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| Index | ALL CHANGE by Peter Bowles - Chairperson Urban legend has it that there is an ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ This has been an interesting year for CRuC/CRES, but I believe it will turn out to be a blessing, not a curse. The handover of the course to the CRES Steering Group (joint CRuC and JRI), has been completed. The Keele link will be terminated in 2006, but we have established a link with a new validating body, Ripon College, Cuddesdon, which is now up and running and they are showing an interest in actively promoting elements of the course in a context of theological education. Last year John Whitehead announced his intention to retire at this year’s AGM and so the search for a replacement began. It took some time but we ended up appointing the Rev’d Philip Wagstaff and Rev’d Dr. John Reader. Some restructuring was indicated and has now been put into effect: Dr. Martin Hodson becomes Principal Tutor; Philip becomes Senior Tutor working with Martin on the CRES Certificate Course; the CRuC Diploma now also comes under the CRES umbrella; and John has a double role, as Senior Tutor of the Diploma and he is also charged with course development. Both appointees are involved in rural ministry– Philip is a former CRuC student, a Methodist Minister in Devonshire and Methodist Rural Officer and John has had wide-ranging involvement in theological education at every level as well as being a country parson in Worcester. He should be a very valuable addition to our strength. We welcome them both on board. It is good too that the Free Churches are now represented on central staff. All this has taken most of CRuC’s energy over the past year. Now everything is in place it is freeing us up to develop our other role of awareness-raising. To this end we are looking at day conferences on matters of importance to rural Christians; we are also exploring the development of short courses for special constituencies and for general use. We are also actively searching for a new President to replace Bp. Chesters, who retired in 2004. In the short time since I first drafted this letter the new system has swung into action and looks promising; there is a new energy and we have had our first visit to Cuddesdon. It has a good feel for us. Pray for us that the Holy Spirit grant us good gifts to uplift the life of our rural churches. On a different note: this magazine has an important role in communication, filling the gap between the newsy Country Way (and if you aren’t getting it, think about doing so it is very good – contact Country Way, The Arthur Rank Centre, Stoneleigh Park, Warwicks CV8 2LZ) and the more academic Rural Theology. You get it free with your subscription. Here comes the ‘but’. We are sending out about 200 copies. We aren’t getting anything like that number of membership subscriptions. Can you search you conscience or your cheque book stubs? A fiver a year isn’t bad and CRuC could use the money. | |
| Index | RURAL MINISTRY
by Philip Wagstaff
I have been involved in Rural Ministry in one way or another for the past 20 years in five different Methodist Circuits, 2 as a pastoral assistant in Bamber Bridge near Preston and Ramsey in Cambridgeshire and three as a Methodist Minister, Downham Market in Norfolk, Harwich in NE Essex and Okehampton in Devon. The Church in Rural Areas Very often the influence of these churches and chapels reaches deep into the surrounding community and people know that they are being prayed for. A friend of mine was a curate in Cambridgeshire. Every morning he would ring the bell for morning prayer at 8 oclock. No one came, but while he was going round the village, people said that they heard the bell and knew that they were being prayed for. The knowledge of the church being there for people is important. Communities are being prayed for and the Gospel is being shared. The Christian presence is there in the real tensions which are there but, it is also there in the opportunities that can emerge too. The realism is that some church buildings may close – if we get to this stage, I would be an advocate of finding other uses for them in their community before they are sold and ways found to continue a Christian presence or join with other Christians in the community. However, many churches which are often perceived by the wider church to be too small to survive can be key in developing places of prayer and praise in every parish and in every community and should be supported. How rural churches work is different from churches in the towns and is often different from other rural churches. For example, each of the 22 churches in West Devon Circuit do Methodism slightly differently – here is an opportunity to keep local with the security of a wider fellowship as the churches celebrate what it is to be part of community.
So what are the issues around Rural Ministry?
