Bishop gives Sydney the hard word

Consumerism is the new religion, Christendom is dead and buried and the Church is widely seen as peripheral, obscure, irrelevant and confusing. This is the reality facing Sydney Anglicans today, the Bishop of Maidstone has warned, and it is an illusion to assume people outside the Church are just waiting for the right invitation to come back.

The Rt Rev Graham Cray, a renowned British church planter, said Australia is not that different from England where churches have "wide open back doors " and no one is asking why they don't come back in'.

"Christendom is over," Bishop Cray said. "It doesn't exist anymore. Society has gone from a religion of obligation to a religion of consumption. The Western World has changed but the Church hasn't."

He said people have left churches in droves because they were "victims of pastoral abuse, could not stand the infighting, felt uncared for and couldn't see any connection between Sunday and the rest of their lives'.

Bishop Cray was speaking in Sydney on Saturday (March 5) at the second annual Mission-shaped Church conference organised by the Anglican Church of Australia General Synod, the Church Army Australia and Evangelism Ministries.

Over 200 Anglicans from a diverse range of churchmanship were in attendance, including representatives from the Bush Church Aid Society, the Church Army and the dioceses of North Queensland, Rockhampton, Brisbane, Grafton, Armidale, Newcastle, Bathurst, Sydney, Canberra-Goulburn, Ballarat, Wangaratta, Melbourne and Tasmania. The Bishop also spoke at the annual Australian Bishop's conference in Adelaide last week.

To reach society anew with the good news of Jesus, he said churches need to stop thinking in terms of Sunday attendance and instead begin "fresh expressions' of churches in places that are relevant to people's lives such as leisure centres, schools and housing estates.

"Our existing parochial system alone can't deliver an underlying missional purpose," Bishop Cray said. "The pure neighbourhood church won't do in the world we have today" mission should not be a bridge to church. We can't expect them to come to us so churches must be going into the world as Christ did."

Bishop Cray is part of the Archbishop of Canterbury new mission-shaped church committee that is calling for "mixed economy' in the Church of England by implementing a blend of traditional and innovative ways of worship.

"To be Anglican is not necessarily to sit in rows on Sunday with a book in your hands and a robed choir," he said. "Our imagination about the form of an Anglican Church has been in a rut for about 200 years. The question is how to be church so people can hear the gospel and want to come."