This is an exciting day. We are learning that our determination under God to be an effective church as we are shaped by the Holy Spirit in our thinking, presence and structures is similar to the Spirit’s work in other places of the Anglican Communion. So it is wonderful to be connected with the diocese of Nevada and the diocese of Tasmania. Tasmania has feature internationally through the royal romance. But there is more to Tasmania than Mary Donaldson, as lovely as she is. Bishop John Harrower has provided outstanding leadership to what was prior to his election a diocese that did not quite know how to change to be a robust church. Bishop John will encourage us as he shares the Tasmanian story with us.

And Bishop Katharine has opened us to commitment to mission. I understand that the American Church does bewilder some Anglicans. However, I have to say publicly that I have not encountered the same intense commitment to mission at grass-roots level as I have when I have visited the United States on several occasions. The work of mission continues the thrust of the mission of Jesus Christ in liberating people spiritually, socially and individually. There are outstandingly inspiring stories of mission in the American Episcopal Church that show what can be done if the faithful baptized have the will. Again, we are grateful for your generosity Bishop Katharine in sharing your ministry and experience with us, and with other parts of Australia.

This is our fourth Regional Assembly with the largest ever attendance. I hope that these assemblies are sources of encouragement and hope for all of us. I can only say as your bishop that I am truly inspired when I look out upon you, knowing now a reasonable amount of your parish and individual stories. I find energy for my own faithfulness and obedience to Jesus through remembering you and your discipleship. Thank you for that inspiration.

I have the good fortune to work closely with Archdeacon Michael Wood who will be joining me in this presentation. Together with the Northern Regional Council, Michael and I have sought to offer leadership that gives heart and hope to this Region. We have been, I think you will agree, persistent in seeking to make mission our primary objective. We have done so because mission is at the heart of God’s relationship with the Creation.

God is a missionary God. Mission is how God loves and saves the world. God is a sending God. Saint Paul stated that emphatically. “At the very right time God sent the Son, born of a woman...” and then God sends the Spirit upon the Church. Afterwards, God sends the disciples out into the world to proclaim the gospel. And as every Eucharist ends we too are sent out.

Sending is the method God has endorsed through the ministry of Jesus, through the gifting of the Spirit, and through collaboration with us. So we are the sent ones. We too are missionaries, now in a culture that is forgetful of its Christian origins, that is thirsting for spiritual awareness, and that is dissatisfied with the teasing promise of satisfaction from consuming more and more.

We are seeking to shape up as a missionary church. This does mean deep change for up to about 1963 we acted as if we were a State Church, much like the Church of England in England. It was just that successive Australian governments had been too embarrassed to acknowledge the reality that Christendom had been imported into Australia with the First Fleet.

What operated as a de facto arrangement has crumbled in the glare of our consumer and secular society. We are as a church one religious option in a spiritual supermarket. And we have been tainted too by this. We think of ourselves as a product, work for market share, and even promote ourselves in terms of difference for the more discriminating religious customer. We are at the David Jones end of the religious supermarket, if you don’t mind!

But the facts and figures both of weekly attendances and national surveys now make it clear that the chaplaincy era is over for us. Chaplaincy assumed that the culture was Christian, and that the culture itself reinvigorated its Christian awareness. We know that our culture has drifted from such Christian moorings. Now it is a matter of sharing with an unknowing culture the Christian story, especially the wondrous facts of God’s self-giving in and through Jesus Christ. This self-giving is at the heart of the Christian faith and shapes the lifestyle of the Christian community. Our mission in seeking to share our experience of the Good News and the liberation it has effected is prompted by our sensitivity to the love God has for the creation and for humankind.

So we are learning to be a missionary church. It is very much, I detect, a pattern of two steps forward, and one step backwards, but there is progress, as our snapshots of Ministry disclose.

This then is our theological background, our source, our motivation for the strategic direction that has been developed by the Northern Region Council and adopted two assemblies ago as the movement for the Region.

In order to honour this theological impetus and to ensure that we indeed are a missionary church and not a worship club, we have clustered some principles that provide a framework for how we try to be a missionary church. These basic principles that are derived from the New Testament, from mission thinkers and from our Anglican foundations act as a template for planning what we do and for evaluating what we have done.

