… is where the Meissen Commission met from Thursday last week until yesterday (Sunday). Locating the annual joint Commission meeting in part of Bradford called Little Germany is not nearly as tactless as the hotel bar showing a war film (Nazi planes bombing England, etc.) while we were grabbing lunch before dispersing yesterday afternoon.
One of the surprising things about Bradford is the stunning Victorian architecture. Little Germany is wonderful and is gradually being re-populated by businesses as part of the city centre's regeneration. And Bradford Cathedral happens to be located right by Little Germany.
This Commission (which I co-chair with the Bishop of Braunschweig, Bischof Professor Dr Friedrich Weber) came to Bradford to learn about how churches are learning to re-define their mission in a complex cultural context. If your parish is 82% ethno-Muslim and the local Church of England primary school is 95% Muslim, what does it mean to be an Anglican parish church or vicar – when Anglicans organize and define themselves territorially?
To help us look at this we met the Vice-president of the Council for Mosques, a leading Hindu businessman, the Anglican chair of the Presence and Engagement Task Group, the new Dean of Bradford Cathedral, the Vicar of Manningham and my interfaith adviser. We visited the wonderfully excellent Bradford Academy and the equally remarkable St Stephen's C of E Primary School. The Commission, in reviewing the visit, was struck by the warmth of welcome and hospitality in Bradford (the Great Victoria Hotel is excellent) and the “creativity and energy” with which the cultural challenges are being met.
The situation in Germany is different in so far as most Muslim immigration there is economic in origin (the Gastarbeiter from Turkey) and not post-colonial as it is here. Therefore, the corporate psychology of interaction is different. The Germans came to Bradford and discovered a church that, rather than buckling under the challenge of being – in some parishes – a minority, has risen to the challenge with vision and amazing imagination.
Just look at the schools we visited and the leadership exercised there.
So, the annual meeting over, I am now in Oxford for the annual meeting of the bishops of the Church of England. No time to write more now, but Meissen continues to fire me up.
