Clergy has vital role in rural crises

Press, 3 November 1984, Page 16

Clergy has vital role in rural crises

“Tremendous levels of stress” are being felt in many New Zealand country communities. JACQUELINE STEINCAMP reports on four days of meetings in Canrterbury between lay people and clergy anxious to define a dual helping role.

The land is letting them down. A dejected farmer grazing a mob along the Old West Coast Road looks bleakly at his parched paddocks. Irrigation sprinklers are on the go already. These signs of impending drought made foreboding introduction to meetings for rural clergy and lay people. They were getting together to talk about the human aspects of rural disasters and stresses.

The gatherings were held last week at Darfield and Sheffield. They'were organised by a committee drawn from the Anglican Rural Ministry Unit and the Darfield churches.

“How can the community help? Does God care? How can we reconcile natural disasters with the idea of a God of love?” Queensland Uniting Minister, Ron Elvery asked. “God seems to do things on a large scale for which we’d be hanged if we did them on a small scale,” he said.

The four day “consultation” between rural ministers of the Australian Uniting Church and the New Zealand Anglican Church was designed , to help rural clergy become more effective in the light of dwindling parishes, climatic disasters, and changing expectations. The point of the exercise was not just to enable rural clergy to cope better with

the resulting human problems. It also examined the benefits of sharing church leadership and pastoral care with lay people. This is an approach that has parallels with the present health emphasis on community care, as people take responsibility into thenown hands.

It’s easy to play games and make pretty speeches on such an occasion. But there were clergy and lay people there who had been through all the drawn-out horrors of fire, flood, and drought. They had pitched in in crisis, and helped to hold families together in the long miserable aftermath. People like Nola Stuart, moderator for the Southland Presbyterian Church, who had been through the Southland floods; Adrian Wells, an energetic young layman, whose efforts during the Victorian bushfires of 1981 were talked about by many of the Australians; and Hugh Paterson, Anglican vicar at Sheffield, who has shepherded his flock through increasingly severe droughts and economic stresses.

The rural minister of the future will need to be an enabler, not a one-person band.

He or she will need to regard lay supporters as equals, and relate to them on an equal basis.

But in discussion groups on “Mutual: Ministry” (the catch phrase for everyone-caring-for 4 everyone-else) comments ' from some

clergy indicate that changes may be resisted. “The best pastoral care my parishioners can give me is pray for me every day and come to church every Sunday,” said one sunny-faced young Australian outback cleric. “Most clergy have counselling and helping skills. Today’s need is for those skills to be shared with the laity. “One person cannot look after three to four hundred families in any realistic way. The emphasis must be on sharing the load,” Hugh Paterson said. Ministers are often the only professionals with training in counselling arid pastoral skills. Because of this they have special responsibilities to ensure their effectiveness, he maintained. He pointed out that there have been great changes in the Sheffield community during his 18 years in the district. “There’s tremendous levels of stress in this dis-

trict that would be typical of farmers around the country. “Thfe chief causes are the decline in produce prices, and drought. Farmers here are terribly anxious about

going into another drought, as indeed it looks as though we are.” - -■ ■’ ’■■ ■ “Eighteen years ago marriage breakdowns were unheard of in rural communities. Last year I dealt with ten.”

But he doesn't see marriage breakdowns as necessarily altogether bad. “Women are demanding better types of marriage relationships; they are requiring emotional responses from men, and if they don’t get them, they go.” He thinks there’s no point in blaming the men. “The fault is the conditioning system through which they are put. The husband may express his fear and anxiety by working harder — that’s an inadequate way to express stress, and it will eventually kill him.

“We have to find better ways of helping men to express such feelings.” Widespread concern has been voiced at dwindling rural congregations. But in the view of Gray Birch, a minister specialising in rural ministry with the Uniting Church in Sydney, numbers are not important. “When congregations decline, it is important that ministers are left there because professional people are needed in every rural neighbourhood. “Economic viability is the deciding factor out there in

the world as to whether V things stay or are chopped J' The church does not usfi that method. We must n® pull out on those who ne«l< us,” he said. « Home discussion grouttJ J; were seen as' a yaluare -*, way of building parish soliv «? arity, and of reaching rura r men*. •HL"’ Many fanning men a* hurting all the time, inf „ they don’t come to servie| * and they won’t come } to: ; church functions. s ' “The real growth is injhej ; parishes where, the sirgle. <■ sex organisations have teen ’ done away with,” om- < mented Mrs Stuart. ;! 4 Participants left wit; a* much higher level of cafid- , j . ence in the role of Jurat „ churches and small Som-V ■< munities, according 50 a Canterbury University geo- J grapher, Garth Cai, a J. Methodist lay reader.: , ; “There’s a big chdlenge ‘ to the clergy to sharepower . and leadership,” he sad. “Iff j it’s just challenging rithout , support and affirmation, it’s i j very .destructive bth for j the clergy and theShurch. ' « “It * means tberes an J equal challenge tj’•me laity i to provide, support when ’ leadership raes are' j shared.” j “The over-all feeling was j that we should(rot be dis- , couraged by mall rural J congregations, m message ) that ‘Small js /Beautiful’ I came through slrongly.” ;