These principles have shaped our core values and have given us the understanding that we are Ministering Communities in mission. This motif of being ministering communities in mission summarises the essential task as church. It also reflects a crucial understanding that God has gifted the faithful members of the church (highly thought of in the Pauline writings as the ‘Body of Christ’) with sufficient gifts for ministry and mission. This still appears to be a revolutionary appreciation of the local congregation, whatever its size.

I have come to realize that unless a congregation can embrace this understanding, unless a congregation takes seriously that Scriptural description, then not much will ever happen in either that congregation realizing its potential as ‘body of Christ’ or that congregation functioning in a missionary way. This appreciation of the Holy Spirit gifting the members of the Body of Christ sufficiently for ministry and mission becomes the hallmark of whether the local church has the energy or real desire to engage with its surrounding neighbourhood in outreach and evangelism.

Without such an appreciation that the local congregation is gifted by the Holy Spirit for ministry and mission, we are in another theological climate far removed from the New Testament church, and adrift in a consumer religious dimension. We simply live for our own religious satisfaction. In 1993 an international Anglican Congress in Toronto plagiarised a piece of Saint Paul’s writing by crafting the aphorism, “the church that lives to itself will die to itself”. Still true.

The underlying principles for being ministering communities in mission are these:

1) The understanding that presence is basic to mission. This simply means that as a church we seek to be present in local communities to witness to the Gospel, to embody the Gospel, and to incorporate into the gospel.


Each community has its particular needs and is different. In these northern and eastern suburbs the differences between communities is often delineated by a single road. For instance, Marmion Avenue as its winds northwards differentiates communities on the basis of income levels. Those who live west of Marmion Avenue live within suburbs that have higher land values, costlier houses, and are appreciated as more desirable living areas. Those who live east (evenly just east) of Marmion Avenue live in lower cost housing areas. Robin and I live east of Marmion Avenue. This is true also of Wanneroo Road, of Beach Road, of the Reid Highway. Well, that is my primitive sociological analysis.

My point, however, is that surprisingly within literally hundreds of metres of each other, divided indeed by an arterial road, communities do differ, do have distinct character, and thus have different needs requiring particular forms of ministry and particular practices of presence.

Presence is an integral expression of Anglicanism. Anglicanism does seek to be local; local in character in order to be as fine a membrane as possible in transmitting the gospel in various areas, and not assuming that the one way of transmission is acceptable or productive. This notion of presence builds upon Saint Paul’s precise missionary social sensitivity that he was “all things to all people in order that they might be saved”!

“Our calling is not to withhold our presence from those around us. Our calling , as imitators of Jesus Christ, is to bestow ourselves; to seek ever-new ways of being more fully present to our brothers and sisters, and the people God gives us to share our lives with.” ¹ This quotation from a young English theologian, Dr. Ben Quash, highlights the importance of presence as the foundation for mission. Ben Quash suggests that mostly human being, at least in Western nations, are about hiding or concealing themselves, rather than being openly present to one another.

Of course, this understanding of presence is in accord with the incarnation of Jesus - that God makes Godself present within the creation in order to create the possibility for relationship and for faith.

Within the Northern region we are seeking to ensure that we have as effective as possible presences within communities that are attractive samples of the truth of the gospel. Therefore, we are working on proven missionary principles. These were first discerned by an English missionary priest, Roland Allen, who digested them in a classic book Missionary Methods; Saint Paul’s or Ours? The question still scrutinizes the church - are our missionary methods in tune with saint Paul’s or have they been developed in some latter-day way that deflects us from being a church that does engage with our communities.

Roland Allen observed first-hand the failure of the church to develop vital indigenous churches. His first-hand experience was in China. Our could be as close as Papua New Guinea. Roland Allen’s reflection led him to these principles that have become for me foundational in being the church.

Here are his mission principles:

1. A Christian community which has come into being as the result of the preaching of the Gospel should have ‘handed over to it’ the Bible, creed, ministry and sacraments.

2. It is then responsible, with the bishop, for recognizing the spiritual gifts and needs in its membership and for calling into service priests to preside at the Eucharist and to be responsible for the word and for pastoral care.

3. It is also required to share the message and the life with its neighbouring communities not yet evangelized

4. The Holy Spirit working on the human endowment of the community’s leaders are sufficient for its life. Don’t ‘train’ them too much. Don’t import from the outside.
5. A Christian community that cannot do these things is not yet a CHURCH; it is a mission field.

