PASTORAL LETTER
To be read at all services on the Sunday before Lent, 6th March 2011
My dear brothers and sisters,
A few weeks ago I was preaching in a church in our companion Diocese of the Highveld in South Africa. The church is in a black township and the Eucharist lasted nearly three hours. There were five hundred or more people in the congregation and the service was marked by tremendous enthusiasm, joy and fervent prayer. The people there are poor but when it came to the collection they all danced up the aisle and joyfully placed their collection in the plates at the front of the church. Later in the service they announced how much had been collected and people dug into their pockets again to make it up to a round sum! I also learned that they were planning an envelope scheme with different colour envelopes depending on how much people will be pledging!
I tell you that story as an example of how Christians may be materially poor and yet spiritually rich. There is much teaching in the bible to remind us we should not store up treasures on earth but riches in heaven. In many ways we are very blessed. Nearly all of us have adequate clothing, shelter, food and health care. Again, I was reminded of this in the Highveld when I visited what is called an ‘informal settlement’ where tens of thousands of people live in corrugated shacks. It was raining and the shacks were leaking. Children were running around barefoot among live electric wires that were smoking in the mud! Yes, we have a great deal for which to be thankful.
This Lent
On Wednesday, we begin the great season of Lent when the Church prepares to celebrate the great Easter festival. The Church invites us to observe the four traditional disciplines of prayer, bible study, fasting and almsgiving. This year, for five weeks in Lent at five different venues, I shall be giving talks each evening about St Luke’s Gospel and I invite you to come along. When I did it two years ago I was overwhelmed at the response and the hundreds of people who attended. Each evening lasts about 45 minutes and you are welcome to bring a friend - and a bible. Please choose a venue that is most convenient to you and if you cannot manage the same evening each week you can always go to another venue.
As usual, I am asking you to fast by going without a meal on Ash Wednesday and the Fridays in Lent and to give the money that you would have spent on food to my Lent Appeal. Fasting is a prayer in action. It reminds us that we ‘do not live by bread alone’. It heightens our spiritual awareness and is an act of solidarity with the millions of God’s people who do not have enough food. You might also wish to give up something you enjoy like chocolate, alcohol, meat or cheese.
As in the last two years, I shall divide the money raised from the Lent Appeal between projects at home and overseas.
Overseas Project
The overseas project is to train 150 catechists for the Diocese of Niassa in Mozambique. The Bishop of Niassa is Mark van Koevering, who with his wife Helen served in this diocese. Mozambique is the seventh poorest country in the world. The Diocese of Niassa is experiencing phenomenal growth and in the last seven years since Bishop Mark and Helen have been there, there has been a 97% growth in congregations with tens of thousands of people waiting and wanting to become Anglican Christians. This will only be possible if they can train catechists to go out and teach the people and plant churches. The catechists need to be trained and later many of them become priests. A residential training course costs £2,000 to train 30 people, so I hope we can send them £10,000 to train 150 catechists who in turn will each prepare hundreds of people for baptism and confirmation and enable them to plant new churches. As we struggle to grow our churches in this Diocese we can rejoice at being able to help to grow many churches in the Diocese of Niassa.
Home Projects
This year, I have chosen three home projects.
The first is to support the Monmouthshire branch of a Christian charity called ‘Farm Crisis Network’ to help provide expenses for the volunteers who minister to farmers facing hardship. The farming industry is facing many difficulties and farmers by the very nature of their job, can feel very isolated. Sadly, the suicide rate among farmers is alarmingly high so it is good to have a Christian network that can provide support and friendship.
The other two projects are projects that we have supported over the past two years – the Street Pastor scheme and the Newport Night Shelter. Both projects have continued to grow and more volunteers are being trained. I hear wonderful stories of Street Pastors being able to have significant conversations with the young people they meet on the streets at night and I know that some of the people using the Nigh Shelter have found faith through the love in action shown by church volunteers. These are three worthwhile local projects run by Christian volunteers to reach out to those in need.
Lent Book
This year, I also want to commend a Lent book. It is called Finding Hope and Meaning in Suffering and is written by Trystan Owain Hughes, the Anglican chaplain at Cardiff University who himself suffers from constant pain. It is a remarkable and very readable book which has received outstanding reviews. For Christians, belief in a loving God when there is so much pain and suffering in our world has always been a mystery. This book enables people to enter into this mystery and through pain and suffering to find resurrection joy in our own lives.
I thank you for the way in which you have supported my Lent Appeal over the past few years. This year, I blessed the lecture room that we built in the Diocese of the Highveld. The programme to provide food for children continues and thousands of new Christians in China now have access to Bibles. These projects overseas and projects at home have been made possible by your generosity, fasting and almsgiving.
May you be richly blessed in your observance of Lent and to God be the glory.
+ Dominic