Diana has written in today’s newsletter about an imaginative use of the Parable we heard as today’s Gospel – the Parable of the Talents.  She reminded those who were there at the time, and informed those who were not, of the Sunday when former Rector, Peter Noakes gave away £500 in £5 lots and asked the congregation to go and ‘invest’ the money to raise a few thousand pounds to pay for much needed restoration work on the building.  It was a good use of this Parable and it paid real dividends.  The Parable of the Talents has often been linked to our financial giving for the upkeep of the Church – either to fund capital projects such as having a new roof or to pay our way with the Diocesan Share so that we can continue to have the services of ordained ministers.

But this parable is more than about money.  It is also about the gifts and abilities we have been given to build up God’s Kingdom,  and essential to that Kingdom is the people God has created.  We are the gift which God wants to us in his work of loving the world into His Kingdom. That is the starting point for our Faith & Skills Audit.  Diana has told you just now about How we are hoping to do it.  The Parable of the Talents gives us a hint about WHY. 

First – because God endows us with gifts and talents and he relies on us to use them.  But he also awakens within us FAITH  so that we begin to understand that what we are doing is developing our souls in such a way that we should want to return to God what is truly his.

The old Communion Service (if I may call the ASB old) had an offertory sentence in which we prayed:  

Yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power,

the glory, the splendour, and the majesty;

for everything in heaven and on earth is yours.

All things come from you,

and of your own do we give you.

If any prayer expresses WHY we are to give God our faith, our gifts and our talents, then this is it.  It is even more apt when we put these words into their context.  They are part of a prayer which King David prayed in 1 Chronicles Chapter 29 when he announced the Building of the Temple.  This was to be the focal point of the Judaic religion and the centre of Israel’s worship. 

David  provided a lot of the money needed to build the Temple and he gathered the people and asked  for their gifts too.  They each gave freely from what they had.  It was then that David prayed his prayer of which the words I have quoted are a part.

The Temple was never built in King David’s time.  He entrusted the work to his Son, Solomon.  You can read what happened in the first 7 Chapters of the Second Book of Chronicles.  The people of Israel worked together to build the Holy House of the Lord in Jerusalem – it was a remarkable act of Faith and it was completed using the skills and the gifts of the People.

We too are being called to share in the work of building a Temple – but it is of a very different kind.  We are being called to build the Church – not St. John’s but THE Church – the focus of which is not buildings but people.  Our Primary call as Christians is to BE that Church.

It is a call that comes to us through Baptism; is strengthened in Confirmation and is worked out in lives of self-giving service as we proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ who is our self-giving Lord.  We have been given a special mission which is to witness to God’s Holiness, Justice, Mercy, Faithfulness and Love in the world.  We are called to this work because We are God’s People.

You are a chosen race,

a royal priesthood

a holy nation

God’s own People

in order that you may proclaim the mighty works of

Him who called you out of darkness

into His marvellous light.

That is the description you will find about us in the First Letter of Peter, Chapter 2 verse 9 and it is a vital text for the Church of today if it is to become the Church of Tomorrow.  It recognizes that we are ALL God’s people and we are all called to share in our Lord’s ministry and mission in the world.

One of the things we are working on as a Deanery is a Strategy for Ministry.  It has grown out of the Vision Exercise which every Church and every Deanery has been doing over the past two years.  You may remember that we issued a Vision Statement in 2007:

Our Vision was expressed in these words:

“In the light of God’s Call, and our situation here, our vision is to respond to God’s love and live our lives in ways that will attract people to Christ. As an inclusive, encouraging and listening Church we value all who share our fellowship and seek to nurture, teach and nourish people so that   guided by the Spirit, we may seek new ways of being  Church . We  will develop the ministry of all and,  using the gifts we have been given and the building we have inherited, we will create new opportunities for serving our community and so proclaim Christ and His Kingdom.”

We followed this statement with an exercise called Growing Healthy Churches and we looked at the 7 Marks which make for a Healthy vibrant Church – from which we devised a programme of action – action which the PCC is still leading us into.  The recent Team Reflection Day took this a little further and whether we realize it or not we are in the midst of a development which is about Growth and about how we can be shaped  to become the Church of the Future.  We are working towards that final sentence of our Vision – to create new opportunities for serving our community and so proclaim Christ and His Kingdom.  It is in order that we can address this seriously that we are doing the Faith & Skills Audit now – and the other reason we need to do it now is because the Church we belong to – the Church of England is at a point of Crisis.

There has been, within the Church of England, as with other Christian churches a Shaking of the Foundations.  Our Crisis  is that the way we have been doing things – for centuries – is being challenged.  We might focus that challenge in the financial crisis which we have been experiencing over the past couple of decades.  Lack of money has meant that we have been unable to train and ordain as many stipendiary priests as we think we need and, the secular economic restraints will mean, probably, that for a time there will be less money for the mission we would like to engage in.

