The Cwm Tawe Ministry Area Big Picture

Following on from our recent Ministry Area Day, and a brief outline of ideas which will be in the April Newsletter, I would like to take the ideas discussed in the day further and deeper.

What working together now demands from us

Firstly, it is important for us to realize the practical implications of being people who believe in working together and who wish to identify what should be our next steps as a result of this. I outlined one implication in the Ministry Area Day, namely, that there is dissonance in the way we work because we have a group of churches, but not a team of churches. This dissonance is highlighted by the way in which various people, lay and ordained, are expected to work as teams for practical and constitutional and legal reasons, but the churches themselves may not see that this applies to them also. For example, as clergy we are required to work as a team, not a group, but this can be difficult when the churches for which we have primary pastoral responsibility individually do not see the need to work as a team of churches. Consequently, beyond the broad outlook and strapline of a Ministry Area Vision, churches adopting a team approach has to be adopted. This is a new approach which has not needed to be done in the past for a variety of historical reasons, and therefore, we can understand why a change of attitude and action is difficult for people. Again, I return to an insight from elsewhere: Things are not difficult, things are either possible or impossible given their context. It is people’s responses that are difficult because of the emotions they have about different things. We need to address the emotions as well as the ‘things.’

What is the vision?

In the Ministry Area Day, people spoke of the need to shift from asking, ‘what do I get from this?’ to ‘how do we all achieve?’; from asking, ‘can I keep the roof on?’ to ‘can we show Christ in the world?’

So what is the common aim and purpose? What is our vision as a ministry area? This is something which we began to explore in the Ministry Area Day. People spoke of bringing the kingdom of God into our present reality and of doing so with imagination, flexibility, courage, learning, love and integrity; of the need to nurture spiritual growth for everyone; of the need to engage with the communities in which we find ourselves, of the need for ourselves to be together more often for prayer and guidance. There was also an appeal for inclusivity, for what we do being part of the way we encourage people to be good citizens so that we live in a good society.

It is important for us to remember that the Church’s purpose is not the same as its mission. Mission is only part of its purpose and we need to remember whose mission whose mission it is, namely God’s, not ours. Hence the mention of WELL: Worship, evangelize, learn and love as a rounded way of looking at our purpose. While mission in the Christian tradition has the sense of being sent out, its basis is that we are sent out fully equipped, and this demands the need to identify what our church people and clergy need as part of understanding with confidence the faith that we seek to share with others.

Practicalities of a vision statement

We do need to discuss further what we mean by some of the ideas on the sheets of paper which we have collected from the day. For example, what does a ‘Church without Walls’ mean? It could be interpreted in a number of ways from us saying that people are first buildings second, or that the move from inside to outside should have a seamless character to it. The concentration of thought on the kingdom of God needs clarity for two reasons: Firstly, as I’ve mentioned, I think a lot of the confusion about the pressures of the present lie in the way in which church people see themselves as people who are seeking to follow Jesus, but Jesus did not found an institution such as the Church in Wales made up of church buildings within walking distance of each other, which is what people really want because that is their lifelong memory. Hence, we return to matter of emotions. How many of our people want the kind of vision which began to be articulated in our Ministry Area Day and how many people just want the continuation of the local church in the way with which they’ve been used to seeing? How many of our people have a foot on both sides of the boundary line of thinking here, including ourselves?

Realistic development and expectations

A key issue for us to get right along this development of thinking about a vision is not only to have a realistic vision but to develop it in a manageable way. Part of the day articulated doing more together, but we need to ask how we find the extra time and energy for this given all that various people and churches already do. Part of the problem here is that stopping doing something that already happens to create time and energy for something new and different receives a strong negative response, especially when we are a group of churches rather than a team of churches. A few years ago, not in our Ministry Area and discussing something that was different, I explored the implications of this and was told, ‘you can’t do that!’ Well, I suppose that given I have to work with limited resources of all kinds, yes, I can, and further, I posed the question, ‘so what would you do?’, to which there was no answer. As we work our way through devising a vision and the practicalities of it, we have to brace ourselves for many a discussion along these lines.

