Ushaw College, near Durham was the new venue for the 2005 Northern Synod Ministers' Summer School, held from 21st to 23rd June on the theme Working With Others. Summer School provides an opportunity for our ministers to learn together and to meet together in a relaxed setting. With participants numbering in the mid-twenties this was the largest turn-out of ministers for a Summer School in some years.
Perhaps the promise of en-suite accommodation influenced some in their choice to attend this year. What they and the organisers did not know until they arrived, however, was that this palatial accommodation was at the other end of the college from the conference room, a ten minute hike along corridors from whose walls gigantic paintings of priests, prelates and popes gazed down upon those trekking to and from the conference sessions.
Happily the journey was worthwhile. Ann Morisy, writer on community ministry and mission, theologian and currently Director of the Church of England Commission on Urban Life and Faith led three sessions on the church working with communities. Drawing together theology, sociology, common sense and a host of illustrative stories from church and community life, Ann encouraged those taking part to value the contribution churches make to communities and to combat the congregational anxieties that undermine movement towards working with others.
One example of Ann's approach was to draw upon the Disney Corporation and the principle of ‘obliquity'. Disney instructs its employees to smile at the customers because it knows that if customers are made welcome and happy the ‘bottom line' will take care of itself. If churches concentrate on being church in imaginative, challenging and fun ways then the numbers issues may even take care of themselves.
A different approach characterised the Bible studies at Summer School. Colin Carr, Dominican Friar and Theological Consultant North East Christian Churches Together (NECCT), invited participants into his ‘workshop'.
Colin's workshop is located in his mind where he is hammering out thoughts on the theme of covenant. Participants were asked to work alongside him as he tried to make sense of a biblical journey through the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, stopping off at the mountain tops of Bethel, Zion, Ararat, and Sinai, then finally arriving at “a hillock called Calvary”. Sometimes the sparks flying from the workshop dazzled to momentarily blind and confuse, yet at other times they represented flashes of insight and illumination for those taking part.
Throughout the Summer School was undergirded by worship, led by Janet Flawn, minister of the North Tyne Group of Churches. A presentation on the South Tyneside Churches' KEY Project www.keyproject.org.uk offered participants the chance to compare some of the ideas that had been discussed with one example of churches working with community to support young people with housing problems lead independent and successful lives.
As ministers departed from Ushaw on the Thursday they took away thoughts and ideas for ministry and the benefits that arise from sharing experiences with colleagues. This really was, as one participant put it, “relaxing and learning with friends old and new”.
Trevor Jamison