Key Note Address: The Opportunity to Fulfil the Mission Bishop of Grimsby

What is God's day job, Monday to Saturday?  From the beginning to the end of the Bible, God is a God who wants to be in relationship and a God who creates and exploits opportunities; He is a God who says that we can form relationships if we use opportunities.

If the Church is going to do more than husband a received estate, then our schools need to be a dynamic expression of a dynamic God.  The mission of the Church in education is to express the God who wants to relate; when church schools play their part in the mission of God they relate to people so that they understand that there is a God who relates to them, long before they relate to Him.  Church schools are wonderful opportunities to show that the Church relishes what God relishes: the Kingdom of God coming close to people.  We engage not for what we get out, but for what we put in.

God is an opportunistic God and an authentic God.  We need to spot the opportunities and take advantage of them; if we want to talk about kingdom values, living them out in education is important. 

Expectations now are concentrated on those who can provide, achieve transformation and have capacity.  The pace of change is matched by the pace of expectations - we are expected to keep up.  Can we as a church move ourselves from where we have been (our historic inheritance) to where we need to be to take up the current opportunity? If we work in a way that was right for a previous generation, we must challenge this, engage positively with current opportunities and move to a place where we are fit for purpose for what we need to do today - so that we can be signs of the Kingdom of God coming close.