Pastoral Letters
 

	Seek The Lord - Lent 2008
	Low Sunday 2007
	“livesimply”
	Feast of Holy Family 2006
	'God speaks to the heart' - Lent 2006
	'The time has come... follow me' - January 2006
	'Called to work in the Vineyard of the Lord' - The Pastoral Plan, September 2005
	Lent 2005
	'May they all be one'- January 2005
	Growing Together in Christ - October 2004
	Lent 2004
	Lent 2003
	Advent 2002
	Vocations Sunday 2002
	Lent 2002
	Christ the King 2001
	Vocations Sunday 2001
	On Child Protection
	Vocations Sunday 2000

September 2005

“Called to work in the Vineyard of the Lord”

Dear Sisters and Brothers in the Lord,

In July, hundreds of representatives from all the parishes and communities of the diocese joined me for the Diocesan Pastoral Assembly in Reading.  For me, this was one of the most important occasions to have taken place in the diocese during my time as your Bishop.

Gathered together as the family of the diocese, priests, deacons, religious and lay faithful joined me to celebrate our oneness in Christ – our communion. We came together so that we could be refreshed in the Lord’s calling to us, as individuals and as a diocese, to take up his invitation to work in His vineyard. In Reading, I felt there was a sense of real excitement and a passionate eagerness to go out to bear the fruit of the Kingdom.

The Pastoral Plan  - entitled Go Out and Bear Fruit - which was celebrated at the Assembly, and which is now available to all of you, is the result of an immense amount of work and consultation that has been going on in the diocese for at least the last two years. It is a statement of how we see ourselves as sharers of the Gospel and how we are to be as those for whom Christ’s word and teaching is absolutely central.

The Plan raises many important pastoral issues for the diocese and many projects are named in the text. At the heart of them all, there is one that is absolutely crucial and a second that offers us a way to ensure that our communion leads to the mission – the work in the vineyard – to which the Lord is calling us.

The first is the centrality of the Sunday Eucharist. More than anything else we do, this establishes us as the gathered community of Christ’s disciples. It is through the Eucharist, celebrated together in our communities and parishes, that we hear the call of Christ and are empowered to share in his life and in his work of transforming the world.

The second concerns the development of Larger Pastoral Areas. This will entail a radical reassessment of our parish culture. But in today’s very secular world with fewer priests and more mobile communities, we have to be even more effective as a missionary community. Remaining committed to that calling means recognising and affirming in a new way that the gifts of the Spirit are given without distinction to everyone, clergy and laity alike.

The Pastoral Plan belongs to the diocese – it belongs to all of us. The work for all of us that lies in the months and years ahead is to make it happen.  For this reason, I want to stress that it is not a plan written in tablets of stone. It is a working document and it is yours because the ideas and the insights it contains flow from your committed faith; they have come from you.

It doesn’t matter if you haven’t been involved in the consultations; it doesn’t matter if you weren’t able to be at the Assembly in July; it doesn’t matter if you are only coming to it “at the eleventh hour”. This Plan is for all of us and it’s the blueprint from which we will all be working from now on. Because it belongs to all of us, it’s important that we read it, study it, discuss it and, most importantly, hold it in our prayers. It is available to all of you this weekend and I ask you to take a copy home with you.

This autumn, I am coming to all the parishes, gathered together in smaller or larger groups, so that we can have that ongoing discussion together. I hope that as many of you as possible will come to one of those meetings  - there are 11 – because they are about the way forward and that’s something that concerns everyone. Each of us is called to work in the vineyard – our resources and our strength are to be found in the gifts of the Spirit that come to us in the Sacraments – this is the way in which we respond to the command of the Lord that we go out and bear fruit, fruit that will last.

I look forward to meeting and talking and praying with you at these gatherings and I am very confident that, as we build on the wonderful spirit of the Assembly, you will welcome and be open to all the many rich opportunities for our continued work of witness and proclamation of the Gospel of Christ.

In my introduction to The Pastoral Plan, I quoted words written by St Edmund Campion in his famous Brag: “The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted, so it will be restored.” These words move me very much and, although they were written for a very different situation, they are, nevertheless, entirely appropriate for us. They certainly ring in my ears and warm my heart as we set out together with renewed faith, hope and love, “to the whole world, to proclaim the Good News and to make disciples” – for the Lord.

I have no doubt that there will be challenges ahead for us, but I am convinced that, by working together, we can meet them. Let us pray for one another as we begin this great enterprise – and may God bless you all. 

Bishop Crispian

To be read or made available at all Masses on the weekend of September 17^th/18^th 2005, the occasion of making The Pastoral Plan available to the whole diocese.