"I ask God from the wealth of his glory to give you power through his spirit to be strong in your inner selves, and I pray that Christ will make his home in your hearts through faith. I pray that you may have your roots and foundation in love, so that you, together, with all God's people, may have the power to understand how broad and long, how high and deep, is Christ's love." Ephesians 3.15-18:

In the film "Gorillas in the Mist", the story of Diane Fossey's work with gorillas in the forests of Rwanda, we learn that the way to avoid damage from a charging male gorilla, a silverback, is to cower to the ground, touching it with your head, and, above all, to avoid staring.

At theological college they teach you to do this when you do pastoral visitation. Move off the step, put your feet together, don't stare into the window, take your hat off. Look as unthreatening as possible.

Such demonstrative submission is calculated to check aggression and so avoid being wounded, or maybe even destroyed. Most of us have attended enough church meetings to know what this strategy of appeasement is all about, but why should it be so?

We take a vow this afternoon to receive this man as from God. "Do you receive Barry Griffin as from God?" That would present a problem if we took it in the proverbial sense to mean that Barry is God's gift-to-Stoke-on-Trent, in the same sense that 20-year-old males are God's-gift-to womankind. That sort of posing is bound to raise hackles around the church, and does in too many instances, but that is not the sense in which Barry Griffin comes to you from God.

At the end of the day, Barry comes to you as we all come to one another, from the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ that broke down the walls that stand between us and made peace, shalom, among us who have been separated by so many miles of distrust, duplicity and betrayal. Barry comes to you as Christians through the ages have come to one another, as one who has known the brokenness of God and therefore the depth of God's love in his own heart and comes sharing that as something that cannot be contained.

Barry's disarming, self-effacing manner will perhaps not make apparent what those of us who have worked with him suspect, that this man cannot exist without sharing the good news of God, the peace of Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, any more than the church can exist without sharing that good news, making it known to those who are far apart.

This sharing the good news of God is not a matter of knowing what words to say. Barry will preach, and he's a great preacher. But fundamentally we're speaking about making the good news known not by speaking but through doing. Barry comes to you from God by embodying the peace of God, bringing peace in his person, and so giving the grace and peace of God a local habitation and a name in Stoke-on-Trent.

So we will make the good news known to one another in such palpable ways, by continuing what God did in Christ, making a new community by taking down the walls that stand between me and you, dismantling the barriers that stand between classes, races, young and old and men and women. The church has no existence if it isn't doing this. We have no other ministry than the wall-dismantling ministry of reconciliation that comes from God.

So we say Barry comes from God in the same way that we come to one another.

We will also vow to receive this man to serve among us and with us. A friend back in the States sent me a notice-sheet from a church down by Atlanta, Georgia. It was a big church, so on the back of the sheet it listed all the staff--the pastor and the assistant pastors, the music coordinator, the director of education, the organist and the caretaker. Up at the very top of the list it said, "Ministers", and then it said, "All baptised members". All baptised members. That means we are all ministers, and this man has come to serve among us and with us.

Now if that is true, if it is true that we are all ministers, then that raises a very interesting question. What have we hired HIM for? Good question.

There are lots of practical reasons. He can answer the phone. He is trained to preach the Word in an educated way. He is qualified to preside at the sacraments so that they are kept in good order and don't get out of hand the way they did in the Corinthian church. He is prepared to teach you what he knows about the Bible and theology and church history and all that interesting stuff. And then he has practical experience in seeing to the administrative work of the church. He can moderate meetings, make up agendas, chase up those who have volunteered to do things. He can go out calling on newcomers and visiting the church members. He can recruit the Sunday school teachers and the Boys Brigade leaders. He can urge members to support their church financially, he can cover this detail and that detail, setting out chairs, typing up the worship sheet, sweeping the floor, polishing shoes, wiping noses, in short, being your minister, so you don't have to do anything anymore.

What a relief, now that the interim is over! We don't even have to be Christians anymore. We've GOT one!

But of course what Barry's job is, what Barry's ONLY job is, is simply to enable and equip the church for a ministry it does together, as a community.

I can imagine no apology that can be made for a church that stays behind its stone or brick walls singing its favourite hymns like some kind of spiritual feeding station while its minister goes about among members and out into the community doing the ministry that BELONGS TO the church as a whole. Don't let him do it for you!

So when we speak of supporting this man in his ministry (which we must do because it isn't an easy job), don't let that be just another way of distancing ourselves from a ministry that belongs essentially to ALL of us. The support we give to Barry ought not to be different from the support we give to one another, and we need to ensure that there are structures and procedures in place to make sure that support for one another in our ministry happens.

Church is something we do together. The age of the clergy-centred church is over. The church for today and tomorrow is a community of ministry gathered around a table, not a man in a collar.

Barry has no other ministry than that of enabling that community of ministry which is your ministry:

. . . .through preaching to remind you and encourage you and provoke your imagination to do what God requires of you,

. . . . through the sacraments that gather you here to scatter you out into your neighbourhood to become bread for world

. . . .through teaching to give shape to that knowledge of God already there in your hungry hearts so that you can build one another up to the full stature of Christ as mature Christians.

Barry has no other ministry than enabling yours, and no other authority than the authority of the cross of Christ which is also YOUR only authority, the authority of the cross and the authority of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, experienced whenever any church finds itself free enough to find new life together by taking down the walls that stand between us and the world around us.

Let us welcome this man to this ministry as sent from God, as we, too, are sent from God, as ambassadors of reconciliation in the world around us. Speaking truth in a spirit of love, we will thus grow in every way to the full stature of Christ, no longer as children to be led but as brothers and sisters to serve alongside our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in whom we pray. Amen.

Rev Dr Tom Arthur
Weoley Hill United Reformed Church
5 Weoley Hill, Selly Oak
Birmingham, UK B29 4AA
e-mail:T.J.Arthur@bham.ac.uk or T.Arthur@Westhill.ac.uk