Winter Newsletter 2019: Article

Dear Friends

 

At St Andrew’s we affirm the Gospel imperative to love in the inspiring phrase, “serving each other; serving the world.” In order for our physical bodies to live we need to breath in and breath out, and we do this largely without thought and mostly unhindered. Our spirituality at St Andrew’s also reflects this as we breathe in by serving each other and breathe out by serving the world.

 

As we breath in our pastoral care and worship life are critical; as we breathe out our outreach is a priority.

Care & Fellowship

 

Pastoral care is a broad area of ministry encompassing everything from home and hospital visits to participation in small groups, to our fellowship events and prayer for one another, and more. Chris King has bravely accepted this Parish Council portfolio for 2019, and brings a multitude of great ideas to this task, but also a keen interest in wanting us as a Parish community to help define the priorities for the breadth of this ministry. As with our physical breathing, pastoral care happens largely unconsciously through the daily life of our community at St Andrew’s, but it is helpful to occasionally awaken to what is actually happening, and to where the gaps in our care for one another lie. Chris is keen to have this conversation, and I encourage you to have a word with him. I look forward to seeing where this conversation takes us over the next few months, both in affirming what is already happening and in igniting new initiatives in our midst.

Worship & Liturgy

 

One of the anomalies of being Christian (and Anglican) in the Southern hemisphere is that we are out of sync with the Church Year, which is based on Northern hemisphere seasons. Pentecost Sunday marks a shift from the big celebrations which began with Advent leading into Christmas, followed closely by Lent leading into the season of Easter (or Eastertide). The time following Pentecost is generally referred to as Ordinary Time, and is marked liturgically by the colour green, mimicking (in the Northern hemisphere) spring and summer and all the wonderful growth that these seasons symbolise. Here in the South the trees have lost their leaves, winter is moving into full swing with the cold seeping into our bones, and so we need to find other ways of making the symbolic links between the natural world around us and the focus of our worship. This is one of the tasks the Anglican Church of Southern Africa’s Liturgical Committee has been assigned as they guide us towards developing a new Prayer Book: to develop liturgies that make sense of living under African skies.

 

Our Parish Council agreed to us being a test Parish for some of the new liturgies being developed, and thus the Advent, Lent and Eastertide liturgies that we have used over the last eighteen months. Another task of the Liturgical Committee’s mandate is to develop season-specific liturgies, whereas our present An Anglican Prayer Book 1989 (APB’89) essentially offers one liturgy for all seasons. Thus you may have noticed the Lent liturgy in 2018 was different to the Lent liturgy this year, an attempt to explore what a seasonal liturgy could look like for Lent. Another aspect of the Committee’s mandate is to develop more gender sensitive language, which in English can become somewhat complicated grammatically, especially when pronouns are avoided!

 

Personally I have enjoyed the different liturgies, a reminder that our worship is not always “business as usual”; and that while I miss some of the APB’89 rhythms, new words make me stop and think about what I am saying, and bring about fresh insights into who God is and the faith we share. That said, there is clearly a lot of work still to be done: the liturgies have tended to be quite wordy, and there is a missing simplicity; there is also a missing fluidity to the Eucharistic Prayers, and a grammatical harshness about some of the attempts to be more gender neutral.

 

We have had some useful discussions around these liturgies at our monthly Layministers meetings, but it would be useful to have some feedback from the pew. As Rector I would value your comment, brief or extensive, in terms of how these liturgies have helped or hindered your worship experience over the last while; and more specifically (if you have the time and inclination) which particular aspects have been helpful or unhelpful?

Outreach

 

The Ministry to The Needy (MTN) is our main form of breathing out, but in fact any act of care that reaches beyond our community is outreach. Sometimes we do it together and MTN helps our communal response, and sometimes we reach out as individuals, but always representative of God’s people active and caring in and for our world. Debbie Coombe is always willing to chat about what our MTN programme is up to, and is open to suggestions and additional support. We do a lot in financial terms to help others, but the bigger challenge for me is how we grow our person-to-person contact in these activities? Relationship is fundamental to living and sharing the Gospel, and has been the primary vehicle for evangelism over the millennia.

 

Keep warm and keep healthy!

 

Blessings

Mark