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.

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!”

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

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.

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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 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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… 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. [↩]

“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. [↩]

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. [↩]

…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. [↩]

…there can be no argument to the truth of God in Jesus Christ without
witnesses…
Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe (2002)

From the very beginning, the Christian community recognized the need for witnesses. Luke’s history of the early church, mediated by the later experiences of that community, tells us that appointing a witness was the first task of the church, before all else. In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter’s first recorded speech deals with the gap in the number of witnesses left by the betrayal and death of Judas. In the presence of the whole community of the followers of Christ (the sound and round number of 120), Peter explains his plan:

‘So one of the men who have accompanied us throughout the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.’ (Acts 1:21-22)

Famously, the lot fell on Matthias. Continue Reading »

Today, 27 February, is, of course, the feast day of George Herbert, priest, poet, who died this day in 1633.

King of glory, King of peace,
who called your servant George Herbert
from the pursuit of worldly honours
to be a priest in the temple of his God and King:
grant us also the grace to offer ourselves
with singleness of heart in humble obedience to your service;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Those of us who write blogs find ourselves at the mercy of search machines: Google might not necessarily be the friend of the keen and enthusiastic person within the UK who today entered “ordination training” as the search term, and was directed to

KGH : Lin-Chi, the Curate and the Anglican Divine

Sorry, whoever you are. Perhaps that wasn’t the sort of information that you want now… but, one day, you will!

Dear fellow Herbicidalists!

It has been sometime since the last installment of KGH was posted on 3 Minute Theologian. This has been caused by, amongst other things, Easter, parish life, the demands of a new PhD project, preparing for the Lambeth Conference, Anglican Roots, an exciting project that is still underwraps (but was hinted at by my new best friend, Sam Norton), and vain attempts to get a life.

Having said all that, the next section of Killing George Herbert will be posted beginning on Monday, in smaller, screen-sized chunks (rather than the previous, full-on, chapter-length, 15,000 behemoths). If you want to see in which way a parish priest’s ministry should approximate to a Bob Dylan/Jimi Hendrix song, join me from Monday.

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower, (1968)

One autumn I found myself rewatching Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings in my lunch hour. Gradually I was drawn in, and half an hour (very occasionally!) became an hour when I could have profitably been visiting, filing, sermon writing, planning, form-filling. I finished the final film on 1 November, overwhelmed once more by the breadth of Tolkien’s vision and the skilfulness of Jackson’s film-making.

The next day was All Souls’, and with it a Requiem Eucharist. I realised that Lord of the Rings, book and films, is about, on one level, the cost of death and the waste of life. What sacrifices can we bear, and in what cause? What lasting effect does the slaughter of the previous age have upon our own? Can the unheroic hero Frodo, who has suffered so greatly, and seen so much destruction, ever find rest and redemption? I realised that this was a story written in middle- and late-age by a man who, as a callow lieutenant, had fought in the trenches of the Somme. And yet, Tolkien had been able to describe the healing of death in a memorable image: “the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”¹ Jackson transposed this description into a speech by the wise and powerful Gandalf, made in the middle of a battle in which violent death was a certainty. The transposition was inspired, for Gandalf’s speech did not offer cheap comfort; the costliness of the experiences lived through and described by Tolkien prevents that. This is a truer, deeper resonating, understanding of life and death. My sermon on All Souls’ night used Tolkien’s experiences and Jackson’s creative depiction of Tolkien’s work to present my congregation with the Christian hope through and over death. A member of the congregation came up to me after and confided that she had never really understood such hope before it had been presented to her in the imagery of Tolkien and Jackson.

So, on one level, my lunchtime viewing was a waste of time. For the Time and Motion outsider it might have seemed to be a self-indulgent distraction from the core responsibilities of my job. Perhaps. But sometimes what is seen as ‘waste of time’ is actually fallow ground becoming fruitful.

The Archbishop of Canterbury in his lecture on ‘The Christian Priest today’ makes much of this apparent time-wasting. He calls it making sense of the landscape in which the priest conducts his ministry. There is an explicit precedent for this role in the scriptural tradition and the Archbishop draws the attention of his listeners to Habakkuk and Ezekiel: in this role, the priest is to act as Watchman.

In Habakkuk 2, the prophet tells how he has been set at the watch-post by the Lord, upon the rampart. Habakkuk makes clear that what he will see is what the Lord wants to tell him: “I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint.” [Habakkuk 2:1b] The events seen by the prophet will be interpreted as the word of God to him, and an answer to his complaint. God will reveal his purpose to the prophet (and thus to the wider community of Israel) through the events the prophet will see.

