Good News People

So the new Diocesan Academy for Formation and Mission is well and truly off and running. I had thought to post some themes from our first weekend together, but for now I am going to let that gather some steam and put something different, though not altogether unrelated, on the table. This evening I picked up a half read report from the Church of England on the the work of Diocesan Evangelists. This role is definitely evolving but may become ever more useful as the Church and the World change. The term and the role have some heavy baggage and an inconsistency of example that makes it difficult to recognize. So appropriately enough, this report is called "Good News People: Recognizing Diocesan Evangelists" from Church House Publishing in 1999. Their findings are compelling:

We therefore came to understand the word 'evangelist' as describing someone, man or woman, lay or ordained:
*who goes where the church is not;
*who proclaims and lives the gospel: the way in which this 'proclamation' takes place is essentially contextual, and is by no means limited to preaching or even to verbal communication;
*who interprets the Church to the world and the world to the Church;
*who comes from the centre of the Church and feeds from its riches and is accountable to it as well as challenging it;
*who encourages the whole Church in its work of evangelism, not least by communicating the gospel to those inside as well as outside the Church.

In many ways, this is what I feel called to do, despite the fact it seems like the exact opposite of the natural inclinations of my personality. The life of a monastic does feel like my natural inclination. However, when I met with the abbot of my Benedictine community to discuss some of the possibilities surrounding my call and the education I was hoping to undertake (this was about two or three months before the plan for the Academy blessedly reached me: Good News indeed), she said that what she was hearing was a more active and world engaged life than is possible in the cloister.

We shall see. For now, the end of another day. Amen.