’ and ‘faith’ and the issues that occupy them are foreign to so many people, we need to exercise a servant ministry – one in which people will see us as a desirable place to be but one where there are not so many barriers that they are discouraged from being a part of us from the start.
It is more than time for us to recognize that God is calling us to take a leap of faith and accept gay and lesbian people as full members of our Church, with the right to receiving a blessing or with the right to be married in the Church if they desire, but also with the right to be ordained as deacon, priest or bishop.
If we allow ourselves to be held hostage by concerns that in the interim the number of people in our worshiping community may drop or our revenues may be down, then we are not being faithful to the gospel which tells us that faith is costly. We have to be prepared for the fact that being faithful as we interpret it will not come without difficulty.
My hope is that when we say ‘mission’ or ‘Millennium Development Goals’, we will not be met with a look of bewilderment but instead will be met with understanding and with so many suggestions about what we should/could be doing to meet them that we won’t know which to tackle first, that every Anglican would know about the ministry we exercise through PWRDF and the integrity of the work that is accomplished through it, would understand just how privileged we are to be a part of that ministry and would open their hearts and wallets/purses accordingly.
