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From Friday night until today I wore a purple cassock and sat in front of those who have entrusted me with the guidance of their diocese as we shared together in the business of our annual synod. We met in the Invercargill Working Men's club and the local parishes hosted us and made sure we were undo another notch in the belt well fed.We listened as Bronwyn Miller delivered some not very encouraging news about parish finances, the likely effects of the Christchurch earthquakes on insurances and the implications of new earthquake strengthening requirements. We are, after all, the inheritors of many historic and beautiful buildings, often made of unreinforced masonry and often with other parties (local bodies, the Historic Places Trust) wanting a say in what we do with them. Many are a struggle to maintain even now, and their future utility will exercise our imaginations considerably. For all that, the synod wasn't negative; not even a little bit. For myself, I am perfectly sec...

For a long time, I have used the role renegotiation model as a way of analysing relationships. This model acknowledges that all committed relationships - marriages, churches, tribes, families, clubs, whatever - have boundaries: there is a limited set of participants in the relationship and there are rules about who these participants are. If there are no boundaries then there is no relationship. People who participate in the relationship have expectations about how others in the relationship will behave and expectations about how they themselves will behave. In a sense, a relationship is an agreement -made formally or informally, consciously or unconsciously- about what these expectations are. Relationships break apart when expectations are not met, so it is important to know what the expectations are, and how breaches in expectations can be repaired. Now I'm telling you all this because much of today's 14 hours of General Synod was spent dealing with issues of membership The ...