bath & wells: from the bishop

Inspired to Live the Gospel

(The Bishop of Taunton’s message to the Diocese from the September 2007 edition of The Grapevine, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Bath and Wells)

It is that time of year again. Just a few days to go before the new football season begins, and I can feel my relentless passion for the beautiful game, and West Ham particularly, rising.

But, like the famous bubbles song, I also sense that, even though they escaped relegation by the skin of their teeth last year, come the end of the season, just like my dreams, they may well fade and die.

Adrian Chiles, radio and TV presenter and self confessed obsessive West Bromwich Albion fan - as is the Archdeacon of Bath - has just written a book about his adventures as a Baggies fan. He simply cannot understand his obsession. “When I hear fans chanting at the referee: ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’, I often think we should be chanting to ourselves that we don’t know what we’re doing, because I really don’t think we do.”

Some people might level that kind of criticism at the Church. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” but actually, at this moment in time, I think we have a pretty good grasp of what we are trying to do.

Core Values

In front of a capacity crowd in the Cathedral in July I ordained 15 Deacons called, in the words of the service: “To proclaim the Gospel in word and deed as agents of God’s purposes of love, and to reach out into the forgotten corners of the world that the love of God may be made visible”.

At the heart of Changing Lives are the core values of ‘calling’, ‘transformation’, ‘renewal’ and  ‘reshaping’. We want to affirm the call of all the baptised and to encourage and nurture the gifts God has given us. Through The School Of Formation we hope that all of us will have the opportunity to renew our faith so that we may have the grace to proclaim the Gospel afresh in this generation and transform the lives of individuals and communities. In that way we will be able to play our part in reshaping the Church in ways that connect with our ever changing world.

In a few weeks time, in front of another near capacity crowd in the Cathedral, I will have the privilege of licensing a new group of Readers.

Inspired

Readers continue to flourish across the Diocese, as we can see in these pages, inspired no doubt by St Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers, on whose feast day I am writing this letter. It was said of him: “He possesses such great integrity and is so strongly motivated by divine love, that without doubt he is a bearer of honour and grace”.

Put more simply, he lived the Gospel he preached with a passion, he knew exactly what he was doing.

So it matters not so much whether we are Priests, Deacons, Readers, or newly Baptised and Confirmed.

What matters more is that we know what we are called to do, and that is to live the Gospel we preach with hope, with love, with grace and above all with passion.

+Peter Taunton

The Palace, Wells, Somerset.  BA5 2PD