No priest? No worries.

I was blessed to have had a challenging, wide-ranging academic and theological education during a time of great theological upheavals and societal change. I believe I came out of theological college well-equipped to deal with ministry in the 1970s and 1980s. That hubris did not last, and my ministerial certainty came crashing down on the rocks of reality. The world outside the library and classrooms was nothing like the world we had so arrogantly subjected to our debates and analyses.

Then I went to PNG, and my theological bubble did not just burst; it was obliterated. My first parish was Ningil in the remote West Sepik Province. It had previously been two parishes and included five long ridges, some extending into the Torricelli mountains and others descending into the hot, mosquito-infested Kunai plains. Life revolved around patrolling these ridges and spending time with the small village communities. One priest - dozens of Eucharistic communities.

One of the most unexpected aspects of those early years was finding vibrant Christian communities in some of the most isolated parts of the parish. Every morning and evening, people would gather to pray. The bell would be rung (sometimes just an old WW2 deactivated bomb struck with a piece of iron), prompting people to get up, wash in the river, and head to the small village chapel. A local village prayer leader or catechist would conduct the prayers, often including hymns, Bible readings from the lectionary, confessing sins, and prayers for the community. Afterwards, people would go to their daily work.

That was an impressive discovery for a young priest. I was young, fit and loved the whole of patrolling, living in the villages and exploring such a rugged, beautiful and dangerous part of the country – dangerous because of illness and accidents, not from the people. I spent more time in the bush than I did in my mission house.

Despite all of that patrolling, most villages were reached twice a year – if things went well... if rivers were not too flooded, malaria and other exotic illnesses did not set the patrol back for a couple of weeks, monsoons did not wash away jungle pathways and a million and one other disruptive events in the land of the unexpected.

One of those visits was at Easter. I would go from village to village for nearly two months celebrating Easter in each one of them. I would be out on patrol for weeks on end until I had completed a full round of each village It was the time for baptism and even though I ended up celebrating dozens of Easter day liturgies, they were wonderful times. The other annual visit was the “normal” one, where I would spend two or three days in the village, preaching, teaching, anointing the sick and encouraging and resourcing the local lay ministry.

Were these genuine Eucharistic communities?

In the seminary, we pursued several courses on ecclesiology, sacraments and in particular the Eucharist. One thing was clear from all of these courses. All authentic Christian communities (parishes if you like) had to be Eucharistic communities or they were not genuine Christian churches. It is the Eucharist in its fullest sense that makes the Church the Spirit-filled expression of the Body of Christ in the world. The Eucharist makes the Church. The Eucharist formed the Church and reminded us as to how it was only by being tied to the Crucifixion of Jesus, to the Golgotha event that could mission thrive.

No Eucharist no Church?

My encounters with these flourishing village church communities led me to question the theology I had learned. When I returned to Australia, I discovered that many parish communities were in circumstances quite similar to those of the typical village church.

Parishes have been closing over a long period of time as population declined and these faith communities were finding they could not afford to pay for a priest. With very poor theology behind the decisions made, parishes were being closed and amalgamated. The standard rationale seemed to be: No priest = No parish. A faith community, even if it was an amalgam of several discreet communities, needed to have a priest resident in a rectory. No priest = No parish. A simple equation that had become the rationale for diocesan planning

Some of these communities were forced to combine with other parish communities. The logic seemed to be that the most important work of a priest was the celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday. Priests would spend Sundays going from an abandoned church community to another abandoned church community, usually with little time to spend with the faithful before rushing off again. But the question kept coming back: No priest = No Church? Some of these communities might have the priest with them fortnightly, or even monthly and on Sundays there was no priest, and nothing happened. Worship, it seemed, could only be conducted by a properly ordained priest.

But Church is about place

One feature of the Church we seem to have forgotten is the importance of “place”. People live in communities, and these communities are of immeasurable importance in the more rural areas. People understood themselves to be a part of something, members of something.

In the smaller towns, most people are engaged in local issues. We worry about health, transport, schooling, unemployment, the problems facing young people, the environment, loneliness and more. We have all kinds of groups engaged in addressing local problems, supporting local groups and wearing their town with pride. Ask me about Linton, my own little town with a population of just over six hundred men and women and I can tell you what is going on. It is our home.

We are unique and while our challenges and difficulties might be reflected across the Victorian West, they-are-specific-to us. Snake Valley, just twenty minutes down the road is different and what works in Linton will not work in the Valley in the same way. They are different people and we have been doing battle with them on football fields and netball courts for many, many decades. We had competed for government grants, fighting over who would have the resident policeman, the new fire trucks and a post office. How likely is it, then, that we could come together to form a “parish”? A genuine faith community?

It leaves us with the question: Are there better ways we can “be Church” outside the old parish model? Would it be possible to break away from the restrictions and limitations imposed by diocesan rules and regulations?