A specifically Christian vision

A guiding principle to many a question which seems to have no answer is for us to realize that to speak of God’s Kingdom are very easy words for us to speak because there is nothing distinctively Christian about them. For a far longer period than us the Jewish people have prayed and worked for the coming of God’s Kingdom. We are simply the latecomers to this particular party. For Christians, we glimpse the coming of the Kingdom in the death and resurrection of Jesus and we witness to this hope of the coming of the Kingdom through living a life different to the past. It is important that our vison for our Ministry Area expresses these things. Living in the peace of the Risen Jesus are a few words that sum up seeking to witness by words and actions the hope of new life brought by the death and resurrection of Jesus and coping with the loss and new life change for us as churches brings given our situation.

Timothy Hewitt

Feast of the Annunciation 2025

During the autumn of 2024, some of the clergy and lay people of our Ministry Area attended a series of training events and support initiatives provided for the people of our diocese. Some were to do about church growth, some were about sharing the good news, some were about making sense locally of all of these things. There’s more about these events and initiatives further below. Over the Christmas period, it’s been evident that we do have opportunities for growth and sharing the good news of Jesus, but also that we need to think in a deeper way about these opportunities so that we understand what we mean by words like growth and what the good news might mean for the people of our Ministry Area.

We’ve learnt the benefit of doing all kinds of things together, and not simply in our own corners as congregations. It’s important that we get a sense of the bigger picture of our Ministry Area so that we make the most of the opportunities afforded to us: Imagine that you’re on a plane as it climbs up thousands of Feet: It gives a different perspective. This is vital to the life of our Ministry Area because we all have to accept that Ministry Areas, and our Ministry Area of Cwm Tawe is here to stay, whatever we make of it, for good or for bad. Ministry Areas are not a brief hiccup in the life of the Church in Wales.

Some of the clergy and the Church Officers have refined our Purpose Statement as a Ministry Area, the refined Purpose Statement being:

We are a people of faith trusting in God’s love and travelling together encouraged by prayer and exploration.

We’ve been asked to concentrate on five basic tasks as part of laying the foundations of our relatively new Ministry Area so that things like church growth and sharing good news can become possible. The five tasks that we’ve identified are:

1. Establish forward planning and flexibility. Quite often, individual churches organize activities without consulting with each other but at the same time expecting the support of other churches. Sometimes the result can be poorly supported events with people being over stretched or activities that didn’t properly consider what will be involved in what they hope to do. Sometimes, it’s better to do less and do things together to ensure success and keep people motivated. In turn, this will create time and space and energy to respond to other things when needed.

2. Deepen the understanding of our faith. This can involve coming to an understanding of what the Bible means for us here today and not simply what it says on the black and white pages of the printed text. There is also understanding what is unique about the Church in Wales in comparison to other denominations in Wales and why we are the kind of church that we are and why certain things are important to us as Anglicans. The truth of the matter is that the development of Ministry Areas is simply a reflection of how the world around us is constantly changing, throwing up new ideas, issues, questions and insights and how what we believe and trust in might have something to say to all these things, and then in turn, things that the communities we serve might find helpful as people live out their lives.

3. Gather information about our Ministry Area. We might know our local patch very well, but sometimes, not as well as we thought as communities change, and we can’t take it for granted that the rest of our Ministry Area knows the communities as well as we do. Each church and congregation are unique and as we seek to carry out the work of mission and ministry together, we need to know and understand each other’s churches and congregations better.

4. Improve communication. As time goes on, and the task of setting up our new Ministry Area progresses, it will be important to communicate why things need to be done differently, so things like the Ministry Area Website will develop further and things like the monthly newsletter might contain a greater variety of information. There is also the matter of social media, and how to engage in this in a manageable way. The clergy are very aware that they don’t know about everything and it’s important to let them know what’s going on, and in turn, that as effectively as possible, they act on what they’ve been told.

5. Communication and conversations concerning long term issues to increase awareness of these issues. Many of you will be aware that we have some very serious issues to do with finance, buildings and the sustainability of what we currently do. Truth be told, having the number of clergy and services that we have is something of a luxury in comparison to other Ministry Areas, and if the availability of our clergy were to change, there would be need to rethink many things across the whole Ministry Area. Some of our congregations are not flourishing which needs addressing, as difficult as it can be. In years to come, as we are nowhere near financial sustainability, we can’t just expect the Diocese to constantly throw money or clergy our way. We need to think about where and what we’d like to be in the decades from now and not just tomorrow. We need to take responsibility for ourselves in relation to others as a Ministry Area.

