3MT : A very long walk [3:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (56)

Mark Boyle is going for a walk. A very long walk. He is walking to India. He thinks it will take him about two and a half years, if everything goes according to plan. And this is the interesting part; because Mark doesn’t really have a plan. Continue Reading »

Apologies for any disruption you may have experienced in 3minutetheologian this afternoon or evening. A slight PHP problem, which was expertly solved by my hosts Machine Networks Ltd. If you are in the UK and are looking for a host for WordPress or other PHP goodies, then I can’t recommend them highly enough.

…the ordained priest is called to reflect the priesthood of Christ and to serve the priesthood of the people of God, and to be one of the means of grace whereby God enables the Church to be the Church.
Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today, (1972)

Over the course of twenty-two years as bishop and archbishop, before every ordination service he conducted in his various cathedral churches, Michael Ramsey gave a series of addresses to each cohort of ordination candidates. They listened to the Bishop (and later Archbishop) reflect on what it meant to be a Christian priest for their days and times. The talks were so illuminating, and so worthy of a wider audience, that they were collected and published under the obvious title, The Christian Priest Today¹. Ramsey made the purpose of his book clear in the rewritten introduction to the second edition, in which he adopted the words of a Congregationalist minister, P. T. Forsyth:

As a priest, the ministry offers to God the Church’s soul, as prophet it offers to it the salvation of God. In the minister’s one person the human spirit speaks to God, and the Holy Spirit speaks to men. No wonder he is often rent assunder. No wonder he snaps in such tension. It broke the heart of Christ. But it let out in the act the heart of God.²

The heart of Ramsey’s book is found in the second chapter, ‘Why the Priest?’; a compact and “immensely rich” (according to Rowan Williams), exploration of what it means to be a priest. Ramsey’s starting place was provided by the article in Theology we have already encountered by Alec Graham (then Chaplain at Worcester College, Oxford and later to be Bishop of Newcastle)³. Whereas Graham describes a possible model for priesthood in terms of experience and pragmatism (the priest fulfils a representative role by displaying a total response to Christ, by enabling the work of the Church to be done, and by involving the whole Church in his activity), Ramsey wishes to affirm the “old doctrine that the ascended Christ gives the gift of ordained priesthood and calls men to it.”⁴ Ramsey delineates this old doctrine in four parts and one whole.

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1. Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today, (London: S.P.C.K., 1972, 1985). [↩]
2. P. T. Forsyth, The Church and the Ministry, (1917) quoted in Ramsey, Christian Priest, (1985), p. 4. [↩]
3. A. A. K. Graham, ‘Should the ordained ministry now disappear?’, Theology, LXXI/576, June 1968, pp. 242–250. [↩]
4. Ramsey, Christian Priest, p. 7. [↩]

We have seen how the pattern of ministry in the Church of England has been dependent on an unrealistic memory of George Herbert’s brief time in a rural parish in the early 1600s. We have seen how men (and latterly, women) of integrity have attempted to apply this false pattern, “Herbertism”, in an industrialised urban society, with unimaginable (for Herbert) changes in economics, social structure and cultures. We have seen the cost of attempting to square the circle of Herbertism in the psychological studies of church life from the late 1990s and the description of burnout in the 1970s. You might feel, with me, that so far this has been an unremittingly negative process.

It is now time to sketch out the beginnings of an alternative way of being a parish priest. With a sense of the urgency attached to the Church’s mission¹ and a sense of urgency derived from the pain (at worst) and inconsequentiality (at middling) caused by exercising its priestly ministry, to answer this question: If we are to kill the George Herbert we meet on the road, then who or what do we put in the phantom’s place?

1. Christopher Lewis, et al., ‘Clergy work-related psychological health, stress, and burnout: an introduction’ in Mental Health, Religion & Culture, Vol 10/1 (2007), p. 2. [↩]

Lent is almost upon us and with it the annual question of what to give up. But perhaps we should ask ourselves a deeper, harder question: what of our comforting religious traditions and customs should we be doing away with?