A definition of parish?

A definition is important as it nudges us in something of a theological direction. If, for example, we define the parish in primarily geographical language, it is the geography that becomes the dominant feature. We form faith communities around the existing natural and political communities.

There are alternatives. One I find helpful is the one used by Paul Sparks...a parish refers to all the relationships (including the land) where the local church lives out its faith together. This still allows for a geographic component – there is an area large enough for people to live, work, play, study, etc – but small enough for relationships to foster and thrive between all members.

The word itself is one of those powerful theological concepts that are both nouns and verbs. They are nouns in that it is the place where day-to-day relationships are lived out. You can point to it and say “That is my parish”.

At the same time, it has "verbal" connotations in that it exists only to bring us towards a divinely bestowed end. It is not a thing but a process that is unfolding, a community that is drawing us towards God as if it was a living reality. It moves us towards a fuller collaboration with what God is doing in that place. It is a place with a purpose. It is much more than just a geographical area we can draw on a map.

This understanding of “parish” reminds us that there is no such thing as a completely autonomous individual. We are born dependent and we die in a state of dependence. There is a very real truth behind the observation of John Donne:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

Community, then, is the fundamental reality for human beings in this world and it is this reality that should shape the foundational theologies that come together in the formation of a “parish” and in shaping ministry and pastoral life. In the definition of parish above, this draws into our arc of responsibility believers and unbelievers alike, churchgoers and non-churchgoers. It can exist and grow without a priest living with them.

Living above place

Paul Sparks speaks of another factor working against thriving faith communities. He

calls this factor “living above place”. He describes this phenomenon in the following way...

the tendency to develop structures that keep cause-and-effect relationships far apart in space and time when we cannot have firsthand experience of them. An example of this is the way we so often eat food but have no idea from where the food originated and the long line of people associated with bringing it to our plate.

"Living above the place" describes this separation and the way it disorients people from reality. We do not know what is going on down at the farm so it is of little importance to us and this has been the situation for generations.

The role of the parish is, in part, the breaking down of these separations and bringing back together the cause-and-effect relationships. They do this through their collaborative relationships in their day to day actions within the community. If we cannot do this within our own parish, then the wider world sees Kingdom living as a fantasy that can never be fulfilled.

The Good News of the Reign of God is a powerful and uplifting message for the world in which we live. The Church has a central role in making this a reality. However, if believers remain unable to witness this vision by world and example, then the Kingdom of God remains an unachievable, unreachable dream. Our Gospel failures undermine the work of God.

This is further enhanced in our contemporary technological world. We create a world of our own that exists only online, and people generally associate with others who think and believe in the same way they do. We gather in smaller virtual communities where views are shared. In this online world, if we come across someone we do not like, with whom we disagree, it is easy enough to delete them or to stop their access. The difficulty is that the more we live in this ethereal world the more it intrudes into our lives, and the more we can find ourselves disconnected from the wider real world.

The neighbourhood without the Church

The social psychologist Christena Cleveland has observed this with-drawl of the local churches from engagement in their wider communities, the more homogeneous it becomes in thinking, liturgy and priorities...We become self perpetuating communities more concerned about keeping ourselves pure and unchanged, far removed from the needs and cries of the world we have been called to serve.

We see this with today’s churchgoers..the tendency is to shop for churches that promote the same kind of values and preferences that fit with their own. People will often drive past dozens of churches en route to their own church, the one that meets their own expectations. Western society has engaged in an evangelical spiritual consumerism that some scholars pejoratively call “Burger King Christianity”.

In case we cannot see how this applies to our own parish communities, let us ponder how many times we have set in place programmes and projects without engaging first of all with those towards whom this ministry is directed? In these kinds of homogeneous faith communities, there is a tendency to believe that "we" know what is good for others, the best way for them to come to Christ. If they become little ecclesiastical clones of ourselves.

We have only a notional relationship with them and yet we feel comfortable in speaking about what they need. I have used this quote often but that is because it is so true...It is not that we do not care about the poor, it is just that we Christians do not know them (Shane Claiborne).

It is because we do not know the poor and have a relationship with them, we can distance ourselves from them by using generalisations...the poor are poor because of their own laziness...they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they really want to improve their lives...they are lazy people, sitting back and living on Government monies, all of which comes from our tax payments...This is "living above place" in action. What these people need, as well as physical support, are strong human relationships and friendships, communities in which they feel welcomed, loved and valued. Pouring money into them is but a short-term band-aide at best.

The unity and diversity in the Trinity

The parish communities are called to model their relationships on the Holy Trinity. We believe God is three in one. Individual persons but the One undivided God. The early communities took this understanding seriously, even though it was more than a century before their thinking would develop into a theology of the Trinity.

