Methodist Conference Day 4 #methconf - Ordination Day - Lyrically Amazing

Ordination Day is a special day.  

Basically:

11am Sunday Worship

• including a cracking sermon from the new President on Colossians 1:15-22 
• some brilliant worship led by the houseband (- so want them to do some Glee numbers!)
• some great use of visuals (AT LAST!!!) in the intercessions and litany
• the reception into full connexion of those to be ordained - basically this is connecting them into the British Methodist Church and them promising to be part of our network.
• preparing those ordinands to be ordained in the afternoon/evening in several regional churches

1pm Chaos - everyone leaves the Hall and heads out to take pictures, greet their friends, melee!

2-5pm Travel - ordinations were held in Southport, Linacre, Liverpool and Chester - so we had a two hour car drive across South Lancashire/Merseyside and Cheshire to get to Chester. It was a bit of an ordeal with my knee playing up, the car rather hot but wonderful company in the shape of Helen Cameron (driver extraordinaire), Ruby Beech (@redgemtree) and Calvin Samuel.

5.30 Ordination Service

• Leo Osborn - new President - led it fantastically well
• Eunice Attword - old Vice President (no, not old in that way!)
• Margaret Parker - former Vice Pres - woman of God - Methodist celebrity - preaching
• Martyn Atkins - Secretary
• Prelate Olatunji Sunday Makinde - World Church Guest

For me, worship is when Conference is at its best and Micky Youngson and Paul Wood have done a brilliant job in setting a mixed and varied tone in our worship over the last few days.  It has been brilliant. Good mix of hymns and styles and all that! Some great energy in the building! Even a sense of the moving of the Spirit.  See what Micky has blogged here.

But the Ordination Service is something different. It is a set order - set by Conference, even the hymns are set. They are ancient hymns drawn from the tradition of the Church and they don't meet everyone's taste (as I found out after the service and on arrival back in Southport - more later). But the point is to put together an act of worship which is transcendent - which anchors us in the tradition of the universal Church to which we ordain our presbyters and deacons.

This service is a Dr Who moment where the time space continuum is supposed to be ruptured where we share with the Church over the years - before Methodist began, before the Church of England was a gleam in Henry VIII's eye, before the great schism of the eleventh century - back to the 9th (Come, Holy Ghost, our hearts inspire), back to the fourth (the Nicene Creed), back to the first century (readings from John and Corinthians).  The ordination service is a linking of our contemporary context (our ordinands, their families, their supporting ministers, the clergy) with the whole tradition of the Christian Church.

I happen to think it is done very well and I pay tribute to Doug Swanney and the staff in the D&M Cluster of the Connexional Team for all the hard work they, their staff and a hoard of other people do behind the scenes to make these services what they are. Well done and thank you!

I think I prefer Ordinations in local Methodist churches. I helped to organise one at last year's conference and was delighted to meet some of the members of that church today. They were still glowing. In fact, in the car down, we had talked about the service and all said how brilliant it had been. The church felt connexional. It felt that it had placed itself at the service of the Connexion and had contributed to the life of the Church. I fear that too many Cathedral Ordinations deprive our local churches of that experience. But I know that Cathedrals work well too and that some local church celebrations don't!

Chester was amazing. I think it must be because of the John Wesley panel in the Cloister windows (pic courtesy of Mark Hammond):

Or perhaps the world-renowned statue of Jesus and the Samaritan Woman sculpted by Stephen Broadbent in 1994:

Or perhaps because of hundreds of people throwing themselves into an event to support nine ordinary Methodist ministers - not celebrities, not experts, not seasoned professionals, just beginners. But their was a palpable sense of us being on their side, of us doing this for them, of us shouting THEY ARE WORTHY so that they would get goosebumps!

I was so pleased to see Ric Stott's tweet when I got back:

And another from an atheist friend pondering whether he was missing out on something!

The answer is a definite YES!