Rurality is being defined in different ways in different places and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get a definition of what is rural. We do need to reflect on what it is to be rural and how the links and relationships, past history and present realities mix together. The Church is part of this complex web of relationships and it is important to recognise that. If people come to church at Harvest and Christmas we rejoice together. They might not be there every week because of the milking or of family needs, or they are involved with the many things that people do on Sunday. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t interested in faith - the challenge is to find ways of exploring it together and that may mean changing the way that we do things. It’s important to see that being rural is different in different places. I’ve worked in the prairies of East Anglia and the rolling hills and Moors of Devon. These communities are distinctly rural but they’re different. The church has discovered this for Suburbia and for the Inner City and is discovering this in rural areas too!! Secondly – there is a lot more movement of population in the countryside than there has been previously. When I began ministry as a probationer minister in Downham Market circuit in 1986 the town was just beginning to welcome in people from London and the South East in significant numbers. People had lots of spare money, as house prices were low in Norfolk and high in London. The search for the rural idyll had begun but so had the real issues that social migration can cause. People soon realised that instead of having a bus past their door every 15 minutes there was a bus on Wednesday when the Market was on and a few buses a day to Kings Lynn. People became isolated and one way that the church responded with setting up a lunch club every day to get people together. Of course social change never has a simple cause and we see an increasingly complex set of relationships between different areas of the country and between town and country. In our part of Devon we have great views and a slower pace of life. People are coming to the South West to retire and the community is changing all the time. New people are welcome and they don’t single handedly cause all the issues that our communities face, life is never that simple, but by the very nature of the low wage economy in the South West we are in a situation of great social change. But, the church is in there too – every parish church, every village chapel, together with many other agencies are seeking to develop and build appropriate forms of community and to make a difference where they are. Society is changing – and rural areas are changing too. The countryside is becoming more accessible. People come to Devon for ‘slow tourism’ because of the hectic pace of life in the cities. But what does that say – both about rural areas and the community within them? The difficulties of finding, affordable housing, appropriate services, a place to live, a way to travel by public transport and building a real community are all important issues which will continue into the future and about which the church has something creative to say if we can find a way of saying it. Thirdly – and this is an important one – the closure of local services. e.g?. Economy in Devon is one of the highest group of car owners in the country. It’s not because we are all car enthusiasts in the South west – but its because if we don’t have cars we can’t for whatever reason get about! In my time in ministry this has continued and to me one of the great sadnesses is that it has happened in the church too. We appear sometimes to be running an economic model rather than a kingdom model. Perhaps the church should be more prophetic. I’m not an economist or a political analyst but it seems to me that one of the signs of the spirit of the age is individualism. We are told that we should be able to sort things out for ourselves. After Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said ‘There is no such thing as society’ those who want to build up community have been at a disadvantage although this is slowly changing. Community used to happen because people helped each other – looked out for each other - talked to each other – in many places this does not happen. When I lived in a village as a minister we got used to saying hello to everyone as we walked through the village, friend and stranger, visitor and family, everyone did that. In villages, there can be a tendency for everyone to know everyone’s business. The plus side of this is that people look out for each other and that is a real gift to any community. The church can pray for those who are known by name because they know who lives near to them. If the closure of chapels is made on economic grounds then we are missing the point of our connectedness here. If closure of chapels is made, on the grounds that there are not many people there, we are missing the point. What we should be doing is exploring the church presence. The church is of course not the building but to many people it is. What are we saying to small rural church communities if our regional or national Church policy is to concentrate our resources on large churches many of which have the resources to look after themselves but who pay most assessment. Or do we work with and support small chapels who are working faithfully in their community. We are not in an ideal world and we need to make choices, let’s look to making appropriate ones. John Wesley said ‘Go not to those who need you but to those who need you most’. If the Post Office, the shop, the doctor and sometimes the school move out of a village that leaves the church. If we pull out too purely on the grounds of economics then we lose the credibility that the church has built up over generations. Fourthly – There have been many changes in Rural areas over recent years. How ministry takes place in all churches, not just rural ones, is changing. The time when there was one vicar to a parish is a distant memory along with the time when Great Western Railway had flower beds on its Stations. . How times have changed!! And not all these changes have been for the better. Those of you who listen to ‘‘The Archers’’ on BBC Radio