Ensuring he was fully prepared for the Synod of Synodality’s second session kept Archbishop Paul Martin extra busy before leaving for Rome.
Commenting on Facebook, Martin said it was difficult to examine Synod’s first session synthesis and see how it was expressed in the second session’s instrumentum laboris (agenda).
It’s not what you’d call a task for the fainthearted: it took quite a lot of thinking and reflection.
On the plus side, the task has left him with several hopes for the synod outcome.
Hopes for the synod
“I hope at the synod we’re aware of what we as a Church are going through and experiencing now” Martin said .
“We need to consider the hopes of people and try to be faithful to that, while also being faithful to what the Church calls us to be and do.”
He hopes confidently that he, Pa Dennis Nacorda and Mr Manuel Beazley (the Vicar for Māori in the Diocese of Auckland) “will try to be authentically faithful to our people, … [and] to the church”.
As to how that will emerge, Martin says “we’ll just have to wait and see” what happens at the synod.
A Synodal Church on Mission
The second session is asking us how can we be a synodal church on mission, Martin explains.
Many points raised in the synthesis report have been picked up in the instrumentum and presented as topics and ways of discussing.
“There’s some theological reflection around the points and then how that might look” he says.
There are also questions around authority – and what it looks like.
Other questions delve into the baptismal call of all people or examine how we as a Church can be faithful to our tradition, while looking at how we might live that more fully and fruitfully.
Martin said he has come to appreciate the instrumentum is a practical document: it provides practical things to talk about at the synod, he found.
Several key topics are being dealt with separately from the synod, which will feed into the bigger questions for the Church, he noted.
He sees a tension in being aware of what the Church is going through and experiencing now, the many and varied hopes of people – and trying to be faithful to those – while being faithful to the Church.
Ongoing mission
Synodality is not a box you can tick and then say we’re now synodal, Martin said.
“It’s a process, it’s an attitude, it’s a way of living, being people of the spirit, of allowing the church to be the fullness of who it should and is called to be.
“I don’t think that come the 26th of October we’ll all walk away and say ‘Well that’s done now, isn’t that helpful?'” he said.
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