We know that there are cutbacks in the number of clergy available in our own area – indeed, as a Team, we were the first group of churches in the Deanery to experience this after Chris Bard died and we were told that he would not be replaced.   Other Churches in the Deanery are also losing clergy – Loughton, Buckhurst Hill and eventually Chigwell and Waltham Abbey.  It might seem that part of our response to this is the development of Upfront Lay-Led Ministry and the training of a team of Pastoral Visitors.  However, this is not so.  It was one of those ironies that the first Upfront Service was delivered at Theydon Garnon on the very morning of the day that Chris died in the afternoon.  By then, too, Carol Smith was meeting with those who had volunteered to become Pastoral Visitors.  Both these ministries have helped us weather the difficulties we are working under but they were not born out of the crisis the loss of ministry has brought about.  We had already planned them and developed them.

Those two ministries and other developments came out of a very different Crisis.  If you look up the word Crisis in the dictionary, you will discover that one of its main meanings is that of Turning Point and the Turning point for the Church of England has come about from a very different challenge which has been made to us, not by circumstance, but from theological necessity – in other words the Challenge has come directly from God.  The Challenge is about Becoming the Church as the 1^st Letter of Peter understands it – a Church which embraces the ministry and gifts of all her people.  For too long we have misunderstood this – and allowed ourselves to become clergy-dominated.  Yet, when St. Peter wrote about the Royal Priesthood the only priests around were the Baptized people of God.  They were ministered to and taught by the Apostles and by some deacons who were ordained to look after the pastoral needs of the people.  As the Church grew and spread new ‘Apostles’ were chosen to have spiritual oversight of the people – those we know of as Bishops – because that’s what the word in Greek means – Overseer.  As the Church continued to spread these Bishops couldn’t provide the spiritual leadership for everyone so they appointed others to help them – Presbyters or Priests.  Priests as we know them didn’t really come onto the scene until the 3^rd and 4^th centuries.

Whilst this was a good thing in many ways it developed until the priesthood began to dominate the Laity and as the priestly power grew, the power of the laity diminished until by Medieval times they became just pew-fodder, governed and controlled by laws and rules which kept them down.  When serious Bible study began in the 19^th century the Laity began to engage more seriously with the Word of God though some branches of the Christian Church were so frightened that the Laity might gain in knowledge and influence and eventually, power, that they kept the Bible from them.  Easy to do if you insist on reading it publicly in Latin and in Greek!  In Victorian and Edwardian England the mission of the Church in the towns and cities grew through the tireless efforts of dedicated clergy and some trained laity but the real breakthrough is only just beginning to happen.  The Challenge for Change has come from God and with it is the recognition that it is not the clergy who are the front-line people in God’s mission to the world, but the Laity – the Royal Priesthood.  Living out faith in the world and witnessing to God’s holiness, justice, mercy, faithfulness and love is the mission of the Laity.  The clergy’s mission, apart from leadership of worshipping communities, is to resource the Laity.  As one Ordination candidate once put it when I asked him what the role of the priest was:

The Priest is there to support an over-worked and underpaid laity.

That rather turned things on its head – but how right he was – and still is!

So there is a partnership of ministry involving Laity and Clergy – a true partnership of the Baptized – because Baptism is our real ordination to Christian Service.  It is this that is the thrust of the Deanery Strategy and hopefully we might see the Deanery make some progress in the time ahead. 

But we, here, have the opportunity to do it now. We are already changing as a Christian Community – those boards over there provided a snapshot of our life  as it was 18 months ago when we had our Bright the Vision weekend.  As someone remarked the other day – some of that is already out of date – we’ve moved on.  And we must go on moving because God is leading us in an exciting time for the Gospel of Jesus Christ to worship, witness to and serve Him in new and exciting ways.  For this to happen we all must share responsibility for the faith we proclaim and be adult Christians who work together to play our part in God’s Plan. 

In order to help us in this we are doing this Faith & Skills Audit so that we can better offer ourselves as God’s People -  challenged by Him to be both Gospel people and centres of Mission.  The paper you have in front of you is designed to help you make a better offering to God of your gifts and talents and insights of faith.  It has been done as diagrams with various suggestions under each of the headings- Worship & praising God; Learning & Growing; Welcoming & Including; Having Concern and Caring; Reaching Out to others: Making & Doing – practical things which service our mission; Supporting and back-up – which every movement needs if it is moving forward –  for behind every action there must be a supportive and praying community;  and finally Planning and Looking forward.

All you are being asked to do is to reflect on the different ways you might be able to offer your gifts, talents and faith in each of these areas.  You may only end up circling just two or three things – but your offering is part of a joint offering and when we work through the responses we will be able to plan and create opportunities for Christian Service which uses all our gifts for God.  Initially we were going to ask you to complete this Audit now by having a short time of silence but I want this to be a truly reflective exercise which you will undertake by first reading the options and then praying through them before you finally decide what you might offer. I then want you to bring back the paper next time you come to Church or, if you prefer, by posting them to me at St. John’s House.  Whatever you do, the Responses will be offered up to God for Him to bless at the Eucharist on Advent Sunday – the beginning of the Church’s year.  We will then go forward from there.   

I would like to thank you for listening to me for a little longer than usual! and I would also like to thank the small group that met to plan this for us.  I would also like to Thank God for giving us this wonderful opportunity to reflect on what it means to be His church and I pray that He will give each of us the Vision to respond to the greater Vision that He has for us.