Here is one of the better ways of describing this...1 Corinthians 12:12-13... For just

as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. This entire chapter written to the Church in Corinth is worth reading as it develops and includes his beautiful metaphor of the body for the Church.

To this unity in diversity we need to add a further dimension: the incarnation of Jesus. When he became man, he became a real, full, genuine man in a specific place and time in human history. He was born a Jew in the Judaism of that time, a Judaism struggling to maintain its uniqueness in the face of her all-powerful Roman occupiers.

This is the full meaning of the Word became flesh and lived among us. The Message Bible puts this into the simplest of language... The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood. The local must always be a major component of what shapes us for they are the locus of the actions of God in our neighbourhood.

Here is a further quotation from Shane Clariborne...

The seeds of the Gospel are minuscule, like Mustard seeds is the image Jesus used. Planting the seeds of the Kingdom is about beginning small, in seemingly insignificant ways. It is about meeting God at dinner tables and in living rooms, in little towns that may not even be known to the rest of the world. A bit like Bethlehem was in the time of Jesus. That is precisely what happens when God moves into the neighbourhood in the person of Jesus.

This is our Christian vocation, to grow into a neighbourhood, to plant ourselves somewhere and to get to know people there, and to see the seeds of the kingdom grow there.

Claiborne is speaking as much about our own parish communities as he is speaking about our parish in the “neighbourhood”. If the Christian community is unable to offer a Kingdom model of relationships to “outsiders” it has nothing to offer the world.

All the searching and needy individuals in the world find in these stagnant and lifeless Christians only what they could discover independently, without the Church.

Conversion will happen only when Christ’s disciples live in the Spirit rather than in the self. We are called to model a powerful alternative way of living... Jesus offers the world a new way of living, a new vision, one that will enrich them now in the present world as well as an eternal life in the glorious presence of God.

During the coronavirus isolation requirements, I re-read my collection of books on Church, renewal and mission. Nearly all of them begin with an opening chapter on the decline in the West. There are pages of statistics showing how things have gone so very wrong. There are even dire warnings about what the future holds for communities already held together by ageing Boomers. It is not a great picture.

However, I cannot help but wonder if we are measuring the Church in ways that are

meaningful for us. Our definition of a successful Church would be one where the

building is filled every Sunday with a congregation of all genders, and ages and a broad mix of the local humanity. That means our finances will be in the black and we can do all of the things we believe we need to be doing.

But is that the measure we find in the New Testament? Could it be we are using the wrong measures? Could it be the shrinking congregations and our Boomer focus is not talking about failure but an indication from God it is now time for a new canon, a new measuring stick?

I know from my own tiny community of Linton, that people are showing levels of love for others in the community we would not have ordinarily noticed. We give and receive phone calls checking on the welfare of others, offer food, and shopping services and take people for medical work. Our community food bank is overflowing, and I know that if I collapsed today, it would not be long before someone came calling to find out if I was well or had fallen sick. That is the true love of neighbour demanded by God, witnessed to by Christ Jesus.

Few if any of these people come to church on Sunday. Sadly, our Bishop is only offering a single service per month and nothing else during the week so there are not many opportunities made available for them. And yet they love. Those who are Christians express their faith and imitate Christ through extending these relationships.

This is the essence of Church, our fertile mission field. Across Australia, there are numerous communities like these, both in rural locations and within larger urban areas. While churches may be diminishing and shutting down, the more we explore our local communities, the more we discover individuals seeking and fostering relationships filled with meaning and purpose. Love is actively present in Linton through the Christ who has truly entered the community. Our fellow Lintonians might not realise it, might even reject it, but their love is the manifestation of God's love among in them.

Connecting with the Spirit is already at work all around us

What builds the local community is most likely the very same way the Spirit is building the Church. Here we have a food bank, a community garden, transport for the frail elderly, BBQs, new-home warmings, weddings in a garden, the tiny local school, a fire brigade, a Men’s Shed, bartering and a lot more. Building bridges and reconciling people one to another is the norm, just as it is in the Gospels. Is this not the works of the Spirit?

There are many, many things we could list as reasons for our shrinking congregations, but that shrinking is not the same as saying the Christian way of life is coming to an end, that the Kingdom is collapsing. Christ is still reigning, we just do not discern the way the Spirit is working.

Here is a list of some alternative survey questions we might like to ask as an alternative to an examination of numbers in the pews (Sparks):

• Are there signs of people sharing life and love together?

• Are there people seeking ways to build reconciliation and renewal here?

• Are there people concerned about justice for the marginalised and the poor?

• Are there people entering into relational forms of civic and economic life?

• Are there people creating reciprocal relationships of care across the community?

