Letter from the Rector, April 2009
April 6, 2009 by Andrew
The announcement by the Bishop of Exeter that he had declared St. Andrew’s “a Minster” received widespread local publicity and the inevitable enquiry into quite what a minster is. My ‘Dictionary of the Christian Church’ cites the monastic foundations of the title from the seventh century, while Wikipedia (which I notice has already added St. Andrew’s to its Minster entry) highlights the mission focus of the original minsters in evangelising their surrounding areas before the introduction of the parish system. I just tell people that a minster is a bit like a cathedral – but better!
There has also been some interest in how we should use the title. The name Minster is invariably attached to a location (eg York Minster, Wimborne Minster). So we could just be Plymouth Minster, except that no-one I have spoken to wants to lose the St. Andrew’s designation. Alternatively we could describe ourselves as St. Andrew’s Church: Plymouth Minster, or maybe simply as The Minster Church of St. Andrew.
Rather more important than the name is what we make of this new title. I have said on a few occasions that it is something we shall have to “grow into”, and it was a helpful co-incidence that on the Sunday morning after the Bishop’s announcement, we were looking at the prayer of Jesus for his church recorded in John chapter 17.
In that prayer, sometimes called the ‘high priestly prayer’, there is a great concern for truth to lie at the heart of the church’s being and message. “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (v17). It is the challenge to listen to God in the scriptures so that his truth can shape and change us and our world. Jesus prays too for the holiness of the church, that we would be kept not just from error but from evil. “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one” (v15). Here is the call for what one writer calls a “holy worldliness”, the root of that saying about being in the world but not of it.
From that truth and holiness flows mission, for the church is sanctified by the truth for a task – in the world but not of the world, for the world. “As you have sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world” (v18), his own incarnation becoming a model for our own mission. And his prayer concludes with the unity of the church, “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” (v21). Here is to be a community through whose love and common purpose the world would “know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (v23).
Here is the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” which Jesus prays would be his legacy on earth. At the church’s annual meeting (22 April) I hope we can explore in practical terms our minster status and how we can more truly reflect that life which is at the heart of this great chapter.
Nick McKinnel