Letter from Stephen Brian
Dear Reader
We are delighted to be here, and I am very happy to be safely ensconced in the study at the Rectory in Earl Soham writing this letter.
Perhaps I should just say briefly who ‘we’ are. (If you would like more detail and you have access to the internet, you will find a ‘biog’ on the Ashfield, Earl Soham and Cretingham benefice website here).
I was born and grew up in Surrey, trained to teach in Brighton, taught for five yeas in large comprehensive schools in Luton and Newbury, trained for ordination at The Queen’s College, Birmingham (where I met and married Liz, now a Careers Officer), served a curacy in Scotforth (just outside Lancaster), was Vicar of Freckleton (near Preston) in Lancashire for nine years, moved south to be Vicar of Bagshot in Surrey for a further nine years and did one year as a school chaplain in Wantage, Oxfordshire (until the school closed!) before moving here. We have three children: Sally who has just finished at Bristol University and is working down there for a year before training to teach; Jenny who is in the second year of the sixth form at Thomas Mills High School; and Mary who is 14 and has just started there in Year 10.
We are looking forward to getting to know everybody and explore what is to all of us a new county. We are also looking forward to discovering with everyone else here what it will mean to be part of a wider benefice which includes not three, but eight parishes and eight churches. That change should take place formally within the next month or two, but I have been glad to discover in the meantime that many people have already begun to ‘take on board’ the change and think how we can encourage communication and wider participation across the whole of the new benefice. People have already begun to worship together.
When the two benefices are formally joined there will be a service of celebration to mark the union, and I will change from being a licensed Priest-in-Charge of two benefices to an instituted and inducted Rector of one benefice - but I doubt if anyone will notice the difference!
So there is institutional change involving a lot of ecclesiastical jargon going on and in some ways it all seems rather esoteric and even anachronistic. Does it all have any relevance in the 21st century? Does it really matter? We are told that even denominations are irrelevant to most people, let alone what benefice they’re in.
Well the answer is both yes and no. The parish system is there primarily to facilitate pastoral care for everyone. No matter where you live, there is a Church of England parish priest (whatever his or her label) whom you can call upon for help should you so wish. The present changes are simply an attempt to make that system work better given the current situation in the Church of England in terms of resources. But it is also the case that what really matters at the end of it all is not ecclesiastical forms, but whether people are being helped to make connections between their lives and the God who loves them, and being encouraged to live lives of Christian discipleship. I believe that is indeed going on already, and I will do my best, with God’s help, to help people continue in that journey.
Stephen Brian
Letter from Gill Lee
As someone who is statistically now past my time for a mid-life crisis, I have learnt that the cry “What am I here for? Where is my life going?” is not the sole preserve of the thirty or forty something’s. People of every generation can identify with Alice’s predicament in Alice in Wonderland:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the cat.
“I don’t much care where,” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the cat.
“So long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an afterthought.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the cat, “if only you walk long enough.”
How many of us are in danger of leading aimless, unfulfilled lives, not much caring where we’re going as long as no one bothers us on the way, living out Solomon’s nightmare vision of a life of hard work, seeking possessions, power and pleasure and finding it all to be “meaningless, a chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 4:16b)? Even those of us who are Christians all to easily find ourselves falling into a rut of work, family, and church commitments, going through the motions because we have lost sight of the purpose God has for our lives.
But doesn’t the Bible tell us that we have been “called according to (God’s) purpose” (Romans 8:28b), and that our life isn’t about just “getting somewhere”, but is about becoming all that God designed us and Jesus saved us to be; that it’s about making a positive difference in the lives and eternal destinies of others? We have a divinely appointed reason for waking up every morning!
According to research done by Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist who survived the death camps of Nazi Germany, the most significant factor that determined whether a person would survive the camps was a sense of future vision, the conviction that they had a mission to perform, important work left to do in their lives. Everyone needs purpose; otherwise they merely exist but do not really live. It was the profoundly handicapped Helen Keller who wrote “Worse than being blind would be to be able to see but not to have any vision”
Jesus said that he came that we might experience life in all its fullness (John 10:10). He disturbs the comfortable, gives courage to the timid, empowers the weak, humbles the proud and envisions the blind and all in order that his Kingdom, which is life in all its fullness, might come in increasing measure into this sad & needy world.
Preacher Haddon Robinson once said “You’ll give your life for something or you’ll throw it away on nothing”.
The choice is ours.
Gill Lee