6. The bishop and his staff (Timothy, Titus etc) are crucial.

These principles inform too our practice of TEAM training - Teach Each A Ministry. We recognise, as did Roland Allen, that the most effective evangelists are not the imported experts, but the local people who know intimately their surrounding community and are the human entry points into the faith community from the local community.

Because I am an eclectic reader, I came across in 1980 the writing of a famous predecessor of Bishop Katharine, Bishop Wesley Frensdorff. Wes Frensdorff introduced the principles of Roland Allen to Nevada. The story itself cannot be told now, but believe it is an amazing story of synchronicity that indicates to me the supple working of the Holy Spirit in bringing together the right people at the right time to achieve God’s purposes.

These were the ministry principles that Bishop Frensdorff introduced to the diocese of Nevada. These were foundational in getting ministering communities in mission into church space!

1) Each congregation is to be a ‘ministering community’ rather than a community gathered around a minister, sufficient in ministry from within its own membership, including local deacons and priests wherever possible.

2) Each member of the church will have the opportunity to serve our Lord in church and world, through ministries which will vary greatly according to gifts, available time and opportunity.

3) Seminary-trained clergy and laity will increasingly be trainers, enablers, supervisors and pastors of trainees. Congregations will become less dependent on seminary-trained clergy as the doers of ministry.

4) The diocese, as the primary unit of interdependence in the life of the church, is the support system. The diocese will provide training and support for the various forms that ministry can take, including local priests and deacons.


Again, these principles have informed the evolution of TEAM training and underpin Ministering Communities in mission.

The Northern Region has used these principles to work towards a vision of having in as many communities as possible presences of the church that are most culturally appropriate for those communities. This appropriateness includes the factor of financial sustainability. We do not want to burden congregations with financial obligations that turn them into fund raisers who exploit their mission field in order to sustain themselves financially. Rather, the vision is of churches giving to their mission fields, rather than taking from their mission fields.

In order that this will be our practice we have developed a boundary about finances. We will not allow parishes to become indebted to finance their recurrent costs. We differ in this from some other places. However, debt has proven to be a real burden, a demoralising burden that has siphoned the energy and the attention of congregations from mission to survival. If you are at the level of survival, there is not much surplus energy for anything else. And we know that mission takes energy - a lot of energy.

This boundary around debt has led to re-structuring of professional ministry. We have parishes that now have clergy who serve in 0.5 full-time appointments. These appointments are now carefully negotiated with agreed position statements that focus on the professionally trained clergy person working to develop and enhance the ministry teams of a parish. This is an important pastoral role that maximizes the skills, training, expertise and available time of the seminary trained priest so that the priest’s wisdom and skills are dispersed through the ministry teams. This is a simple instance of what might term ‘gospel arithmetic’. In other words, we maximize the accumulated skills of the professional priest by providing a context in which these skills - theological and ministerial- are assimilated by eager others who also share the priest’s sense of mission.

The boundary includes too our use of diocesan ministry grants. These principles formed the basis of the Diocese’s development of this year’s Grants budget:

1) Grants are not to be used to pay stipend or assessment arrears
2) Grants are to be used for the development of new ministry and where there are good signs of potential for growth
3) Grants are to be used in places where there is the need to maintain a priestly ministry and it is right for the Diocese to support this ministry
4) Grants are to be used as support for contextually appropriate ministries of presence
5 Grants are to be used in partnership with other Anglican agencies


A final yet nonetheless important principle is the question, whom are we serving? This sharp question interrogates our programmes. The style of church we have inherited was designed for the insider when it was thought that the whole culture was insider, that is, Christian. We are aware now that the insider is a minority. We are surrounded by a society that is notionally Christian based but which includes a growing percentage of secularists who label themselves as having no religion. Our mission field is widening as the same time as our membership is contracting. Therefore, our programmes, how we worship, how we connect with the community must be shaped from the perspective of the outsider rather than from the perspective of the insider.

These principles fashion the missionary approach that the Northern Region Council is practising. I hope that your parish no matter its size will appreciate that these principles are foundational missionary principles and that therefore your parish will seek to express them and build upon them in its mission and ministry.