As the imaginary plane descends to its destination, these are the smaller details that come more clearly into focus, as without the small details, there is no big picture.

Some details about the training events and initiatives some of us have attended:

Leading your Church into Growth.

The Leading Your Church into Growth programme suggests 7 steps that need to be taken as part of growing churches:

1. Create a prayerful culture of growth.

2. Implement the four P’s. Prayer, presence, proclamation, and persuasion.

3. Practise fruitful evangelism.

4. Develop engaging worship.

5. Become an inviting and welcoming church.

6. Make a pathway for seekers to become disciples.

7. Begin the planned journey of growth.

At its face value, this sounds like a great plan for everyone to follow, but it does need understanding and planning, and we’ve not reached that stage yet. Leading your Church into Growth is recommended to churches by its authors who are convinced of its success, but the experience within the dioceses tells a different story. There are three main reasons why this growth may not have happened in the way in which people anticipated. Firstly, Leading your Church into Growth presupposes that everyone understands what we’re all talking about and that the desire to see growth is a point along a purposeful journey that has already begun previously. Opinions can differ greatly about the issues raised by the seven steps even to the point of strong disagreement about them. Secondly, there is often a failure to accept that an environment for growth needs to be created, which will demand choices being made to create such an environment, along with a realism that this demands rather than the easy stating of beliefs that do not touch on the reality of the context of the individual church. God, the maker of heaven and earth, has not enabled vineyards to grow in Antarctica yet! Thirdly, the Leading your Church into Growth programme does not take into account the multi church organization of church life either here in Wales, or for that matter, in the Church of England. Interpretation of these principles needs to be done so that what is good can be used in multi church contexts.

The emblem of Leading your Church into Growth continues to be the bunch of grapes, and this presupposes certain ideas about growth, also about what is the church and how churches live out their lives. We’ve run straight to the growth shop and in so doing run straight past the guidance shop and the hardware shop for the stuff we need to help us. There are many tips and tricks within the Leading your Church into Growth resources, but we need to work out where our starting point is, and where it is to which we seek to travel. For example, one reflection that came out of attending Leading your Church into Growth for everyone was that we need to grow faith and understanding and discipleship within our congregations first and how we might do this can be one starting point.

If we’re encouraged to pray for growth, then at least this can be an opportunity to re-establish things like prayer cycles and intercessions. We might want to consider concepts to do with being healthy churches, because it’s being healthy that enables churches to according to Leading your Church into Growth, and other church programmes. In terms of the Church Year and how that is used as a basis for the work of the four P’s (Prayer, presence, proclamation, and persuasion), we might need to think in terms of longer than 12 months for a project and when projects should begin and end in the Church Year.

Welsh Evangelism Conference

A couple of us attended a Welsh Evangelism Conference that was held through the medium of Welsh and had an ecumenical input to it. As it happened, it turned out to a conference that mainly looked at the church buildings perhaps rather than Evangelism. We began by looking at the concept of Pioneer Ministry and the need for calling, vision, gifts and resilience. A church needs to be pioneer in its organization and life if it expects pioneer ministers and we were challenged about what resources go into pioneer ministry. Here in Wales, our history and culture become our stepping stones to a living faith. Contradictions exist. Wales is a land of pilgrimage, but few people travelled widely in life experience and are reluctant to experience new things. We touched on something called process evangelism, where church growth has been a certain process happening, which in the case of the example of the conference was:

An example of Process Evangelism:

Restoring the building;

Restoring the worship;

Modern preaching;

A positive experience of church;

The growing of leaders for the future;

Events for all ages.

Here in Wales, we have seen very distinctive forms of Christianity over two thousand years, and there is good and bad that we can say about all of these forms. Have some been too close to paganism and have some been too narrow, constricting creativity?

There was also the opportunity to look at creative uses of buildings that have problems with sustainability, but the examples given were to be found within significant tourist areas, so the solutions are not universal.

Lead Academy Support

One of the unique things that Lead Academy brings to the table is the way in which it gets us to think of the here and now and the need to know why we do things as churches. It is out of the support Lead Academy gave that the purpose statement was refined and the five objectives for the immediate future were developed.