1.  Let us pray: Loving God, pour out your Spirit on this parish of St James’, and grant us a new vision of your glory, a new experience of your power, a new faithfulness to your Word, and a new consecration to your service – that your love may grow among us, and your kingdom come.  AMEN.

2.  As you know this coming Tuesday we shall all be meeting, as a parish community, to listen to what the parish said in the important survey about our hall and Social Centre.  This will be a very important meeting, but it is vitally important to remember that this will be about much more than simply what we do with our buildings, for whatever we do – or do not do – must spring from a vision of who we are, and where we are going.  Both the church and scripture tell us; we are the People of God, and we are on pilgrimage – a journey into the fullness of the kingdom of God.  And although, at one level, we are a diverse community of individuals, at a far deeper level, we are members of one another, within the Body of the risen Christ.  We are the Catholic Church – the fellowship of God’s Holy Spirit – and we are striving, in all our activities, in all our groups and initiatives, to live out our vocation, to love one another as Jesus commanded us, and to share that love with everyone, far and near.

3.  But we can only love one another if we know one another, and if we make the effort to meet each other, especially after Mass on Sundays, otherwise we are living a truncated version of the faith.  We are a community of almost 1,000 adults, together with about 400 children and young people.  One of my main concerns as your priest is how we get everyone to feel that they are part of the whole, how we encourage everyone to feel that they have an indispensible role to play within our church community, that they matter, are noticed and valued.  That’s quite a tall order with 1,000 people, but the pastoral leadership teams are getting to grips with this and we shall report in due course.  After 3 years, I feel a sense of personal failure that I still do not know many of you, and, again, I am working on this and next Sunday will outline a new approach to parish visiting.

4.  At the heart of our existence as a Catholic community is the Sunday Mass.  Many of you invest much time and energy on this, and rightly so.  Unless there is a genuine reason, we should never be absent from Sunday Mass.  This is the ‘baseline’, the irreducible minimum of our lives as Catholics, and without it our spiritual lives suffer decay and, ultimately, death. There are so many temptations, so many alternatives – the voice of the tempter can be so strong – and yet to neglect our Sunday Mass is to neglect our very souls, to become lukewarm in our faith, to just go through the motions.  I suspect that we need to place our faith in Christ, and in the church he founded, and which speaks with his authority, right back at the centre of our lives.  Our Catholic Faith is not just one more thing that we do, not just another spare time hobby or activity, but a matter of life and death – our life and death, and the life or death of our community.  The reality of Christ, who is the meaning and end of human existence, must be at the centre of our lives, not at the periphery, and by implication, the church, his Body, must also be at the centre of our lives and not somewhere at the edge, just an option to pursue when we feel like it or when life gets tough.  We shall never grow into the likeness of Christ if we are not at Mass each Sunday, being nurtured through the Word of God, being fed by the Lord in Holy Communion, and slowly being built up, with our sisters and brothers, into the kind of community that Christ would have us be. So whatever else may be said about a vision for the future, our Sunday Mass must always be first, central and of irreplaceable significance, and it is on that basis that the following points are based.

5.  What is your vision for this parish, say, in 5, 10, 50 years time?  One of the most encouraging signs of the past 3 years or so has been that people are beginning to grow in confidence, and to express their own ideas, their own vision, of our parish. We now have our two main pastoral teams, and ever-improving means of communication within the parish, of which our website, and the parish handbook are excellent examples.  Your ideas, your views, will always be taken seriously, so never be afraid to express them!  All members of this community are equal, because we are all equally baptised into the death and resurrection of Christ.  Baptism is the great equaliser, and it is on this basis that the community is built.  It may not always look or feel like that, but theologically, it is true.

6.  Part of my vision for the parish is that all of us should be in some form of on-going spiritual formation.  We need to be confident in our faith, but we shall only be confident if we really know our faith, and for many, if not all, this formation ended at the age of 16, if not earlier, and for some of us, that was a long time ago!  This should be a matter of concern to us all as we try to explain our faith to others, to both children and adults, and as we grow in spiritual maturity.  We are always concerned about passing on the faith to our young people, but what about ourselves?  Do let us know what sort of formation might be appropriate for YOU – and we shall try to respond.  And what about church during the week – morning prayer, daily Mass, confession, adoration – I am convinced that we would all grow considerably in our faith by worshipping in some way during the week, and it is great that we have a faithful core of daily worshippers.

7.  Another part of my vision concerns the falling away of young people and young adults (18-30) from the church and its life,  and I think we need to give serious thought to this, and in particular, what provision is made for the faith formation of children and young people at non-Catholic schools?  This is a complex issue, and it is to be hoped that, at some time, a Catholic secondary school might be established within the Borough.  But even so, the responsibility is ours and in the new year we shall be offering a course here at St James’ for those of you who would like to be catechists – helping to prepare people for the sacraments of infant baptism, first confession and communion, and confirmation, and possibly the faith formation of adults.  I shall speak more about this in coming weeks, but I do hope many of you will think about offering yourselves for this.

8.  An essential item in any vision for the parish will be the offering – of ourselves, in union with Christ – to the Father, for the salvation of the world.  In the Mass, and especially as we participate in the Eucharistic prayer, we are literally invited to enter into the moment of Jesus’ offering of himself to the Father.  Our Lord Jesus Christ held nothing back – ‘this is my body given for you...’, that is, this is my entire being, given in love, a gift to God.....and we, too are invited, with Christ, to make a gift of our lives to God, to put him first, other people next and ourselves last!  This might sound severe, but it is the mystery of Christian discipleship that those who do live like this find an indescribable joy in their lives!  In fact, many experience what the Bible calls resurrection, nothing less.  In practical terms, this means the offering of our time, our talents and our money, and as we ponder together on our parish vision, I invite and challenge everyone to review their own self-offering of time, talents and money, to really pray about these things and to take action.

9.  And then there is the welcome we give to newcomers, to enquirers, and to those new to the Catholic Faith.  It is almost impossible for those of us who are so familiar with the church, to realize how new and strange it all is to newcomers!  If you are a new, or newish person or family at St James’, I hope you will soon feel part of our community, but you too must make the effort!  It is wonderful that we have so many new families and individuals amongst us, a sign of growth and renewal, of life and of hope for the future.  May we always be the warm and inviting community that this parish has been since its formation in 1937.

10.  We have so much to be thankful for, but also so much to do as well.  This community is richly blessed – God has a work for us all to do here, so please, do not be timid, please participate and get involved, and above all, pray each day, and, read the scriptures.  My Day by Day is an excellent resource, and it is good that so many of you use it.

We may live in difficult times for the Catholic Church, but they are also, I suggest, times of great opportunity and hope.  As Catholics, we have a treasure of inestimable worth to share with others – we are not to keep it to ourselves.  We must move from being a passive church to an active one, to become much more pro-active than reactive, to see where the opportunities lie, and to seize the moment.  Our Justice and Peace Group are an excellent example of this and I do hope many more of you will get involved.

11.  In four years time – 2013 – we shall celebrate the 50^th anniversary of this church building.  Already some of you are suggesting ways in which we might celebrate this – please make your own suggestions.  As we think about how to improve our facilities here, and what we need to enable us to fulfil our vision, let us also think deeply about how we can be more effectively the Church of Jesus Christ at the end of this first decade of the 21st century.  Let us pray together, talk together, formally and informally, let us be together the disciples of Jesus as we renew our vision and re dedicate ourselves to his service.