But for the sermon I am due to preach in St Mary’s Cathedral tomorrow morning, I guess my work out here is just about done.  This morning I had a ‘summit meeting’ with a few senior church leaders, to begin to sharpen up ideas for the contect of the CrossTalk conference in July.  It went well, and was (the sermon aside) the last major task in front of me before I fly home. 

The meeting was attended by Dean Jason, Canon Fred David and Mr James Chee (the Bishop’s Officer for Visitors).  I had prepared a discussion paper, in which I set out what seemed to me to be six major themes worthy of attention at the conference, arising out of my observation of the churches I have seen in the three dioceses over the last two and a half weeks.  We then had a productive dialogue about these and other possible subjects and came up with the makings of a very worthwhile 48-hour programme.  I think.  I hope. 

My six headings were these:

a)    Mission in a multi-cultural society
I’ve been very impressed, in all three dioceses, at the capacity of fairly ordinary parishes to sustain ministry and mission across two and three ethnic groups – and by their capacity to hold together the diffferent language-speaking congregations in a single community, with shared vision and identity.  Since ministry and mission for many dioceses in England has a multi-cultural context (whether because of established minority ethnic communities like those from the Carribean or the Indian sub-continent; or because of more recent arrivals, like West African or Middle Eastern asylum seekers, or european economic migrants from, say, Poland or Bulgaria), it may be that there are good lessons for our churches to learn from one another here.  Economic migrants from Indonesai, Cambodia, Nepal and other parts of South East Asia are similarly presenting new opportunities and challenges for the church here.

b)    Church planting stories
I’ve heard so many exciting stories about the nurturing of new congregations: particularly in ‘the interior’, among indigenous tribal groups, and (a concerted initiative, this, by all four diocesan of the Anglican Province of South East Asia) in parts of Indonesia.  And we have exciting stories to tell in Lichfield too, about church plants in schools and community centres, about so many ‘fresh expressions’ of church: ‘pioneer ministries’, ‘network churches’ and ‘churches without walls’.  There is scope, I think, for us to share good practice from across the world:  what are the signs that the Lord might be calling us to plant a new church?  What are the steps that are necessary in preparation?  How do we prepare prayerfully?  What resources do we need? 

c)    The Church and Islam
This trip has been my first real exposure to the church in an Islamic state.  In fact circumstances vary a bit across Malaysia: the ethnic mix is such that life is somewhat easier for Christian believers in East Malaysia (Borneo), than it is in West Malaysia.  But for all three Dioceses, the state poses severe problems: in the administration of schools, in the building of church plant, in the restrictions upon evangelising and even upon meeting – even in the use of the word ‘Allah’.  This is the word for God in the Malay language and has been for decades.  It is used routinely in Malay translations of the Bible and in Anglican liturgies.  But the government has now forbidden its use except in an Islamic context.  So, quite apart a massive re-education task, the church is face with a massive re-printing bill!  And in England, too, many parishes (and church schools) operate with an increasingly prominent islamic neighbour: many of our urban parishes include a mosque; many of our church schools include a significant moslem clientele.  What are the key issues raised for the church when it encounters Islam?  

d)    Lay training: for what? And how?
I’ve been impressed, on the one hand, by the quality of lay leadership in all three dioceses, and by the investment of time and energy in lay training, but also by the extreme difficulties that have to be overcome: literacy is an issue in the rural areas; geographical distance from a central resource centre is another.  We face similar but different challenges in Lichfield: how to we deliver training to highly able, highly skilled but also highly busy lay people?  For what roles are we offering training? What resources do we need?  Again, there is good practice to share. 

e)    Culturally appropriate worship:
Then there’s the issue of indigenous worship.  It was a joy for me, at the ordination yesterday, to hear the Scripture readings in three languages: Mandarin, Malay and Tamil and not only to hear the offertory hymns obviously draw on Chinese and Tamil music, but to hear this fact celebrated.  This was a potent recognition, I think, both of the cultural diversity of the Anglican Church out here and of the appropriateness of offering to God a worship that is incarnate locally.  But so much of the liturgy and hymnody remains very English.  The fact that it is in English isn’t problematic: it is in business, in tertiary eductaion, in retail as well as in church that English is a default language.  What is more problematic is the fact that the idiom is English liturgy and hymnody then translated word for word into Iban or Chinese – rather than Iban or Chinese worship rendered in English.  In England, part of the virtue of Common Worship is the flexibility it offers to culturally very diverse parishes to choose and use what ‘fits’.  Here too there may be lessons for us to learn from one another. 

f)    Anglicanism:
Finally, it seemed to me that we might want to take time in the conference to consider what unites our Dioceses across our very different cultures.  And what does Anglican mission look like?  How might CrossTalk be different, if it was a Pentecostal programme or a Roman Catholic one, rather than Anglican?  What is it that makes us Anglicans, what does our shared future hold?

My colleagues were very gracious in their affirmation of these topics as relevant and important and well worth conference time.  They helped me refine the ideas, and to assign priority.  In particular, they stressed how important it may be to acknowledge explicitly (in any discussion of Anglicanism) the fault-line currently running through the communion – and to name the controversy, as it will, they say, undoubtedly affect the future of our partnership.  They also urged that time be found, either as part of the conference programme or outside it for a discussion of how to develop our partnership further., either by building upon parish to parish links of the kind that CrossTalk has recently introduced, or by drawing Lichfield Diocese into the task now being undertaken by the Province of South East Asia to evangelise Indonesia and to establish an Anglican Diocese there (as well as, in due course, in Nepal, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam). 

It was a productive, if mentally exhausting morning!