I have now brought him to the parsonage of Bemerton, and to the thirty – sixth year of his age, and must stop here, and bespeak the reader to prepare for an almost incredible story, of the great sanctity of the short remainder of his holy life; a life so full of charity, humility, and all Christian virtues, that it deserves the eloquence of St. Chrysostom to commend and declare it… [I] profess myself amazed when I consider how few of the clergy lived like him then, and how many live so unlike him now.

Isaak Walton, The Life Of Mr. George Herbert (1670)

If you think the Angel Gabriel in Jacobean clothing is an over-the-top description of our subject, look at this passage from an early twentieth century edition of Herbert’s poems:

Here, as the cattle wind homeward in the evening light, the benign, white-haired parson stands at his gate to greet the cowherd, and the village chimes call the labourers to evensong. For these contented spirits, happily removed from the stress and din of contending creeds and clashing dogmas, the message of the gospel tells of divine approval for work well done… And among these typical spirits, beacons of a quiet hope, no figure stands out more brightly or more memorably than that of George Herbert.¹

The reality of Herbert, his life and ministry, is, of course, a lot less bucolic, and because of that, a lot more interesting.

George Herbert was born on 3 April 1653 at Montgomery to Richard and Magdalene Herbert. His family were a collateral branch of the Earls of Pembroke; his paternal grandfather, Edward, was constable of Montgomery Castle, and his maternal grandfather, Richard Newport, was a descendent of Welsh royalty. He was part of a large family, the seventh of ten children. When he was less than four years old his father died, having been injured in a robber ambush some years before. His mother was two months pregnant with his youngest brother Thomas. The family moved to live with his maternal grandmother in Eyton-upon-Severn in Shropshire, but following his grandmother’s death in early 1599 the family were obliged to move again.

This time Magdalene took her family to Oxford, where George’s eldest brother, Edward (later first Baron of Cherbury) had already matriculated at University College. According to Herbert’s later, and not always reliable, biographer Isaak Walton, it was while living in Oxford that Magdalene Herbert became friends with the young courtier and diplomat, John Donne. Many years later Donne was to deliver the eulogy at Magdalene’s memorial service.

Continue Reading »

1. Arthur Waugh, introduction to George Herbert: Poems (Oxford: OUP, The World’s Classics, 1907). Quoted in T. S. Eliot, George Herbert, Writers’ and Their Work Series (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994 [1962]) p. 20. [↩]

The young curate was very excited. He had spent the day at a post-ordination training day, normally a deadly dull occasion (workshops on “new ways of being church for Generation FLK¹”, “Fresh Expressions for the Cappuccino Church”, or “Pixellating Networks for Time-Poor Professionals”) brightened only by opportunities for the diocese’s curates to complain about their training vicars. This day was different; it had actually been engrossing: a study day on the life, work and example of the Anglican Divine, George Herbert.

“George Herbert is so great,” the curate burbled to his vicar. “He turned down a life at court, he worked in a poor rural parish, he wrote loads of great hymns, his congregation loved him, and even stopped work in the fields to say their prayers when he rang the evensong bell, and he wrote this brilliant book on how to be a country vicar which is full of really good advice.”

His training incumbent, relieved not to be on the receiving end of projected disappointment and misplaced stress, coughed, turned over a page in his copy of the Church Times, and said,

“If you meet George Herbert on the road— kill him!”

Continue Reading »

1. Doctors’ shorthand for “Funny Looking Kid”. [↩]

For three hundred and fifty years the Church of England has been haunted by a pattern of parochial ministry, based upon a fantasy and untenable for more than a hundred of those years. The pattern, derived from a romantic and wrong-headed false memory of the life and ministry of George Herbert, finally died on the South Bank of the Thames in the mid 1960s… and nobody noticed.

In this first section of the book we will examine the history and structure of the false pattern (which I have christened “Herbertism”); we will recount the real life and ministry of the Saint of Bemerton; we will look at the changes in the status and functioning of English parish clergy in the last one hundred and fifty years; and we will mark the true death, the moment of passing, of “Herbertism”.

None of this story happens without a cost, and our survey of “Herbertism” will conclude with an accounting of the personal cost of “Herbertism” in the lives and emotions of the clergy of the Church of England today.

In the second section of the book we will explore the beginnings of a new conceptual framework for ministry, based upon a lecture given by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2003: a sustainable pattern for ministry will be grounded upon the three Ws of Witness, Watchman and Weaver. We will unpack these images, measuring them against the realities we have described in the first section.

In the final section of the book we will become entirely practical: the sustainable pattern of ministry, which I have christened “KGH”, will be laid out, with strategies for managing the constant temptation to fall back into Herbertism. If you read time management books, or life coaching books, or productivity guides, then “KGH” is for you.