We welcome Revd Simon Cutmore to the deanery. Simon was licensed as Priest in Charge of All Saints, Hertford, on 4th September.
Have you any confirmation candidates in your churches? There’s to be a confirmation service at Christ Church, Ware, on 3rd November. Get in touch with Christ Church if you would like your candidates to be included.
Check out “Cups on a String” – the latest Riding Lights production at St Andrew’s Stanstead Abbots on 16th October. There is a link for more detail on the deanery calendar, here.
And now, a reflection for harvest …
In my benefice, we are holding a combined Harvest Festival Service next week. We often gather together on the fifth Sunday in the month if there is one, and this year, with a fifth Sunday in September, it seemed fitting to draw together for the celebration of God’s goodness in his gracious provision of the fruits of the land. I’m looking forward to the increased volume of the combined congregational voices belting out those classic harvest hymns!
We won’t be singing it in church, but years ago, my father wrote a new set of words to a well known hymn. I mention in here because they capture something of the reality for people today. Here is the first half of the first verse…
We plough the fields and scatter,
the farmers do, at least,
so townies like yours truly
can have their daily feast…K Dunstan
Even in villages like mine which are surrounded by fields, the number of people actually working on the land is very small. We see the changing seasons very clearly as we journey anywhere beyond the village boundary, but only a few of us are engaged in either the planting, tending and harvesting of foodstuffs or the preparation of the land for the next crops. In truth, we are almost totally detached from the land and the complexities and struggles that our farmers often experience in trying to manage it. Most of us just let the professionals get on with all the messy stuff, and we take advantage of the benefits through the agency of a supermarket, perhaps even an online one – putting a further layer of insulation between us and the hard graft of food production and distribution.
The thought has occurred to me that there is a risk that our churches can be similarly detached from the work of harvesting for the kingdom of God. For many years, in “Christendom,” there was a steady flow of people whose paths intersected with our churches without us having to do very much – the “hatching, matching and despatching” ministries (to coin a phrase). The professionals (parish priests), aided by the culture of the nation, the rhythm of life and the church’s associated “occasional offices” were able to welcome new members to their churches with reasonable regularity. Most lay folk were able to take advantage of the benefits of this process – a larger congregation providing the possibility of greater social interaction, separate activities for children and even perhaps sufficient income to be able to employ a youth worker who could be left in charge of the hard graft of communicating the faith to teenagers.
Today, the nation’s culture is different. People don’t know the stories of Jesus. I once asked a baptism preparation group of over 10 people to tell me anything they had heard about Jesus (e.g. via TV or other media, from a friend or at school or Sunday school). I specified that it didn’t matter whether it was true or not – I just wanted to know what they had heard about Jesus. I gave them born in Bethlehem, had twelve disciples, rode a donkey into Jerusalem, died on a cross, and rose from the dead. The group struggled to find ten more things. Eventually someone said, “He had a beard.” And we left it there.
In our evangelism, we are no longer dealing with people who know a lot about the faith and just need the penny to drop two feet (from their head to their heart). Today, we are dealing with people who genuinely want to know whether Jesus invented chocolate (because what else would explain Easter eggs?). A lot of these people won’t come anywhere near a church. They may never meet a “professional” Christian (e.g. a priest or chaplain), and very few of them will get close enough to one for long enough to befriend and trust them. But they will rub shoulders and, more than that, share lives, with Christians in their homes, workplaces, social clubs and schools. And so it is those Christians who need to be ready to fill in the gaps in their friends’ knowledge of Jesus – not just so that those friends know more facts about him, but so that they can come to know him personally. This is not a get-out for the clergy, by the way; it is just an acknowledgement that a church of just ten people has at least ten times the reach of a single priest in terms of personal relationships. (I will add that it can be argued that today’s clergy are the pastors and teachers mentioned in Ephesians 4 v11 whose role (v12) is “to equip [God’s] people for works of service;” so if you don’t feel equipped for this particular work, it’s your parish priest’s job to equip you!)
In church circles, I hear quite a lot about the need for us to sow seeds. Given the level of general ignorance about Jesus in our society as a whole, we certainly need to do this. As St Paul says:
How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?
Romans 10:14-15 (Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.®)
There’s no doubt we absolutely need to keep sowing seeds. But in the same way that farmers both sow the seeds and carry out the harvest, it is not enough for us merely to sow seeds – we also need to engage in the harvest. And there’s a simple way to do that…
Sowing and reaping are linked, not only because the farmer does both but because the farmer reaps what the farmer sows – what is sown is what will grow… For Christians, that means that the “sowing seeds” that I am hearing so often encouraged must be the right seed – what is sown is what will grow! Practically, this means that if our faith conversations relate to church, the harvest will be a churchgoer. If our faith conversations revolve around “God,” the harvest will be a God-fearer. So for our harvest to be a Christian, our conversations must draw attention to Christ. It’s relatively easy to talk with a friend about church these days. It’s pretty uncontroversial to talk about God with most people (and people of other faiths may be happy to join in – “God” is a vague enough concept which can attract wide-ranging approval). But Jesus? He’s a bit like Marmite (people love him or hate him).
If we want to see a harvest for the kingdom of God, we need to sow the seed of the kingdom of God, and that is Jesus Christ – with his compassion for the least, the lowest and the lost as well as his striking demand that we deny ourselves daily, take up our cross and follow him. Anything less, and the harvest we will reap will not be what it should be.
As we celebrate harvest over the coming weeks in our churches, may we all resolve to sow the right seed, whatever the cost to us, that there might be a fulsome harvest for the one who gave himself completely for us.
Mark Dunstan
Rural Dean