The book mentioned in the podcast is Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples by Thom S. Rainer by Eric Geiger.

 

 3MT : Simplicity and Clutter, Lent and the Beatitudes [3:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (60)

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“At times I wonder whether we are all going a little soft round the edges. What our parents and grandparents put up with or had strategies to deal with, we find it really difficult to cope with… I have to say that I do hear a lot of grumbles about stress and pressure and burnout… and I do sometimes wonder where is the cutting edge, where is the resilience and stamina, where is that stickability which I learnt years ago from my training incumbent when I was a young curate¹. God never promises us an easy journey in carpet slippers but the way of a cross.…”
The Rt Rev’d. David Bentley, Gloucester Diocesan News, February 2002.

The Bishop of Gloucester swiftly retracted his words. Sort of. In the following month’s Diocesan newsletter he wrote “The last thing I want to do is to cause offence, particularly to clergy or their families, and, if I did so, I am very sorry.” The Bishop’s spokesman, John Horan, underlined his boss’s apology. Sort of: “Some people agreed wholeheartedly with what Bishop David said in his article, and applauded him for saying it; others felt offended. The Bishop’s response was to apologise for causing any offence.”² This is a mealy-mouthed sort of apology: I am sorry that people were offended: the substance of my caricature remains.

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1. This incumbent was Michael Hocking, the author of a whole series of parson’s handbooks (A handbook of parish work, A handbook of pastoral work, The parish seeks the way), none of which mentions “stress and pressure and burnout”. [↩]
2. ‘Bishop regrets attack on softies’, Church Times, (No. 7254), 8 March, 2002. [↩]

… it is true, and not just cynicism, that an automated priest with a perpetual grin on his face, everlastingly wandering around the parish and automatically “mouthing” what would be only quite a small repertoire of platitudes, would meet the vast majority of needs.
Nick Stacey, Who Cares, (1971)

By the beginning of the 1960s with the publication of the Paul Report¹, it had become clear that the stresses and strains of ministry were beginning to have an unendurable effect on the clergy of the Church of England. Part of Paul’s examination of the state of the Church was the first serious, statistically valid, polling of the activities and morale of its clergy. Almost 1,000 questionnaires were processed in the summer of 1962 to become the statistical groundwork of Paul’s recommendations. Thirty two questions were asked, ranging from the simple, numerical (Easter communicants, full time staff and so on), to the complex, attitudinal (“Are you able to secure a period of relaxation each day?”, “Do you have too little to do?”)². Paul allowed space for the clergy to elaborate on these questions if they wished, and he reproduced some of their comments in the body of his report. They make heart-breaking reading, even after forty five years. Example 30: A town incumbent, who believes his to be a “glorious parish”:

‘The parish will quite literally kill me one day and I am quite prepared for this… am in a chronic state of perspiration (so people will not approach me) and am so desperately tired… Oh how desperately I need a holiday, or if not that, just a bit of interest on the part of anyone in the utterly impossible task with which I am confronted.’³

Again, a town incumbent (Example 33):

‘The time sheet shows an average week of 70 hours. When special events come round such as Lent, Christmas, Harvest, Confirmation, etc., this has to be stepped up to 80/90. It is not that one is unwilling to work these long hours, as the whole of one’s life is dedicated, but the effect is disastrous. One feels a sense of being held fast in a machine that grinds endlessly on. Hobbies are impossible. Family life is neglected and worse still one becomes uninteresting and dull to other people. This feeling is made worse here by this unhappy parish. As my predecessor has said, he “never knew what the crucifixion really meant until he came to Y…”’⁴

And, to show that overwork is not the only cause of poor morale, Paul took into consideration those who felt themselves to be under-worked:

‘It is questionable whether it is right to have a resident incumbent in many of these places. A man can easily lose heart when Sunday after Sunday he is ministering to less than six people at any one service…’

