A Pastoral Letter to all the faithful for Advent Sunday 2010.

Come and see! “Come and see” is the invitation that the diocesan Standing Committee has chosen for our motto in 2011. The members of the Standing Committee are your elected representatives, and, as your bishop, I work with them in order to find ways to support the whole life of the “Teulu Asaph”. The motto which has been selected for 2011 picks up an invitation which appears twice in the first chapter of the Gospel according to John. In the first (v39), Jesus invites two of his future disciples to “come and see” where he is living. In the second (v46), Philip, already a disciple, invites his friend Nathanael to come and find out for himself about Jesus. In both cases, the original Greek verbs are commands, but each command bears a depth of meaning: I suppose they could be translated, “Accompany me on this journey and find out for yourself.”

Come and see – journey with me and find out! This is the invitation which Jesus makes to all who become his disciples. As he invited the first of his followers to find out where he was living, so Jesus invites us today to enter upon a journey to find out more about the Kingdom of Heaven. This is much more than a journey towards life after death. It is about discovering the way we can live in God’s presence in this life.

Unless we’re careful, Church membership can become nothing more than doing our duty towards God. We turn up week by week - maybe even less than once a week – we pay our respects towards God, and hope that the Vicar will put in a good word for us with the boss. But Jesus truly invites each one of us to do much more than that. He invites us to make an interior journey, a journey involving our hearts and souls, in which we’re invited to seek out the places where the love and holiness of God dwell. So Jesus speaks to us: “Journey with me and find out! Invite me to be part of your life; listen for my words to you when you read the Bible; look for me to speak answers to your prayers, share in the meal that I prepare for you in the banquet of the Holy Communion.” Psalm 23 v5 says that God spreads out a feast for us to enjoy: his presence, his blessing, and his love. But the truth is that so often we don’t give enough time or effort to “come and see”, to times of quiet and prayer, to reading, to worship. Perhaps we never take time for anything more than the fast food equivalent of spiritual sustenance.

So “Come and see” is an invitation to each one of us in 2011 to consider how we can travel more closely with Jesus in our lives, to see how he is able to bless us, and to dwell with us. Come and see!

A few verses later in John Chapter One, the command is repeated; this time by Philip to his friend. “Come and see” is the invitation to come along and take a look at Jesus, and to find out whether his friend will find in Jesus what Philip has already found: a teacher imparting real knowledge about God, and who lives out the love of God by touching people with healing and hope. So the second “Come and see!” becomes now the sort of invitation that we should be extending to our own friends and community.

In the same way that we welcome guests to our homes, and “lay on a spread” to entertain them and welcome them, so we as a Church should be inviting people to come along and join us and to experience for themselves what we believe our worship offers. In choosing “Come and see!” as our motto, we recognise that as a diocesan family we need to be people inviting others to come along and to experience God in their own lives.

Of course, this means that we have to live out a common life and worship that is inviting and inspiring. We need to be a Church which looks to draw other people into our life- and not because we are trying to keep the club going, but because we believe that faith has something to offer towards a richer experience of life: indeed, that it is the offer of eternal life.

In my visitation this year, I am discovering more and more about the life of the congregations of our diocese. I see and understand the concerns that exist – money is getting tight, and people are worried that young people are not being drawn into the life of our Churches as much as we would like. But I also see more than this. I see a Church which is thinking about what the practice of Christian faith has to offer, in which members of congregations are trying to help one another to become better disciples, where the focus is turning to the quality of faithful life and experience that we live, and the quality of faith that we’re offering to other people.

For these reasons, I think “Come and see!” is going to be a good motto. We are all of us invited to come again to Jesus to see how God wishes to work in our lives. We are all of us invited to pick up this invitation and to offer it to others. We are all of us called to live the sort of Christian life together that reflects the love of God and is inviting to others. So I hope that this motto will inspire and guide us for the coming church year: Come and see!

I wish you all the very best of Advents – and a very happy Christmas in due course.

+Gregory Llanelwy.