will have heard the changes over the years. I’ve listened since 1982 when I started rural ministry, and have heard a great change in it’s portrayal of ‘county life’ in the everyday story of country folk on Radio 4. The Archers now tackles issues that would have been undreamt of in Dan Archers’ day. I know that Borsetshire is fictitious but ”The Archers” does give an insight into both church and community. Its portrayal of the incumbents of St Stephens has been many and varied through the years – vicars looking after more than one parish, the tensions of rural Ministry, non stipendiary vicar vets, a woman vicar – and now a vicar with a motor bike!! Many people have come and gone from St Stephens in Ambridge and all have been a reflection on how rural ministry is changing. The storylines have reflected something of the way that the rural church has changed too but it is still there and is still part of the fabric. Ambridge people would notice if the church wasn’t there and they gather within its walls at times of crisis, celebration, thanksgiving for lives passed and for new life born into the community. So it is with our real hamlets and villages and people do notice that the church is there too although increasingly through the ministry of lay and ordained people exercised in new ways in the community. There have been many changes in food production. The Archers has tacked the issues around BSE, Foot and Mouth Disease and Bovine TB. Along with the debates around Badgers and TB, organic production and GM are discussed which is a whole new area of debate both for the Archers and for the church in rural communities today. Changes in farming practices, with small farms being squeezed and large farms getting larger together with changes around Single Farm Payments has meant that the way that rural communities relied on farmers is changing. Farms are still key players in rural economies and the economics of suppliers as well as tourism was noted dramatically during and after the Foot and Mouth Crisis of 2001. Many rural churches now hold rogation and plough Sunday services as well as the traditional (from Victorian Times) Harvest thanksgiving but other areas are more complex. Issues around blessing the hunt (even in its changed form), we need to ask questions as to where Christians might stand in the debates around food production, issues around Genetic Modification of crops and animal welfare are there too and the Church must be involved in the debates. But at the heart of all this is our relationship with the land and our relationship with the created order which is very much a theological question. The bible is full of agricultural references but we live with real tensions in the farming community. When I was in Norfolk we had the smallholding scheme of county farms. When a framer retired this land was not relet but adsorbed by neighbours. All this has changed and challenged community cohesion. The days of all the village celebrating the gathering in of the harvest which everyone was involved in are long gone and the hard manual work has largely gone too. An individual on a combine harvester and a couple of tractors and trailers can do the job in a couple of days. The fundamental understanding of food production and the increasing need to explore issues around food security mean that we cannot be complacent – single farm payments, increased bureaucracy, a new market led approach will challenge farmers and rural communities who rely on farmers for their livelihood. The increase in Farmers markets say something about locality – traceability is becoming important post BSE and Foot and Mouth Disease, issues around fair trade are gradually being introduced and that applies to local produce too. A couple of pence a litre on milk would not be noticed by the consumer who generally does not look at the price in the supermarket would transform the dairy industry in our part of the South West. The debates around GM food, are real and will not go away, as the science is already well developed. Unless the church is there – in the middle of the debate – standing with people who have to make increasingly difficult decisions about the future of food and farming, then we have no credibility and we have no vision for the present or for the future. And we can’t do that effectively if we’re not local. The Church can recapture its vision and we can influence the communities of which we are part both by prayer, by rolling up our sleeves in practical action and getting stuck in to the debates around rural transport, rural housing and issues around food and farming. We cannot shout from the towns. We need to be in villages and hamlets, alive, real, sharing, and caring for the communities of which we are a part. After all, “where two or three are gathered!” There are issues around small congregations but at the very least let us find a culture where circuits and deaneries are as supportive of small fellowships as they are for their larger congregations. So if you had asked me 20 years ago.....if I would still be in rural ministry when the church was being told to centralise, to review buildings, to close and to buy minibuses to take people to large town churches, it might have been seen as folly to get involved. To become experienced in ways of ministry that many would like to see changed may seem pointless. It’s like the farmer sowing seed out of a basket. That was fine until the coming of the seed drill. The change was dramatic but the social cost has been enormous. Will we do the same with our rural churches? The church in the countryside may be small but it’s there. We may not be able to do the things a big church can – but then it’s not a big church. The church in the countryside (as every church does) stands with its people, but it can know its people well, working with the community to which, it has been linked for generations. There are resource issues, there are issues around sustainability – but as long as we have a place to meet, a roof over our head and a voice to sing praise to God then we should be there . The community knows that prayer is offered, that empathy is there and that people care. That’s why the church is still there. During the Foot and Mouth Crisis the first agency on the ground was the church. After