Spent five hours yesterday with a group of church leaders coming to terms with a declining membership and the loss of ordained ministry. We used the Jeremiah 29 material throughout the day to work through what it might mean to walk through the transition from denial through to acceptance and adjustment for the future.
As we read through Jeremiah 29 we used two resources:
Four tasks of grief
(based on William Worden’s work in Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy.)
- Face the Loss
- Face the Pain
- Face the Emptiness
- Face the Future
Six Responses to Despair
Walter Brueggemann’s reflections on the exiles’ reality, as in hs book, “Cadences of Home: Preaching Among Exiles“.
1. Grieving for a lost world – the need to develop honest sadness
2. Rootlessness -permission to express hunger for roots
3. Despair – doubting God’s faithfulness & power to save – a resolve to find hope together
4. Profaned Absence – become aware of God’s presence in new environment
5. Moral incongruity – face up to chaos
6. Self-preoccupation – find strategies for shaping the environment
We sang – “Rivers of Babylon” – and we prayed. We mourned. We took another look at the new environment of an increasingly multicultural community. We touched base with the passions for shaping the community that were already there. We considered the exhaustion of singles in their fifties and sixties and considered the options of shared living. Maybe these people could consider engaging with a new form of monastic life that energises people in mission.
At the end of the day a dazed group of despairing church members emerged as a hopeful band of mission agents.