Dear friends

In a time when I am struggling to find time to write a pastoral letter, I found the pastoral letter from our Secretary of Conference incredibly timely and apt for what we are experiencing as a circuit.  So this month I simply pass on his letter below.

Wishing you the grace and space to slow down and reflect this lent.

Brenton

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Beloved in Christ,

For much of 2023, there was an advertisement in Westminster Underground station that caught my eye as I came up the escalator in the morning. Promoting a dietary supplement, the poster bore the words ‘Tired of being tired?’ Without having the competence (or the gall) to advise on the merits of taking iron tablets, I find myself thinking about that slogan. It is now eight years since Loraine Mellor reflected on having met a tired church during her Presidential year. It seems to me that we are now beyond tired. We are tired of being tired.

I am sure that most, if not all, of us will be aware of evidence of tiredness in the church. It has long been good practice for those sitting down to have a period in which they do not engage in any active ministry, but I increasingly hear of ministers who become supernumerary in a state of exhaustion. On some of my preaching appointments I have met congregants who share with me their sense of inadequacy at no longer having the numbers or the energy to engage in mission as they would wish to do and who speak of the struggle that it is just to keep going. Over and again, Chairs and Superintendents feed back to the Connexional Team a yearning that there should be no more new initiatives, however worthy, because we cannot ask more of people who have given and are giving their all. 

We know the causes. Our numerical decline combined with increasing regulatory pressures was already causing parts of the church to feel debilitated before a global pandemic forced us into lockdown, required us to do things differently, and further depleted our attendance and membership. We have then struggled to recover, finding ourselves trying to restore much of what we were before 2020 whilst still adjusting to a new reality. It is no wonder that we are tired and no wonder, those things having been our narrative, that we are now tired of being tired. 

Forgive me, I pray, if I have misread the situation, or particularly, if I have misread your situation. I am sure that there are those churches which would not recognise my analysis and that there are those ministers who have experienced the reality of Isaiah’s prophecy that God, who ‘does not weary or grow faint …. gives vigour to the weary, new strength to the exhausted.’ (Isaiah 40:28f). It is good to know and to share stories of places that are brimming with energy since that is far from everyone’s experience.

In fact, it could be that in the sharing of stories we all find a way of addressing this sense of being tired of being tired. Dustin Benac, in a recent paper published in Practical Theology, distinguishes between ‘problems’ - the incidents or episodes in the life of the Church or individuals which are the usual focus of reflective practice - and ‘crisis’ - the category which describes complex situations that require considered practical theological reflection. Being tired of being tired is a crisis rather than a problem. This is something that demands a thicker approach because the issues are compounded and can seem to defy solution or method. Put bluntly, we lack the energy to address our lack of energy and we are not sure what we can do about it. 

Benac argues that a crisis is ‘an experience of being brought up short that requires new interpretive horizons’. The way in which those horizons are identified is through narrative.  Drawing particularly on Luke-Acts, Benac suggests that the response to crisis should be to form ‘an orderly account’. In that way, as in Luke-Acts, the narrative reveals that in the midst of life-changing circumstances for individuals and communities, God has been and is at work through God’s people. We start to address the crisis by realising that we have a story to tell and that the central character in the story is always God.

Forming that orderly account will challenge us to be reflective and, perhaps, to slow down to attend to the presence of God in our lives and ministry. I am drawn to Barbara Brown Taylor’s reflections on ‘The Practice of Paying Attention’. For her, the key word is reverence. Paradoxically (and I speak for myself here), the more tired I am and the more tired I am of being tired, the less likely I am to do those things that could be restorative, which are often about stopping, switching off, and being aware of God’s presence in God’s world. Simply to pause and to notice what is around me can enable me to see God at work in God’s creation, to recognise afresh the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church, and to hear Christ, who himself knew tiredness, reminding me that I am his.  

 I am writing this on the day the Church of England celebrates the 17th-century priest-poet George Herbert. In his poem ‘The Collar’, Herbert eloquently expresses his frustration at his calling. Our tiredness can lead us to rail against the things that we know need to be done, to see our vocation as a burden, and to take whatever the symptoms are (perhaps irritation, tetchiness, restlessness) into our prayers. That is what Herbert does. Then he concludes:

But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wild 

At every word,

Methoughts I heard one calling “Child” 

And I reply’d, “My Lord”.

 Wishing you a reverent and holy Lent and a joyous Easter,

 Yours,

Jonathan R Hustler

Secretary of the Conference