all the Church has branches and roots everywhere. People, who could not get off their farm were phoned by friends and neighbours from the churches and from the communities around them. Here were people they knew and the churches were there, co-ordinating the work. Many other agencies were there too to help and new and dynamic partnerships were formed. The church stepped back once the immediate work was done, but kept contact with many people throughout the crisis and beyond. The crisis showed the rural church in a new light. If the Church was not there people would have noticed. We must, I feel, be there, so that every parish may know the presence of prayer, every community may be prayed for and every community may learn and know the presence of God. That’s the inheritance that we have, the story we tell and the pilgrimage that we share. There are challenges, there are tensions but there are also new opportunities for the Rural Church. Let’s be real, be honest and be open and let God’s Spirit work through us so that we and all God’s children may be blessed. We have a tough task ahead – but then no one said that discipleship would be easy. We share the things of Christ in a sceptical even cynical world but we are fortunate that that cynicism is not so great in the countryside. If the Church pulls out, if we forget our mission, if we forget to pray, to serve and to act then we will have lost the plot – for the church is not about being big and influential but its about being faithful. I’ve found in the countryside the members of the churches have faithfulness by the bucket load – faithfulness to God and to their community – long may it be so. This is a shortened version of a talk given at the Christian Rural Concern Open Day at Manor Farm, Warmington by Rev Philip Wagstaff. | |
| Index | SHOPPING AND JUSTICE
by Joy Gadsby
Shop for the cheapest and most luxurious or shop responsibly with a care for justice and mercy – that is the choice for everyone of us. Today, many of us, especially those of us living in urban or suburban areas, have largely lost touch with the land on which our very lives depend. 150 years ago, many people in Britain would have been well aware of seedtime and harvest. They would have celebrated Plough Sunday, Rogationtide and Harvest Festival and would have been well aware of the natural world around them. David Attenborough’s most recent series “Life in the Undergrowth”points out the importance of the life of the tiniest organisms within the soil for our very existence. Yet even though few of us nowadays are involved directly in food production, we all of us indirectly, and sometimes directly, have an influence on the soil and on those who grow, process, package and transport our food, When the children of Israel reached the promised land and began to grow their crops, they were to take a basket containing some of the first fruits of their produce and present it to the Lord. (Deuteronomy 26 ). This reading from the Bible is commonly used at modern harvest festival services, but few of us are in a position to follow the Israelites’ example. We can however present our shopping baskets to the Lord. What do you put into your shopping basket? Lets look at two examples - distances are approximate from where I live in Surrey.
Basket No.1 contains
Now take basket No.2: And what about prices ? In two examples I evaluated for our local harvest festival in October Basket No.1 cost £12.96 and Basket No. 2 cost £13.36 so only fractionally more expensive to buy fairly traded and locally produced goods. Let me go back for a moment to the green beans from Kenya. I have it on very good authority that they are grown on formerly unproductive land on the outskirts of Nairobi, giving employment to about 1000 workers who would otherwise be unemployed in the town, in danger of turning to crime or drugs. So regardless of the food miles, I think there is a case for buying them when our own beans are out of season. Similarly, there may be a case for buying Australian apples when ours are not yet ripe. We need to use our heads when we shop and weigh the benefits of buying certain items against the environmental cost of their transport. It is worth finding out all you can about how and where the food you buy is produced, processed and transported. In an article in the Times dated 1st October 2005 some very interesting facts and figures were given, but surely the most idiotic is the fact that Brussels sprouts grown in Britain are flown out to Eastern Europe to be washed, tailed and packaged. They are returned here for distribution to supermarkets, one of which is just a few miles down the road from where they were grown !
Justice - Why should we worry about food miles ? We are reminded by the prophet Micah, that the Lord requires us “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God” Climate change has resulted in women in sub-Saharan Africa having to walk twice as many miles every day to fetch water. Is this justice ? Going for the cheapest option at the lowest wage has meant unfair competition for our own farmers, many of whom are heavily in debt or have gone out of business, and with a high suicide rate among them too. Is this justice ? Air pollution from exhaust gases from planes and our own cars contributes to the increase in heart and lung diseases. The incidence of asthma in many of our towns and cities has risen steeply in the last twenty years or so. Is this showing mercy? Expecting a wide choice at the cheapest prices for the food we eat, regardless of how it is grown, what wage the labourers receive for it or whether or not it is in season in Britain is, I submit, not doing justly, showing mercy or indeed walking humbly with our God. We do however live in the world as it is and not what we would like it to be, and super-markets with all their buying power are here to stay. We can however choose those which have signed up to Christian Aid's’ ethical trading practice and who prominently display Fair-trade goods on their shelves. We may feel that issues of justice, resourcing, and degradation of the environment are so big that anything we do is of little significance and that it should be left to governments and market forces to sort out. But remember, nothing we offer to God is too small