Skip to main content

IDC

Our church will gather tomorrow at the Waitangi Treaty house and be welcomed to the Bay of Islands by the Tangata Whenua. We will be from three tikanga: Pasifika, Maori and Pakeha and we will all meet on Sunday for prayer and then on Monday to discuss our common business. Before that happens though, we Pakeha have been meeting to sort out the stuff that pertains only to us.

There is a story told about a native American chief in the 18th Century who was prodigiously talented at languages. In the space of a year he became proficient in English, Spanish, French and Italian. He was taken to England  and at a dinner at Oxford University he was asked, "so tell us chief, what is the grammar of your own language?" He thought deeply for a few moments and then said, "my language does not have any grammar." Just as our own grammar is invisible to us and the grammar of other languages blatantly obvious, so is our own culture invisible to us while that of others is plainly apparent.This is why, before the constitution of our church was revised in 1992 so that it more accurately reflected the partnership between the three parts of our church, us Pakeha used to pretty much run things. Everything was done according to our tikanga - that is, our customs and usages -with some inclusion of Maori or Pasifika elements from time to time, and we Pakeha didn't actually notice what we were doing.

And when our church reorganised itself we Pakeha suddenly found ourselves lumped together as a group based on a culture that we had to struggle to identify to ourselves. The new constitution required that we, like the other tikanga, meet together regularly on our own, and the instruments for doing this were to be Common Life Conferences and the Inter Diocesan Council. Common Life Conferences meet around particular topics on a more or less regular basis. They are a sort of committee I suppose; or at least, I think so- I have never actually been to one. The Inter Diocesan Conference (IDC) has become the way in which the 7 Pakeha Dioceses meet. Early in the piece it was recognised that if we made the members of the IDC the same people as go to General Synod, and we met at the same time as General Synod we could save ourselves a whole lot of money. So IDC became a sort of adjunct of General Synod and, although in fact nobody quite knew what it was supposed to do, by default it became a sort of governance body. I was once elected onto General Synod, and thus onto IDC but attending once was enough for me, and I made darned sure that next time elections came around I wasn't nominated. Now of course, I don't have the luxury of non attendance.

So we met today under the legacy of all that uncertainty. We began well enough. Sarah Stevens, one of the Ministry Enablers from this part of the world conducted an assured and well crafted Eucharist. Ian Render, the other Enabler preached superbly. He talked about buildings and mission, a topic I am wrestling with myself as we contemplate the closure of several of the churches in Otago and Southland. Ian was illuminating, well researched, inspired and inspiring.  Most of the rest of today was spent on trying to sort ourselves out. We listened as the dioceses gave brief reports and we bishops gave mini state of the nation addresses about the challenges and strengths of our regions. We met in small groups to discuss the themes of these addresses and all of that was fairly energised and positive. We, all of us, feel the call to a deeper level of community and to a renewed practice of discipleship. Then in the afternoon we sort of lost our way.

After lunch we spent a long time revamping the rules under which IDC meets. There was a report which not many people had read, and there were motions and revisions and amendments and we were making a good deal of it up as we went along, and I doubt if more than half of us there knew what on earth was going on for a good deal of it. It dragged on until dinner time and the one positive thing that happened out of it all was a hastily convened bishop's meeting where, at the instigation of Justin Duckworth and Victoria Matthews we resolved to do things better and sketched out a plan for doing so.

We, from the Diocese of Dunedin, met afterwards for dinner. We had a very nice bottle of Pinot Noir and the food was good. We ended the day in community: talking over matters of faith around a shared meal. See, we can do church pretty well; at least we can when we're not actually trying to.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder.  One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...
47 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more