Don’t worry! This is not another blog of navel-gazing noodling and self-absorbed introspection. At least, it doesn’t set out to be that.

There will be two main sorts of posts here:

  • Kill George Herbert! and
  • Three Minute Theology.

Death to Herbertism!

If you meet George Herbert on the road…kill him!

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 series of blog posts 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 a second series of posts 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 series 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.

Three Minute Theology

Everyway you go and everywhere you look we are being promised time-saving devices, gimmicks, methods. We are busy people and time is worth more to us than money. If it’s true for cooking, telephoning, travelling, it must also be true for theology. I am constantly (un)surprised by how little Christians know about their own faith and how content they are with that ignorance. ‘If it is important, it will be believed and understood by someone else’ seems to be the attitude. Well if time is the problem, then reduce the theology into handy bit-size chunks. 3MT will give you something to ponder on, mull over and work with, and it will do it in three minutes! Occasionally it will be available as a podcast, for those of you whose eyes can’t even allow three minutes screen time.

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