Anglican Diocese of Perth

Northern Region

Bishop Farran's Sermons 2004

A sermon preached by Bishop Brian Farran at the Commissioning of the Reverend Stuart Fenner
in the parish of Swan, Sunday June 13th 2004.

Adjusting to mission

There have been occasions when in Sydney or Melbourne I have had a few spare hours after an early finish to a meeting and I have used that gift of time to visit the city's Art Gallery. I enjoy especially the collections of Australian art. Whilst I appreciate gazing upon the various canvasses that capture our distinctive landscape and thus reflect to the viewers what has deeply shaped them, I am constantly surprised at those first paintings of Australian trees by colonial artists.

The trees painted by the first colonial artists do not look like Australian trees at all. Their depiction resembles a hybrid of English trees. My impression is that the earliest colonial painters could not free their minds from the detail of English trees. They painted the Eucalypts as if they were painting the trees of England. The result is most unsatisfactory, yet visible evidence of the saturation of the perspective of English culture upon the artists even though they were dealing with a totally different landscape.

It must have seemed perverse, even wrong, to these artists that the leaves of Eucalypts hang down, and can turn to shield themselves from the oppressive noon-day heat of the sun. Enculturation is intense and continued to filter their perceptions and their perspectives too. It was not just those first colonial painters who had difficulty in adjusting to the vastly different landscape Australia was. Other new settlers acted as if they were simply in a more distant part of England.

The earliest churches that the colonists built replicated the English village neo-gothic design. In fact, this fascination with the gothic shape continued unabated as Australia was developed and populated. Thus in remote paddocks at the junction of dusty unsealed roads stand gothic God-boxes, dedicated to the memory of Church as it was in England or as folk-lore had suggested it was in England. I have even been in corrugated iron versions of such God boxes in tiny settlements strung like beads along the inter-state railway lines.

Of course, artists did eventually adjust to their new environment. Most of us have had the joy of standing in front of a Frederick McCubbin painting that captures the quintessential feel of the Australian Bush. For me standing in front of the giant Triptych, The Pioneer, in the National Gallery of Victoria has been a profound spiritual moment. I feel that even though I am now urban, my sense of being an Australian is partly given to me by that image of the Bush. And the Bush is not just trees and scrub, but values, attitudes, beliefs, social mores that were generated by pioneer Australians who settled the Bush.

The fact that people are visibly moved by looking at a painting of the Australian Bush indicates that the emotion is multi-layered. This is not just a response of delight to a piece of beauty that can take one's breath away. The further layers of emotion that are evoked by such a painting are connected with one's sense of self, with one's closest values, with what one senses is at the core of one's self-understanding.

Now if my observation is correct in regard to the impact of renown Australian landscapes upon the general public wandering around an Art Gallery on a Sunday afternoon, I think we can begin to appreciate that neo-gothic church buildings similarly affected people. Probably in unconscious ways people built churches like Saint Mary's and All Saints to perpetuate their spiritual lineages, and unbeknown to them, to grieve their migration.

The replication of the neo-gothic said more about the sense of displacement felt by first settlers than their sense of their new place. It was as if these were memorials to a lost world, and not statements of their presence in a new world.

There were exceptions to this phenomenon. For instance, Sidney Lynton, the first bishop of Riverina, who had to await the building of his house in Hay for several months after his arrival from England, designed the colour scheme of the corrugated iron house, Bishop's Lodge, whilst he stayed as a long-term guest of Bishop Messac Thomas in Goulburn. Lynton chose beautiful Eucalypt greys, greens and blues as the colour scheme.

In fact, the Hay Historical Society has restored the Bishop's House and it is open for public inspection. You can delight in Lynton's eye for and his original appreciation of his new landscape.

Given that the first members of the Church of England in Australia shared the prevailing colonial mind set, they did not think of themselves as missionaries in a new land, but as an outpost -even a very remote outpost- of the Church of England. So the mind set of the Church of England as the state church, the other side of the one coin of society, permeated the thinking of the founders of the Diocese of Australia. Of course, the first bishop was not appointed until 1836. Up to that time Australia was part of the Archdeaconry of Calcutta!

