The time has come... follow me' - January 2006

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ
All the Gospels tell basically the same story but each evangelist brings his own characteristics and “spin” to what he writes. St Mark, our companion this year, writes with a great sense of urgency and movement. His Gospel is full of phrases like “at once”, “immediately”, and “straightway”, and today’s reading echoes that same style. In six short, crisp sentences, he gives us the core of Jesus’ message. “The time has come,” he says, “and the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent and believe the Good News.” And immediately Jesus gathers around himself those he needs to help him. Peter and Andrew, James and John are called and “at once” they leave what they are doing to follow him.

The pressing need for Christ’s disciples to continue to proclaim the Gospel is still there today, the only difference being that now you and I are the disciples who are being called. The life of the disciple is demanding and in the last couple of years, we have all been experiencing that demand in the urgent and pressing activity that has engaged the diocese.

Over the last year, throughout the diocese we have all been involved in a process of intense prayer and discussion as we have explored together what it means to be Growing Together in Christ. As a result of all the feedback from those discussions, we produced The Diocesan Pastoral Plan – Go Out and Bear Fruit - which was launched at the Diocesan Assembly at Reading in July and, subsequently, at a series of meetings throughout the diocese in September and October. Our task is now to ensure that all we have undertaken continues and develops because the Pastoral Plan has to become the defining way of how we proclaim the Gospel and build God’s Kingdom in our diocese.

We have been able to maintain the momentum and the busyness of the last twelve months because it has all been underpinned by prayer. We are not about becoming more efficient, nor is the Pastoral Plan a way of managing what some wrongly see as inevitable decline. On the other hand, we are about discerning how we can become more effective disciples of the Lord and what we need to do so that the Gospel can be more powerfully proclaimed. That discernment needed - and continues to need - constant and serious prayer. Our reading of St Mark’s Gospel this year means that we will not be allowed to forget the fact that prayer was a constant feature of the ministry of Jesus – he could not do without it and nor can we.
Various parts of the Pastoral Plan are already being put into place. A Justice and Peace Coordinator for the diocese is about to be appointed; a number of parishes are beginning to pilot the Stewardship Programme; Liturgy Groups are being set up in many parishes, to mention just a few activities.

But more importantly, serious discussions have been taking place throughout the diocese about how we can begin to work in Larger Pastoral Areas, which is a major feature in the Pastoral Plan. I am very grateful to all of you who have already been engaged in this process. Ongoing discussion is vital because so much of the ultimate implementation of the rest of the Plan requires us to know which communities are going to need to work together.

As many people as possible need to participate in this continuing discussion and a paper to help this will be available at the beginning of February. I want parish groups, pastoral councils and individuals to continue to be involved and I suggest that an open meeting for the parish would be a good way of encouraging wider participation. The Larger Pastoral Areas form the basis of our future pastoral structures in the diocese and it is very important that as many people as possible have a say in their formation - and that we get it right. The discussion needs to be generous and not narrowly concerned with the familiar and the comfortable. In the end, we need a network of Areas, which are viable and sustainable.

You will have the Discussion Document in February and we need to receive your considered responses before April 7th. This will make it possible for the Implementation Team, with whom I am working closely, to help me prepare a formal proposal for the new Areas which will be presented to you at Pentecost. I hope that it will be possible for these Areas to begin their lives as working pastoral units in the autumn.

These are some of the concrete implications of the Pastoral Plan which so many of you have already made your own. In my travels around the diocese for the launch meetings in parishes, for the meetings with clergy and teachers and school governors, I have been very encouraged and inspired by the general level of commitment for what we are trying to do. As I wrote in my introduction to the Pastoral Plan, quoting St Edmund Campion, “the expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God…” That may sound arrogant but I really believe it, just as I believe Jesus when he says to us today, “the Kingdom of God is close at hand.”

Bound together in that shared faith, and rooted together in communion with the Lord and each other, I believe that our communities – your communities – will be the places where we experience God’s presence. When we do that – together – we have no need to fear the Lord when he says to us, “Follow me.” In our various ways we will be ready to leave everything in order to proclaim and be the Good News.

May God bless you all,

+ Crispian

To be read or made available at all Masses on the weekend of January 21st/22nd