Following Simon’s departure to deepest rural Wiltshire we have now entered that strange time affectionately known in the Anglican Church as an ‘Interregnum’. I looked this word up in the online dictionary Wikipedia, and it said that an interregnum is a ‘period of discontinuity of a government, organisation or social order’.

I hope that for the Anglican Church here in Bramshott and Liphook that latter will not be the case and that we will be able to maintain some degree of decorum, but we have nonetheless entered that time between the departure of one incumbent and the arrival of another. We have said good-bye to Simon, and the Churchwardens, PCC and others have been busy putting together our Parish and Person profiles to assist us in the recruitment of our next incumbent.

Notwithstanding all the hard work that has gone into producing these important documents I think that we can rest assured that our faithful God is not only already actively preparing the right person to come here, but that He is also preparing us as a fellowship to receive and welcome them, whoever they might be. And so we might echo those wonderful words of the English mystic Julian of Norwich when she said, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’

It’s in the waiting......

And in the meantime we need to wait, something that so many of us, myself included, find very difficult. But of course so much of the Christian life is about waiting... as followers of Christ we live in those ‘in between’ times; we live in the tension of the ‘now and not yet’ in which the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but will not be fully consummated until Jesus comes again. And we have to work out on a daily basis how to live within that tension.....

Now, I am not saying that being in an interregnum is quite the same as waiting for Jesus to return, because of course it isn’t! However, it does give us the opportunity to practice our waiting skills, so that we wait with patient and hopeful expectation, and perhaps even with some degree of excitement. Many things can happen during a time of interregnum... for some churches it can be a time for laying some things aside for a while; for others it can be a time for quiet reflection; or for still other churches it can be a time of opportunity and growth as individual and community gifts are identified, nurtured and encouraged so that gaps might be filled.

The Seasons

There is something of a sense of the seasons in all of this. Our God is a seasonal God.... his faithfulness never changes, but his seasons do, and nature has much to teach us. There are seasons when the tree is green, there are seasons when it is dry, and seasons when, for the life of us, the thing looks dead. But it is only through the passing of the seasons that true growth can come. Nature teaches us that fruit from a tree comes to us as a result of three or four seasons. The Christian and the Body of Christ need rain and sunshine, cold and hot, wind and doldrums, and we might experience all or only some of these during the coming months. Ecclesiastes 3 Vs 1 tells us that ‘there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven’.

Being a worshipping presence

But I think that the most important thing for us to remember is this: That regardless of what shape our interregnum might take, we must continue to be a prayerful worshipping presence and a witness to God’s love in our local community.

 Alison Bennett