The point that I am gently labouring is that the Anglican Church of Australia has not thought of itself as a missionary church, at least not as missionary to Australia. It has sent missionaries to Papua New Guinea and to the Pacific Islands, even to Africa. But in respect of Australian society the Anglican Church has largely thought of itself as the bedrock spirituality of that society. The church thought that it was present to bless society rather than to convert society.

Now, however, the social statistics inform us that such a view is as romantic and as unreal as the first colonial artists' approach to painting Eucalypts. The spirituality of the vast majority of Australians is given by self-improvement courses and products more than through Anglican Eucharists. And buildings like Saint Mary's and All Saints tell us something of our history but they reflect the spirituality and even the liturgy of an era that has faded from general consciousness.

This generation of Anglicans is faced with the task -the urgent task - of becoming missionaries within our own culture. This is daunting. We are rather unprepared for this because mostly we have acted as if we were present simply to bless society rather than to engage with society in determining values and beliefs. And we all are infected psychologically with that national reluctance to appear different from the rest. So to talk of being missionary immediately pushes our button of fear of being different, of assuming authority, of not being egalitarian.

However, even the Church of England is seriously thinking about mission. A major report has recently been received by the General Synod of the Church of England and enthusiastically endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In his endorsement of the report mission shaped church Archbishop Rowan Williams said, "what is before us now is to become in every way a more adult church. That is taking responsibility, exercising trust, living with some uncertainty and in everyway therefore growing up into the Christ that we seek to serve as a Church."

We are being called to be a mission shaped church because God is a missionary God. The 1998 Lambeth Conference stated that >mission is how God loves and saves the world'. And the theologian Ruth Page has written, "mission is not so much activity on behalf of God as participating in what God is already about. And when the church is truly being the church it concurs with God and allies its energies with God's. Mission is not for God, or in place of God, but with God."

Mission with God means that our proper role is to discern what God is doing in the world and co-operate with that. This requires deep listening and attention to our community. Our listening needs to be stereophonic - listening to our immediate community, and listening to the missionary God through Holy Scripture and in instances of other churches who are on mission.

One resilient means of listening to the community to detect where God might be already working is to use the tool of Open Space. Some parishes are undertaking this process. For instance, the parish of Kingsley-Woodvale used this and discovered a huge amount that they did not know about their own suburbs. This was due to the presence of members of the community whom they had invited to join them in this process of intensive conversation and listening.

The parishes of Mundaring and Beechboro have arranged for Open Space in their communities. I thoroughly recommend this process and the person to contact about it is Archdeacon Michael Wood.

The other strand of listening is to the missionary God. The Gospel of John refers constantly to God sending. The image of God that emerges from John's deep reflection is that God is a sending God. And the content of the gospels is an indicator of how God is present with us.

Matthew bookends his gospel with this notion of God being with us. In chapter one verse twenty-three, Jesus is given the name Immanuel that means, God with Us. So Matthew's gospel begins with the announcement of God being with us.

The very last verse of Matthew's gospel, chapter twenty-eight verse twenty, states the great departing promise of Jesus at the Ascension - "I will be with you always, to the end of time." Again, the assurance of God with us. The text of the intervening chapters amplifies the with us. And that amplification is the substance of our further continuous listening as we seek to identify where God is with us now in God's energetic mission of loving and saving the world.

The report mission shaped church that has begun to excite the Church of England states bluntly that "the church needs to learn from the Holy Spirit to be more an anticipation of God's future than a society for the preservation of the past. Perhaps our greatest need is of a baptism of imagination about the forms of the Church."

I encourage you to be as imaginative as possible in considering the form and style of God's mission here. Too often we have suffered from >imaginational cramp' as we have thought of possibilities. We need to be as wild as the Holy Spirit in our thinking of mission.

The chief task before this parish now with Stuart's leadership as priest is to be more an anticipation of God's future. That will need undergirding from thoughtful reflection on Holy Scripture, with extracting and analysing the themes of mission that emerge, and will require a conversation between these themes and the needs of the community. Within that conversation will emerge the future God requires of this church.

So listen and attend carefully. Be fully present out of this present, and not saturated with the memories of a past that has faded away. Remember such memories distorted how artists drew Eucalypt leaves, and prevented our earliest Anglicans from recognising that they were actually missionaries in The Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.