It is great to have the privilege of delivering my first presidential address to Liverpool. I would like to take this opportunity to thank this diocese for the warm welcome you have given to me since I arrived in April. I have enjoyed meeting a diverse host of people in the parishes, schools, and chaplaincies of the Diocese of Liverpool. From the very young to the old, in the towns, rural areas, and city regions, in the traditional settings of church and among the newer expressions of church, from the splendour of the cathedral to the simplicity of the house group I have seen the rich and varied way that God is at work amongst us.
And while I am thanking people, I want to commend to Synod the leadership that has maintained mission and ministry in our diocese – Bishop Bev, the Archdeacons, Mike Eastwood, and the staff team at St James House and indeed yourselves at Synod. I have come to a diocese that is united in purpose and focused on its vision to ask God for a bigger church to make a bigger difference with more people knowing Jesus and more justice in the world. I remain wedded to that vision and the key principles of introducing people to Jesus; Deepening disciples, nurturing new leaders, and working for justice.
I have spent my time observing and learning and want to present to you synod some of my early reflections on what I have seen. I would like to offer you some of my own thoughts around what I would dream and pray for before commenting on how we might journey together.
Coming from the Diocese of Chelmsford I see Liverpool experiencing the challenges familiar to the rest of the Church of England. We minister in a challenging time. The financial challenges we face are common to many but Synod knows the uniqueness of a diocese with no historic assets and resources to meet the presenting budget deficits. This underpins the conversation we are having with the national church and we pray for that conversation as it continues. These financial challenges are ones we mirror from society. We are called to a region that suffers from the unequal division of resources between South and North. Levelling up has not reached these parts in any significant way so as the church looks to boost its finances, we are asking more of a people challenged by the cost of living crisis and more.
These challenges can make us anxious and weary, prone to argue amongst ourselves, scared of change, and unconfident about putting our heads above the parapet. It creates amongst lay and clergy leaders – particularly those working in isolation - a weariness and despondency which is so demoralising for our moral and spiritual well-being. In our diocese, we are committed to the clergy covenant, have invested in staff wellbeing and I am determined that the future involves us coming together in supportive groups looking out for one another. Jesus laid down a model of working in teams – he sent people out in twos and in groups, he took time to be away from the crowd, he knew when to engage and when to stand back and take time. We need to model that in our lives and our ministry. For if we are sending a message out to our communities that we are a weary, anxious church then it is little wonder why people might think twice about wanting to belong.
That’s why I am encouraged when I see the opposite. The resilience of clergy and congregations bringing great community and social engagement. When I see the way in which congregations have embraced the Parish Giving Scheme – more than any other diocese. When I see the number of digital giving boxes. When I saw the participation in Generosity Week. When I see all this, I am heartened to witness God at work.
As I am heartened by the way in which we are tackling the huge challenges of dealing with the climate crisis, of tackling racial justice – and I commend the work of our racial justice team, the magnificent work of the Triangle of Hope, and the way that we are facing up to the truth of the past, acknowledging it and offering restitution whilst also looking to tackle the current evils of the modern slave trade and draconian immigration policies- the latter a topic I have spoken out about a great deal.
And I am heartened by the places where clergy are coming together in teams to bring their diverse skills, their different church traditions, their wide theological perspectives to focus on what is important. The great commandments of our Lord Jesus Christ. To love God and love our neighbours as ourselves.
For I pray for a diocese that is united in Christ who calls us to be church and is at our head. We may have disagreements and differences – as the ongoing debate around human sexuality shows. But we must be united. Unity is not uniformity. We need the rich blend of traditional and new, of all church traditions and theological integrities. If we are to appeal to the wider world, we need to show our underlying values and that we can be confident in who we are allowing people to make their choice about whether to join us on this journey. Our unity needs to be self-giving; it needs to be sacrificial. It must be based on more than belonging to the same pension fund or praying the same collect. I hope and pray that we would spend our time affirming the centre – Christ- rather than defining our boundaries.
