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April 2002
Dear Friends and Family,
At the top of the news has to be our new grandson Elliot, born
to daughter Tina and her husband Mike on St Patrick’s day.
Wow! The grim realization that I am eligible for the Senior Citizen’s
Special at the local café is far outweighed by the thrill
of holding this little tyke in my arms and bouncing him up and
down as I walk around the kitchen.
I hope you had a joyful Easter. We certainly did. I was determined,
on our Easter Sunday, to survive a combination of dawn Communion
with a spring-time time change that made everything an hour earlier
than body clocks said it was. Then there was another Communion
service at eight (followed by breakfast), and the Big One at 10:30.
The youth group, twenty-three of them plus leaders, having spent
the entire weekend from Friday on in the church, took a major
part in the festive 10.30 service with dramatized readings and
songs from Godspel. It was terrific. I had planned to take the
next week off, but with my mind on planning a workshop on "membership"
for a conference the next Saturday, I did not experience the usual
post-Easter collapse. And a week or so after that, I was scheduled
to conduct an all-day seminar on "Reformed spirituality"
for MA students at the University of Wales-Lampeter. So the collapse
was delayed yet again, and meanwhile, back at the ranch, there
was an extraordinary load of pastoral care and a series of rather
heavy meetings. Finally, last Thursday afternoon, I rang Marieke
in a state of exhaustion to ask her if she would pick me up from
the church office. Instead of the calling I had wanted to do that
afternoon, I slept for more than an hour, then went back to the
church for a meeting from five to seven, and instead of attending
either of the two seven-thirty meetings I should have been at,
I skived off by getting a couple church members to sub for me.
Marieke called this "empowering the ministry of the laity."
We went for a leisurely ramble around Roath Park Lake, meeting
another minister and her spouse running the same scam. The next
day and through the weekend I was filled with energy and productivity.
Thank God for the ministry of the laity. Yesterday, at morning
worship, prayers were offered for a colleague who had suffered
a nervous breakdown.
A lot of the work I am doing here is regional as well as local.
The workshop on membership was part of a consultation that began
in the United Reformed Church’s National Synod of Wales last
autumn called "Re-Imagining the Future," engaging in
lateral thinking exercises to develop new ways of being church.
The crisis is financial—we just can’t afford to keep
this kind of ship afloat—but of course the financial crisis
has to do with the free-fall decline in the European church-going
population. These are exciting times to be involved with the church.
We are being forced to radically re-think what the church is about,
at its core, and how we can be faithful and maybe even flourish
in a time of institutional collapse.
I think I told you in my last letter that City Church’s
own drop in membership, 75 percent over the last twenty years,
had been greater than national, regional and even local averages.
In the last two years alone we had dropped by 25 percent. We’ve
been encouraged that we were able to finish this last year very
well in the black membership-wise, despite the five funerals I
conducted the first month I was here, and our last church meeting,
in March, approved a few new members more. I actually find it
very difficult to see the change, but Marieke tells me the growing
attendance at Sunday morning is noticeable. The Thursday lunchtime
"prayers" had characteristically drawn only about three
or four. Now it is a proper service with a short sermonette and
coffee following. Attendance has grown considerably. We frequently
have to add extra chairs.
Most of the Thursday people are not Sunday people. The Sunday
people come from all over South Wales. The Thursday people tend
to be city-center workers and shoppers. Why do they come? One
started coming because he liked the crossword puzzles we make
for our monthly newsletter, which he picks up in our coffee shop
downstairs. Among the most recent regular Thursday worshippers
are two women who work at Cardiff Prison (not far away from City
Church), one as a drama therapist and the other as Catholic chaplain.
The Thursday group tends to be very ecumenical. Most of those
who come are Anglican, and there are three or four Baptists.
City Church itself may be kind of a model for doing church differently.
The normal understanding of "membership" here doesn’t
work, as we have multiple "congregations"—not just
the Sunday morning and Thursday people, but other groups who meet
here, not always for formal worship, who consider this their home,
or perhaps a place where they can get nurturing in a way that
supplements what they get in their home church. We operate an
adult Christian education center, for instance, which brings people
in all through the week for classes that also qualify for credit
at the University of Wales—everything from Greek and Hebrew
to "Religious Themes in Twentieth Century Poetry" and
"Christian Approaches to Death." People who attend these
courses and other mid-week programs who can’t, for a variety
of reasons, attend on Sunday, still consider themselves part of
the City Church "family." So—what is a "member"?
These are creative times, I think. A lot more is happening, which
I will have to put in another letter. The family is well, overjoyed
at the advent of our first grandchild. Marieke is a caregiver
for learning-disabled adults. Rachel is beavering away at her
college courses, very active in the church youth group, and looking
forward to a summer stint on Iona. We’re all well. Thanks
for the support and for the prayers. It really helps. It really
does.
Peace,
Tom
The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 80
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