Pooling Resources

'Thank you for your card', Fr Andris's email began. I was uncomfortably aware that we hadn't spoken about the Mission Planning process for at least 18 months and I thought I'd drop a line to say I hadn't forgotten him (or at least I had intermittently remembered him) but that our experiences didn't seem to require a meeting.

However he did say that in his Deanery they are thinking more about collaborative working between church communities; in Germany, where his sister-in-law works as a Roman Catholic Pastoral Assistant, the local diocese has amalgamated parishes quite radically and such things as confirmation classes and activities for teenagers are now operating on that broader scale, making life easier for clergy and more rewarding for them. Lessons we could learn, suggests Fr Andris.

While people identify with their own church and the community which uses it, it would be very beneficial to organise such things as confirmation, baptism and marriage preparation, or youth activities, at a higher level than the parish. There are also the environmental drawbacks of getting groups of people travelling to a central point rather than a series of local ones. But it occurred to me that the main obstacle to doing this in the Anglican context is the variety of churches. A group of Roman Catholic churches could be expected to have a degree of uniformity in teaching which you wouldn't necessarily expect between Anglican parishes. I would be most reluctant to hand any confirmands, for instance, that might come from Swanvale Halt (and there are occasionally some!) to conservative evangelical churches to be taught silly things about the Bible, and would want them to think about sacraments and spiritual life in a broadly Catholic way. So I would want to do it! Of the churches that are our most natural local theological and spiritual bedfellows, some are in our Deanery, some aren't. I like the idea of working across boundaries, but it's not completely straightforward.