1st June 2011

Churches are failing in their mission and ministry, causing some to ask, 'Can faith have a future in the countryside?'

The church is struggling with survival and has neither the time nor the energy to engage in mission.

Still there are many active church members working alongside others for transformation, witnessing and celebrating with local meats, organic cheese, locally baked bread and locally brewed beer.

This is social ecumenism.

Every denomination is experiencing the strain of maintaining its ministry in the face of aging and declining congregations

What is required and what must happen if faith is to have an organised expression in the countryside is four fold:

1. Centres of strategic importance must be identified. These will become the Cathedrals or Minsters of the countryside, here the stipendiary ministers with clerical support can be based, worship offered, and congregations gathered.

2. Centres of spiritual significance should be used. Some of these, like Lanercost Priory with its beautiful soaring building, local to Brampton, are already gathered congregations, visitor and tourist attractions. Others are old celtic sites and crosses, some long abandoned and in needing of restoration, but these too can become places of pilgrimage, for away-days, retreats and the spiritual renewal that needs to be restored at a time when economic opportunities are reduced.

3. Individual Christians will be invited to meet, for study, prayer and reflection as part of a renewed lay ministry, to enable people to engage with issues of community concern, local and wider, alongside people of all faiths and none, but who are equipped to share their concerns and their faith openly and clearly with those who ask.

4. The church should, in humility, seek to participate in social  ecumenism, recognizing that a shared commitment to a  common good, a human future, is a corporate task to be developed collaboratively between peoples of all faiths and none.

There are the signs around of  shoots of renewal, many outside the churches, sometimes named and sometimes un-named.

Here are individuals and groups sensing a call to serve, to take risks in and out of faith, here are groups seeking new ways of being community with or without the church, discovering new and innovative ways of being community through sharing the life of  community.

To see this article in full see: Green Christian: http://www.christian-ecology.org.uk/gc/g71/gc71-sustaining-brampton.doc