for him to use and we all have the power of choice. We can either live without thought for those who produce our food, or how much carbon dioxide is spewed into the air on our behalf, in which case we are part of the problem. Or we can be part of the answer to these problems by the way we live and particularly by taking thought for our shopping habits. One final word, not from the Bishop of London, nor the Archbishop of Canterbury, both of whom have had much to say on these matters in recent weeks, but from a 12th C, nun, Hildegard of Bingen, who said “God has allowed humankind to use the earth’s resources, but if it misuses them, he has given nature permission to fight back and exact a just punishment”. I believe we have seen examples of this in recent months. So as we buy our food let us remember those who grow it both in this country and in the developing world and let us thank God, to quote the Book of Common Prayer, not only with our lips but in our lives including the way we do our shopping. We can all with careful, prayerful thought make a real difference. | |
| Index | COOK’S CORNER - OEUFS ST. GERMAIN
by Margaret Stapleton
250g (8oz) fresh garden peas
Place peas in small saucepan and cover with water. | |
| Index | THE FARMING SCENE JANUARY 2006
by John Neal
Today, 18th January is particularly mild with a top temperature of 14 centigrade. Moscow at the same time is experiencing its coldest weather for some twenty five years. Will we in England feel the effect of that cold blast from the east? By the time you read this article, you will know the answer to that, indeed it will be past history and forgotten. British farming is also facing a blast from eastern Europe in the form of cheap agricultural products from a recently extended ED and from the effects of the new ED Common Agricultural Policy. The Single Farm Payment SFP, came into effect in Jan 2005. Soon, very soon now on every farmer's doorstep a letter will arrive which will tell that farmer what entitlements he or she will receive under the SFP. All the form filling, the information meetings and the best estimates will be over and you will know the hard cold fact of what your entitlement will be for the next ten years, at least. During the cold snap last November I spent two cold days in the roof of our farmhouse where the annual accounts and farm records are kept seeking documentation to prove my entitlement on land entered into agri-environmental schemes eighteen years ago. This was after my initial application for the land to receive entitlement had been refused by Defra. Two weeks after my appeal Defra reversed its decision, much to my relief. But what if those records had not been available or I had moved farms. There is going to be a number of disappointed farmers when the entitlement is known and many farming families thrown into crisis. This is so different to F & M in 2001 when the public, were informed and alongside. Now this is a crisis which individual farmers must face alone. For myself, the SFP will mean a change of farming policy. Instead of growing some acres of cereals, linseed for several years, employing a contractor to plough the ground, plant the seed and combine the crop, I will be putting this land into grass, keeping a few more sheep and making more hay. The small bales of hay, which I produce, are bought by owners of horses, alpacas, rabbits, guinea pigs etc. - a whole new market is opening up. There are so many smallholders and hobby farmers now, what a change to the family farm of yesteryear. My local vet tells of the city banker who has a small farm on which he keeps a flock of sheep; when each sheep is due to lamb he wants the vet there to ensure a safe birth. The cost of this at £40 during the day and £80 at night seems and probably is irrelevant to the banker but is an indication of the future shape of "farming". I know that I am the last generation of Neals to farm at Manor Farm. I have no regrets at having spent a lifetime caring for 100 acres of Warwickshire soil. 1 do feel sorry for those who have never experienced what it means to share in God's creative work and have time to stand in the hayfield or lean over the rail in the lambing shed and thank God for the beauty and love that He has woven into all that He has created. What of the future? "We look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells," says the bible. Perhaps that begins to happen when a nation < returns to God's values. It is as I lean on the five-bar gate and think and pray about all this that the deer look back at me, the robin is busy defending his territory, the buzzard soars in the sky and' my sheep gathered around ,me. Can you put a monetary value on that? | |
| Index | BOOK REVIEW - Caring for Creation
by Joy Gadsby
Tillett, Sarah (Ed) Caring for Creation - Biblical and Theological Perspectives (Bible Reading Fellowship 2005 £8.99) This collection of essays sets out the biblical and theological background to the responsibility of Christians to be in the vanguard in finding answers to today's sustainability and environmental issues. Contributors include Sir John Houghton, formerly head of the Met. Office, Sir Ghillean Prance, recently retired from being Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Eugene Peterson, Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, author of several books and of a translation of the Bible The Message in contemporary English, and Professor Sam Berry, until recently Professor of Genetics at University College, London. The essays are enlightening and challenging and each one is followed by an example of the practical conservation work of A Rocha, a leading world-wide Christian environmental organisation whose UK Director is the Rev. Dave Bookless, known to many members of CRuC. I found this book refreshing, relatively easy to read. It sheds new light on what the Bible has to say to us today as we face the critical issues of environmental degradation, climate change and justice for all the peoples of the world, as well as the changes we need to make in our own lifestyle if we are to play a vital role as caretakers of God's creation. |
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Updated 8 Sept 2007 by Ken Wilkinson.
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