The Rt Revd Dr Eleanor Sanderson, Bishop of Hull in the Church of England, shares her journey to faith and passion for mission ahead of the next Lambeth Calls webinar.
Coming to faith
Eleanor Sanderson grew up in England and whilst she “wasn’t brought up going to church,” she recalls that from quite a young age she “had a sense of God and have memories of praying”, attending a village church in her teens. In her later teens, she started to travel, and describes thinking deeply about life’s meaning and purpose: “I was really hungry spiritually, exploring and searching as I went and looking for answers to faith.”
During her travels in Fiji, aged 18, she became acutely ill with appendicitis and nearly died. She recounts: “I was stuck on a remote island and had such an incredible sense of God’s presence.” Continuing with her travels, she still felt as if she had many questions to explore, “[I] still didn’t really know what I needed to ask, to understand the sense of faith.”
She met a young Christian woman on a bus who shared her faith. After this encounter, Eleanor’s journals from that time recorded: “I’ve heard something I’ve never heard before, that through what Jesus has done for us, we have this living relationship with God that is found in this friendship with Jesus. I’ve never heard that before.”
This encounter made a big impression on her. Whilst at university, she went to an Anglican church and took part in an Alpha course which helped her understand more about the Christian faith. This experience informs how she thinks about mission now saying: “…we think mission needs to be about what we do as a church, but actually, the groundswell of mission is … every Christian [to feel] confident in sharing their faith. That’s it.”
Evangelism
Bishop Eleanor has spent time in her ministry working out approaches to evangelism that fit her context. Before her ministry in Hull, Eleanor served in Wellington, New Zealand, starting a community called “The Community of the Transfiguration”. It was for families and young adults who sought to operate like “new monastics” where people coming to the local university could enjoy “daily prayer, weekly discipleship and a pattern of intentional mission together.” It had an evangelistic focus, and they would run lots of activities focused on young adults.
Now in Hull, her evangelism is taking a different pattern, with a big focus on training people in discipleship. “We’ve been supporting some different deaneries and churches… to gain confidence in missionary discipleship. I’m going fortnightly to begin discipleship coaching and training with them.”
Evangelism, discipleship and the Anglican Communion
Thinking about the Anglican Communion, Eleanor is excited that a new Anglican Communion Commission on Evangelism and Discipleship has been brought together. She also commends the Five Marks of Mission. “Our fivefold definition of mission for the Anglican Communion is so powerful…. I want our Communion to be really confident and… proactively live into that fivefold definition of mission, to equip each other … and to know how we can support one another across the breadth of our Communion to live into those callings.”
Asked about her advice for those wanting to engage in ministry and evangelism, Eleanor says: “The main thing is to be really prayerful and not to have your own plan, because it’s God’s mission. It’s God’s church. It’s just never about you and your ego. It’s always about serving and being available. My sense is often to just be prayerfully present. Notice what God’s doing, notice what’s happening, and then, you know, learn to respond to that. And so the discipleship coaching that we do is very much about helping people to hear God’s voice, to be guided by the Holy Spirit in a way that grows in confidence, so that we know that it’s not by striving, it’s by joining in with what Jesus is already doing. That will look different in different places and not to worry about that, but just to be responsive to what we see God doing.”
Eleanor suggests the idea of apprenticeship has much to teach us about mission and discipleship and draws inspiration from her husband’s profession as a mechanic: “…he’s lived an apprenticeship model of learning and he just talks really beautifully about the way that Jesus lived himself, as we say ‘a tradie’ in New Zealand, you know, as a labourer. [Jesus] would have been an apprentice and then he used that same model with all the people of apprenticeship… I think mission and evangelism is an apprenticeship model… we need to be careful when we intellectualise or rationalise it in any way. It is an apprenticeship coaching that we do with one another, which is part of how we live as a family in deep connection with each other. It happens in community, not isolation.”
Bishop Eleanor concludes with a request for prayer for her ministry. “I’d like prayer that I go and do what God calls me to do, with all God’s strength and grace…. I would pray for the Anglican Communion to be soaked in the knowledge of God’s love and to be filled with the confidence that we have in Christ. We are bound to one another and our belonging to each other is a gift that God gave to us.”
For more information
Learn more about the ministry of the Rt Revd Eleanor Sanderson
Learn more about the Lambeth Call on Mission and access resources
Learn more about the Lambeth Call on Discipleship and access resources
Photo credit: The Diocese of York