‘… after you are instituted they leave you alone… A small living is a pleasant enough life if you are content to simply plod on and minister to the needs of your flock, and spend the rest of your life in the garden or reading. However, if you are young and active— after a few years in such a parish you realise that there is really little else you can do and you begin to chafe at the bit. The problem then arrives, what are you to do? The only thing you can do is to see your bishop, and tell him that you would like to move so that you will not stagnate. He simply promises to bear your case in mind, and there the matter rests.’⁵

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1. see note on this post [↩]
2. Leslie Paul, The Deployment and Payment of the Clergy : A Report, (Westminster: Church Information Office for the Central Advisory Council for the Ministry, 1964) pp. 228–230. [↩]
3. Paul, Deployment, p. 72. [↩]
4. Paul, Deployment, p. 72.-73. [↩]
5. Paul, Deployment, p. 86, 87. [↩]

Many years ago I was a student at the London School of Economics. It was a gloriously international institution, with students from more than a hundred countries, and a famously engaged institution, with a tradition of political and social activism, taken from its founders, and expressed throughout its history. I had arrived with an inherited suspicion of organised religion, a series of prejudices, not terribly well digested, against religion for the evil it had inflicted upon the world. I had been to church (except for weddings and funerals) twice in my life, but I knew what the church stood for and I rejected it. On my first day at the LSE, at the Freshers’ Induction, I sat unwillingly through the chaplain’s introductory talk to the first year students. He described how we would find LSE to be an international community, a multi-cultural community, made up of people with many world-views, some of which we might find hard to understand. For example, we would encounter some people who believe that all human life is controlled by an invisible force, which responds to inescapable laws of the universe, and from which the greatest human benefit comes from studying and obeying— and we call them “economists”! Continue Reading »

… the average country parson is now a comparatively poor man… he spends much of his time clerking, teaching, examining, or taking services in neighbouring parishes during sequestrations… simply for his own personal profit. His wife probably goes out to work; and if he inhabits a large rectory or vicarage, he can make a considerable income letting rooms. This is all wrong.
A. Tindal Hart, The Country Priest in English History (1959)

In the autumn of 1988 I went to see the Diocesan Director of Ordinands to begin the process leading to ordination. During the meeting he fixed me with a steely glare and sternly admonished me: “I hope you don’t want to be ordained for the status that being a clergyman affords you, because the social status of the clergy is lower today than any time since the Reformation”. I took him for his word, because I trusted his judgement, because I liked the man, and because he went on to become, in short order, Bishop of Stepney, Bishop of London, Prelate of the Order of the British Empire, Dean of the Chapels Royal, Privy Counsellor, and executor of the will of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Even so, there is but one Bishop of London, and for the rest of us Dr Chartres’s warning hold true; there is precious little status to be found in the life of a cleric today. This chapter explores how and why we have reached the status we do possess, and what that status might be.

I was ordained to a title parish (as a Curate’s first job is technically called) in Cirencester. Just outside Cirencester was a small village called Barnsley. It isn’t one of the heart-stoppingly lovely Cotswold villages, and other than a well-known garden, it didn’t attract coach parties of day trippers like Bibury just up the road. There was one road through Barnsley, and, except for the church, the only public amenity was the village pub, called, imaginatively, “The Village Pub”. The name was painted on the sign which hung above well-tended baskets of flowers. It depicted the road through Barnsley. A car was parked on the road, complete with running boards and huge head-lamps, a 1940s kind of car. In the foreground was a village bobby, again, in a 1940s kind of uniform. He had his arm out to shake the hand of the village parson; tweed jacket, bald head, round smile, glasses. A 1940s kind of parson. The Village Pub, with its Village Policeman, and its Village Padre. The glory of England, combined in one pub sign.

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I took a funeral today, which, for the first time in a long while, took me to the local municipal cemetery. Standing by the grave side in the rain, waiting for the cortege to arrive, I was intrigued (like a rubber-necker on the motorway) by a grave over in the corner. Continue Reading »