Thank you to everyone who has filled in a Welcome Card recently. This has been a useful exercise, firstly to test what is the best way to get this information. The cards will eventually be available for newcomers and visitors to complete and we hope this will help improve our outreach to them. Second, they have proved invaluable for keeping our records of current members up to date.
Quite soon you will be asked to give us some more information. We shall be distributing a questionnaire with questions about who we are - church background, length of stay in Berne, age distribution etc. This information will be very helpful in mapping out the way forward for the chaplaincy.
This will not be like the questionnaires supermarkets put out to ask you about your favourite washing powder. Neither will it be like the opinion polls in politics, nor a referendum for that matter. Because we are a Church, and specifically an Anglican Church, there are constraints. The outer boundaries are already mapped out for us but we need to find what is the common ground we can happily occupy within those Anglican boundaries. And that ground is the place where we can grow.
Another thing we hope the questionnaire will elicit is the resources we have and what skills and interests people are prepared to offer to help build up the church here. When you are planning, you have to start with what you have got.
So please fill in the questionnaire when it appears. If you can do so online, so much the better as it will be easier to process the replies that way.
Something else happening in September is my institution as Archdeacon. This will take place at the Diocesan Pastoral Conference for clergy in Cologne. In our Diocese all the Archdeacons are also chaplains to a congregation, so it will mean additional calls on my time. If everything in the Archdeaconry is running smoothly, then this should all work out. In the past, when I have had diocesan responsibilities, I have found that this wider perspective has a positive spin-off for the congregation too, in helping them to see themselves as part of a larger whole.
This awareness of being part of the wider Church will also be a factor in the sense of identity that our questionnaire will help us define.
Peter