The context in which we are seeking to turn the region into a missionary church is not standing still. We are seeking to undertake major renovation to an existing, functioning body that does need to continue operating. Therefore, the change that we are seeking, and it is deep change, has to be enacted whilst we still attend to the daily business of the church.

However, I would be failing in my responsibility as your bishop if I did not alert you to trends that are already affecting us. Now, I do not have a fridge magnet to offer you, but I do want you to be alert, but not be paralysed by alarm!

Recently, the Diocesan Office posted to each parish in the diocese a trend analysis of parish incomes. This trend analysis indicated the adjusted level of income required by each parish if the income level was in line with the inflation rate. The figure is the far left-hand column is the inflation adjusted figure based on the income figure for 1998/99. Of course, the income figure for 1998/99 might itself have already been insufficient to permit the parish to function as a true missionary church. There may have been financial constraints already in operation.

However, my point in raising this with a real figure though a fictitious name is to indicate that 23 of the 39 parishes in this Region are behind the inflation adjusted figure as is Saint Determined To Grow Parish. Of the other 16 parishes only 10 are secure in being able to meet their budgets without assistance from the Diocesan Ministry Grants budget.

This trend document should send shivers down our spines. Either we embrace substantial stewardship development (which we do need to do), or we prune more and more. However, we will not permit lass than a 0.5 priestly appointment.

This trend of falling income is matched by a trend of rising costs, and by the realization that 0.6% of Perth’s population is worshipping in an Anglican Church on a Sunday. One parish recently in a growing area of the northern corridor realised that they had a congregation that represented 0.4% of the parish’s population!

These trends are indisputable. They give us hard (that is both real and uncomforting) data about our position. The trends cannot be allowed to continue unabated. We do have to seek to alter the decline. We will need restructured ministry for this reversal.

Therefore, we will begin a series of Trending Conferences between parishes. This will enable us to pray, plan and prepare for mission in the most feasible way available to us. There will be pain in this, but to do nothing will be to be euthanised at a slow rate.

These trend conferences will help design our ministry models for the foreseeable future. These models will be based on the mission principles I have already enunciated. The models will be shaped by context, and that too is a proven missionary principle.

Thus, we will have a range of parish settings:

> parishes seamlessly set in school contexts, weaving a seamless faith community
> parishes that are eclectic because of their style of ministry
> parishes that network together to share resources and personnel
> parishes that are expressions of Ministering Communities in mission
> parishes that continue in the family sized church structure already familiar to us
> congregations that might form through the mission of lay communities in new housing areas, like Bennett Springs
> and even multi-campus parishes, as happens in the United States.


Our primary resources are the Gospel, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the faithful baptized, trained clergy, and a passion for mission. These do seem invincible, yet they require equipping, sustaining, nurturing and sensitising with the mind of Christ, a crucified mind and not a crusading mind, as one gentle Asian theologian has reminded the western church.

We have already invested in substantial training of 12 clergy as Enablers in ministry development. I am grateful to the Diocese of Tasmania for making this possible through the terrific ministry of Paul Cavanough who spent a week with us in a residential programme at Wollaston in March. The 12 clergy have already embarked on a follow-up programme of mutual mentoring and further skill
acquisition.

The TEAM training programme just continues to have greater importance and urgency if we are to become a missionary church. The Diocesan Board of Studies is working to ensure that all the units in the TEAM programme will be in distance education mode so that parishes can form training groups and that communities can study together in their own locations. Michael Wood will be out and about visiting parishes to promote TEAM training as an essential missionary investment.

Finally, why do all this?

Simply because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Raised and gloriously ascended Christ, has commissioned us to be his missionaries. We cannot escape our obligations once we have been converted. Faith does imply obligations to be altruistic in sharing the gospel.

So our task is to be effective in continuing to do what Jesus did: to sight, signal, support and celebrate the breaking in of the Reign of God. This Reign was inaugurated in Jesus’ mission, and is sampled in the life of congregations who imitate the self-giving of God in Christ.

Well, that’s the theory. Now for the action.

I want to be part of a missionary church. I invite you to join me in being missionary too.

 ^1. Ben Quash. The Anglican Church as a Polity of Presence in Anglicanism :the Answer to Modernity. 2003. Ed. Duncan Dormmor, Jack McDonald and Jeremy Caddick. London: Continuum, p.38.