If we are to be that people displaying our value, then we need to be strong and confident in our story. This, I admit, is a longstanding concern of mine. That Christians have lost the knowledge of God’s great story as written in the sixty-six books that make up our bible. We must reclaim that understanding of the scriptural story. And we must be confident in telling it. Young and old, lay and clergy, we must be confident in the story and be able to show how our story fits into God’s great story. This is an expression of the inner journey of the diocesan rule of life – to pray, read and learn. To draw from the bible, the great spiritual traditions and the inspiring Christian teachers. We must be sure that we can tell others the difference God has made to us and why knowing God, through Jesus, is so important to this generation. I pray that we regain our biblical narrative.
And I pray that we reach out in the way Christ compels us to reach out. I wish there wasn’t the injustice in the world that makes this so necessary but while we have injustice, we must speak up against it. We must staff the foodbanks, get alongside the lonely, do the works that we are called to in Jesus’ name, and be the voice of the voiceless in our communities. Again, this is the expression of the outer journey in the diocesan rule of life – to tell, serve and give. We are called to be a Christian presence, but that presence is wasted if we are not using it to be a strong and positive impact on those around us.
That is the life call on us all. It doesn’t matter what your role is in society or in the church. If you have a faith, you have a vocation, and that vocation is to live and witness as God would want us to be.
We must journey together and one of the things I have witnessed in this diocese is how you have been trying over many years to journey together. The long obedience to that journey of faith. Now you will have heard of the journey in Wigan – its successes and challenges, its mission and its controversies. I urge you to go beyond the headlines and to see this for what it is, a good and faithful attempt to take the challenges the world sets before the church. Church Wigan is achieving so much and learning so much and I thank God that we have been given the opportunity to try to grow his kingdom in fresh ways.
As I thank God for the journey that we call Fit for Mission. Each and every one of you will have an opinion on Fit for Mission and this opinion will be informed by what can seem at times a campaign of claim and counter-claim, of for and against, of good and of bad.
I hope we can engage in a different conversation on Fit for Mission. I worry that all we hear about it is the creation of fear and anxiety and not the sense of hope and vision that it is meant to be. We need to see this as the journey it actually is, the bringing together of people to try and face the inevitable challenges that we have been given as a church and to meet them practically and creatively. Fit for Mission is not an initiative but an attitude, a missional response. It is about local people discerning a vision from God of how the kingdom could be in their area. And that discernment has to be a process of ongoing learning – from Wigan into cohort 1; from cohort 1 into cohorts 2 and 3; from cohorts 2 and 3 into whatever lies beyond. Fit for Mission will never be a settled programme; it will be the people of God engaging in the mission of God – locally, determinedly and humbly.
We face significant challenges as we think around the parochial or congregational approaches to mission and ministry that we may have inherited. We are called to be the body of Christ which has many parts, each part with a different function but all parts working together to further the mission in Christ. The church of Christ is the church universal – holy, catholic, and apostolic. But we see the parish system as a vital support for the wider church vision of a Christian presence in every community. Can we reimagine the parish system to make it work for the 21st century in such a way that we remain focused on our presence in every community while working together for better resourcing across a bigger geographical area? There is much that we can learn from the good examples we already have in our diocese.
We need to recapture the sense of missional awe and zeal we see in Acts 2 where “all who believed were together and had all things in common,” where through “praising God and having the goodwill of all the people” we find that “day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved”. That’s what I want to see, a church bringing together the people whom God so loved that he gave himself on the cross.
We need to recapture the sense of mutuality that was found in the church of Acts, a bringing together of possessions, skills, and talents shared across the church. The apostle Paul’s many letters are to different churches in Corinth, Rome, Galatia – each with their own challenges, each different but all valued. We need to be that church locally formed to meet the context of the community we serve. It is a way forward and a conversation that needs to be had. It can be shaped by good structures and great governance and supported by our diocesan and national church institutions. But it must be entered into at a local level by committed Christians called to walk humbly, love mercy, and show justice to the world.
Synod, I want you to feel encouraged by what you have in the Diocese of Liverpool. I want you to be encouraged by the networks of committed Christians faithfully working to the mission of God. I want you to see the enthusiastic faces of the newly confirmed - young and old – as they make their promises to God. I want you to be encouraged by the church communities that are growing, maybe in small ways but growing nonetheless.
I have seen this in the places I have been, the conversations I have had and the stories I have heard, and I hope to continue to see it as I carry on visiting the parishes and communities in this wonderful Diocese of Liverpool.
The Rt Revd Dr John Perumbalath
Bishop of Liverpool
October 2023