Report from Diocesan Synod 2017
Change was the theme of Bishop Harold Miller’s Presidential Address to the Down and Dromore Diocesan Synod in Moira Parish Centre on 19th October.
The bishop suggested that in this 500th anniversary year of the Protestant Reformation, the church may be in the midst of another tectonic shift and went on to offer some thoughts about how we might live faithfully as Christians.
Bishop Harold’s suggestion centred round a theory where the history of the church is described as a 500–yearly pattern of massive change or, in a phrase popularised by American lay theologian, Phyllis Tickle, ‘rummage sales’.
The bishop described these as times when “things which have gathered around the church but have become tired, no longer meaningful or useful; things which have lost their focus, as we would beautifully say in Ulster, are ‘rid out’.
“Do we dare recognise that we might be in the middle of one of these ‘rummage sales’, or tectonic times of change at this period of history?”he asked.
As evidence of huge change in the Church, Bishop Harold highlighted the decline of the Reformed Tradition in the Western World; the irrelevance of denominations among the young; the rise of Pentcostal/Charismatic church networks; the recentering of worldwide Christianity in the South and a new cynicism about the church, its institutions, structures and authority figures.