But I am probably a bit biased.  I am Secretary to the Faith and Order Committee and I note that my views on the service have changed over the last few years. I used to think it was boring, old-fashioned, antiquated. I was like the person who met me in the Cloisters and said it was about time we changed the hymns - and I needed to do something about it. Or the person who came up to me in the bar in the hotel and said Get something done about that liturgy, Pete. 

My answer to both now would be a distinct, NO!  I love the liturgy, the hymns, the pomp and ceremony and I think they go beyond the local and contemporary into the eternal and the transcendent. The sermon could speak to the visitors, the pomp and ceremony and God's palpable presence will speak even more.

But I note I have changed. I remember Howard Mellor (or was it Martyn Atkins?) saying to me that becoming Principal at Cliff meant that they became the Guardian of the Treasure.  It tempered their revolutionary urges. It was almost as if they had become possessed by the job or the title. They had to be the Keeper of the Tradition now whereas prior to taking on the job, they could be rebellious and iconoclastic or whatever.

I have the same problem (as Howard not the Spanish Inquisition) with my job.

F&O acts as a kind of Keeper of the Tradition role. It's important to remember who we are as we hurtle towards/through change. The speeding car still needs its breaks, its gears, it safe pair of hands on the wheel. Methodism needs to change but that change needs to be handled within the tradition we are in - not to go careering off into an unfortunate ditch. We need the rebellious, revolutionary pioneers, and the safe, careful guardians. The two have to go together.

For now, I serve the Church as Secretary to Faith and Order. It's quite difficult in that it means some of my maverick elements (remember the tweeting, the social media, the technology, the impatience with the lack of cultural relevance) need to be suppressed and some of the more conservative elements need exaggerating. I need to serve the Church effectively as Sec to F&O without become a block or an anchor in the life of the Church. But at times I find that really hard as it kind of creates a fissure within my own personality (see the last few blogposts) and that fissure is always strongest at Conference.

That fissure causes some awkward moments - times when I speak out and then realise what a prat I have been, times when I need reining in by other wiser than me, times when I fall down the fissure and need time to get myself back out of the hole I have fallen into.

Some may think this makes me a bloody stupid choice for Secretary of the Faith and Order Committee and I probably would have some sympathy for this. But in the end I believe that God has called me to this job because of the fissure. Because to some extent I represent in myself something of the fissure between contemporary and traditional, evangelical and liberal, pragmatic and doctrinal which is at the heart of the Church I serve. So the fissure is actually a manifestation of the Church and my stumbling around in my job and my fumbling around in the chaos of life is a  parable of what the Church itself may be going through.

That sounds too grand and pretentious now - the fissure opens up! And I am just the Secretary - I serve the Committee and I do not run the Committee. I cannot and would not just change the Ordinal because you want me to! I could not be the rebellious evangelical I once was - I cannot make it so! The fissure opens up! But that fissure makes me fall back on God - like in that sculpture in the Cathedral, I am complete only in my need.  I can receive only when I open myself up to God's willingness to give.

Just bear with me when it happens and trust me, please, that I am trying to do my best. In fact, as I say that I think of others who have spoken to me in the last few days - the theologian, the social commentator, the minister, the pioneer, the worship leader, the leading evangelical, the... All these people trying to do their best and wishing people would just trust them to get on with it and giving them the benefit of the doubt for once. I didn't mean to hurt...sorry...it's because I'm human and don't get it right too often.

Maggi Dawn talks of blogs being written in different modes - some are information, some are more personal, vulnerable, open - spoken in the lyric voice. If you haven't noticed yet, mine is a lyric blog.

Pete

 

P.S.

By the way, yesterday I said Kerry Tankard had a dodgy view of hymnody. I was wrong. It was Kerry who pointed out a suggestive reading of some hymns (sorry for not making that clear, Kerry) and I think Will Grady who suggested adding a few words after a hymn line to give it a whole new perspective! But I was delighted today to hear of the actions which go alongside Jesus Tawa Pano!

Also, I understand that the houseband are so in love with "In Mission Together" that they may be entering it for the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 - am I right, Ian and Paul?

 

 

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