The Church in Wales begins the two-day meeting 21st September 2005 of its Governing body in the University of Wales in Lampeter. The focus for the meeting will be mission.
The Archbishop of Wales, the Most Rev. Dr Barry Morgan, told the gathered members in his Presidential Address to emphasise the central place of mission in the life of the church and the lives of all believers.
He said: “Just as Jesus’ mission was not to conscript people or to bludgeon people into belief but to bring about new life for them, a transformed existence, so too our task is to alert people to the possibilities of new life.
“It is to alert people to the purpose of God...It is about helping to reveal God – helping people to recognise the presence of God and what He is already doing in their midst and to help him in that task,” said Rev. Morgan.
Rev. Morgan also called on churches and church members to be bold in the face of secular society: “We need to be bolder in the face of irreligiosity,” he said. “We need to proclaim the living God and his love for that world.”
He also called on church members to be proclaim their beliefs without shame: “Our Western Culture places great emphasis on self-gratification, self-fulfilment, enjoyment and personal happiness. Sacrifice, asceticism, self-discipline are not popular words.It is to alert people to the purpose of God...It is about helping to reveal God – helping people to recognise the presence of God and what He is already doing in their midst and to help him in that task.
Rev. Dr Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales
“The gospel is actually about those things. We ought not to be ashamed of saying so as believers, but more importantly we can best proclaim these values by the kind of lives we lead.”
Rev. Morgan urged churches and members to implement a ‘rule of life’ for non-believers to follow and that members of the Church needed to ‘immersion’ in the values of the gospel and to be “transformed as persons so that people can see in us some transformation so that they too will want to be drawn into that kind of life”.
The meeting is being attended by 350 members from all six dioceses of the Church in Wales who will later discuss both local and international issues facing the Church, including terms of service and employment rights for the clergy under the new UK laws.
Other topics include the forced evictions of slum residents in Zimbabwe and a report by representatives from the Church in Wales who attended the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in July.