These are signs of the Spirit moving through the local Christian community as well as among the unbelievers. Both of these groups are acting under the guidance of the Spirit in this new era in human history inaugurated by the incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. As Jesus said, those who are not against me are for me. This is the renewed understanding of ‘parish”, the way the incarnation works in the world in which we live and move. God is at work, it might just be that his priority is not necessarily filling pews.

Thinking in this way allows for more hope and peace for it reminds us that whatever of our failings, God is still at work in the world. Most of these people will not find themselves on parish rolls but that does no leave them outside of the Kingdom.

They live the kind of life demanded by Jesus in the Last Judgment scene from Matthew 25. They fulfil those requirements and will hear the invitation... “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

For reflection and discussion and reflection

...the worship and sacrifice of the faithful, and therefore their corresponding priesthood, are essentially those of a holy life, an apostolic life of religion, prayer, dedication, charity, compassion...The offering and priesthood of the faithful are spiritual. But this epithet must be understood in its biblical sense, and not as equivalent to metaphorical...the priesthood of the faithful ought much rather to be called “spirit-real”...if we keep to the New Testament and originating texts we have to recognise that the worship and priesthood of the faithful belong to the order of Christian life...Yves Congar

This distancing of the term “lay” from the common matrix indicates that as one enters into the Jesus community through the sacrament of initiation...a person is not thereby a lay person.

Baptism-Eucharist is not the sacramental initiation into lay status in the Church. Rather some new name needs to be developed, one which does not have any of the implications of kleros/laikos (cleric/lay), but rather a name through which the fundamental reality of Christian discipleship can be expressed.

In former theological terminology ...there was an equation between basic Christian and layperson, but this way of speaking is no longer viable. Kenan Osborne

The apostolate of the social milieu, that is, the effort to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws and structures of the community in which a person lives, is so much the duty and responsibility of the laity that it can never be properly performed by others. Congar.

The foundation for all mission and ministry is Jesus. Thus, one can only conclude:

(a). Jesus himself was neither clerical nor lay.

(b) Jeus’ mission is itself neither clerical nor lay.

(c) Jesus’ ministry is itself neither clerical nor lay.

If Jesus’ ministry and mission, the tria munera (teaching, sanctifying and governing,

which correspond to Christ’s threefold office of Prophet, Priest and King) are the basis of all ecclesial mission and ministry, then both clerical and lay mission and ministry must find their basis on this Christocentric centre. Kenan Osborne

The assembly not only assists in the accomplishment of a ritual performance, its actions are intentional and meant to affect those who participate...the assembly also exercises specific roles in the accomplishment of the intention of each of the rites...the assembly’s action is both self-acself-actualisingself-involving. Catherine Vincie

I was surprised to find written into Roman Catholic Canon Law the following broad understanding of the laity of those who are not ordained...in special and grave circumstances, and concretely in areas which lack priests or deacons, can temporality be exercised by the lay faithful, with previous juridic faculty and mandated by competent ecclesiastical authority. Code of Canon Law .

A footnote here explains how this was applied to a range of ministries... ministries of the Word, presiding over liturgical prayers, conferring baptism, distributing Holy Communion, the exposition and deposition of the Blessed Sacrament along with burying the dead and assisting at marriage.

...if yesterday’s world was a world wherein priesthood was well defined and pivotal

and ministry of the people was vague and residual, today’s world is just the opposite (priestly vague and laity more pivotal). William Bausch

Camille Paul sets up the following contrasts and it is worth noting the enormous

differences between the two and their implications. Though specifically Roman Catholic, these unfortunate and outdated theological insights also apply to our Anglican situation. Too many of our parishes fit right in with Pius's views.

Pope Pius X...In the hierarchy alone resides the power and the authority necessary to move and direct all members of the society to its end. As for the many, they have no other right than to let themselves be guided and so follow their pastors in docility...

Paul V1...upon all the laity, therefore, rests the noble duty of working to extend the divine plan of salvation ever increasingly to all people of each epoch and in every land. Consequently, let every opportunity be given to them so that, according to their abilities and the needs of the times, they may zealously participate in the saving work of the Church.

The Church derives its being from the missionary God and is created and shaped to

share in the divine mission (mission Dei) the goal of which is the coming of the kingdom of God.

David Bosch writes, “the classical doctrine of the missio Dei (the mission of God) as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit was expanded to include yet another “movement”: Father Son and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world”.

This is what is found in the Scripture “As the Father has sent me” says Jesus, “so I send you” (John 20:21). In this way the Christian Church derives its life, nature, mission and ministry from God. Whatever God is perceived to be like, the Church, if it is true and faithful, will embody and emulate it.

As St Augustine wrote, “the Church does not have a mission. It is the mission”. By this Augustine meant there is one people, one trinitarian people...they reflect the one God who is lover, beloved and love itself..one God who is sender, sent and sending. Church thus becomes the vehicle of God’s mission, itself infilled and impelled by the sender sent and sending one. Martyn Atkins