Concluding reflections

The overall experience of working with the Agency raised a sharp question about what impedes and enables mature theological reflection within a team. A delicate set of questions around leadership, trust and group dynamics emerged in the research. It is significant to note the Director’s comment in the Cycle Two Joint Feedback meeting, that “he had never had a sense of the team working so well together”. This exemplifies the way in which the ARCS process enables structured conversations to take place that make a difference just by having happened, even when there is - as in this case -a sense of insider and outsider teams not having worked so well together in developing a shared and coherent vision.

A final, and perhaps important, reflection might be one of challenge to the ARCS team: Did we miss a ‘negative epiphany’ - a revelation of the nondisclosed - in the constraints the diocesan Agency accepted, but which we wished to challenge? In the post-research Evaluation Interview, the Agency Director was clear that he had felt that the ARCS Team never really

Westminster Agency for Evangelisation 93 understood the realities of his team and their work, especially as a diocesan group, mandated by the bishop. We might respond, of course, that we could see other realities in their work and practice, which they, too, were unable to receive. The importance of the hard work of receptive conversation is highlighted here. Beyond that, however, there is the possibility of a negative epiphany which casts light on the ways in which agencies located in the eccle-sia ad intra are, in particular ways, necessarily bound to certain ecclesial understandings. Theological action research in these settings might need to take different forms from those carried out with more ‘edgy’ places of church.

Notes

• 1 This document no longer appears available.
• 2 Feedback from the Westminster Agency for Evangelisation faith formation questionnaire.
• 3 The language of ad intra church (and its partner term ad extra) is used extensively in this book. It is drawn from the debates surrounding the Second Vatican Council in which Cardinal Suenens differentiated the two Constitutions on the Church as pertaining to the eccleisa ad intra (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium) and the ecclesia ad extra (the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaud turn et Spes.). These ecclesiological perspectives are not in competition with one another as they simply refer to the same reality of church understood under different aspects of its life - pertaining to the ‘internal’ life and work of the structured community (ad intra) and the life and work of the church in and for the world (ad extra).
• 4 See note 3 above.

6 The organisational contexts