In Ezekiel, the prophet is lifted up in the Spirit of the Lord to act as a sentinel. At first, it seems that this sentinel role is a traditional, verbal one:

Mortal, I have made you a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. [Ezekiel 3:17]

The prophet has the responsibility to pass on the verbal admonitions of the Lord. However, towards the end of the book, the role of the sentinel is explained. If the sentinel sees a sword coming upon the land of Israel, he is to warn the people. This is not just a practical, military, role: as the Lord warns: “if any who hear the sound of the trumpet do not take warning, and the sword comes and takes them away, their blood shall be upon their own heads.” [Ezekiel 33:4]. The people shall not just be killed, but judgement is upon them as well. The Lord then applies the role, in analogy, to the prophet: “if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life.” [Ezekiel 33:9]

We’ll press this image of the priest as Watchman a little further in the next post.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The Grey Havens’, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, (London: HarperCollins, 1991 [1955]), pp.1068-1069. [↩]

Let’s press this image of the priest as Watchman a little further. Let us consider what the image says of the position and disposition of the priest. Imagine a city with a Watchman on its walls. In the city below the walls, life goes on: markets are held, goods made, bought, sold; meals prepared and eaten. If is clear that not everyone can be a Watchman. If everyone in the city were to be appointed a sentinel at the same time, then life would come grinding to a halt. If everyone were watching then no one could be buying, selling, teaching, learning, living. It is not possible to live the life of the city, a civilised life, on the city walls. Life goes on in the city below; people live their lives, trusting that there is someone as to go on in the city below, and the citizens have to trust the Watchman to see the approaching army or tornado or whatever. There should only be one Watchman per vantage point.

Similarly, it is not possible to be a Watchman in the market place, in the public library or in the private home¹: The Watchman must stand in the high and liminal places, on the edges of city life, so as to be able to see what is beyond the city, to be able to see what threatens or promises the city.

These are all characteristics of position; what about disposition? Disposition is a matter of attitude and discernment. The Watchman needs to believe there is something worth watching for: a Watchman who believes that no army could possibly attack the city from his watching place actually becomes the weakest point in the city’s defences. The Watchman also needs to be able to judge what it is he sees: is that cloud on the horizon rain or the dust from horsemen, is it a camel train or a raiding party. The Watchman also needs to know what not to notice. Not every sign of life or activity is significant.

When we transfer this (somewhat over-elaborated) metaphor to Church life, we see that the priest as Watchman needs to be able to read the signs of the times. He needs to be able to understand what is significant, what is changing, what is unfolding in the times and culture in which he finds himself, and in which his community lives. He needs to be engaged with, but not overwhelmed by, the sheer volume of events that unfold in our culture, especially with its tendency to value unmediated novelty. As Williams puts it, the best priest-watchmen “in this and other eras are, it seems to me, those who have known how to read the surface and the depths, but have had no great interest in the shallows”².

In other words, if a priest is to be a meaningful witness to the reality of the Church’s past experience of Christ at work, then the priest needs to be a meaningful student of the present in which the Church finds herself. He has to be able to answer the conspectus questions: where are we? What are the big stories of our day? What are the assumptions of our time and culture? Like a mountain guard, the priest today needs to be able to discern the tiny trembles of snow flakes that precipitate the cataclysmic avalanche. What are the signs of change in our time? Where can we discern God’s purpose being enacted?

And this requires cultural literacy.

The priest should be able to read cultural artefacts, because it is in them he can see what people really value. Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon (1872) gives us a satirical depiction of this. Butler, the son of a parson and grandson of a Bishop, had broken with his family over his conviction of the truth of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. He emigrated to New Zealand, and made his fortune sheep-farming. Returning to England, and disappointed by the hypocrisies of Victorian society, he wrote Erewhon (“nowhere” rearranged, to make the obvious point). In it, the hero wanders into a European-like civilization in the interior of the New Zealand islands. Life is both like and unlike England. The hero gradually realises the central place of the Musical Banks to Erewhonian society. On a visit to one of the grand, impressive buildings which houses a branch of the Musical Banks, he realises that the currency of the Bank is

… supposed to be the system, and… in which all monetary transactions should be carried on; and as far as I could see, all who wished to be considered respectable, kept a larger or smaller balance at these banks… [but]… the amount so kept had no direct commercial value in the outside world; I am sure that the managers and cashiers of the Musical Banks were not paid in their own currency. Mr. Nosnibor used to go to these banks, or rather to the great mother bank of the city, sometimes, but not very often. He was a pillar of one of the other kind of banks, though he appeared to hold some minor office also in the musical ones. The ladies generally went alone; as indeed was the case in most families, except on state occasions.³

The Musical Banks are the cathedrals and churches of Erewhonian society: the desire to be respectable was stronger than the usefulness and meaning of the Banks. The real currency, the real business, happened somewhere else. Here Butler takes Jesus’s injunction in the Sermon on the Mount and asks what would a society look like in which the treasures of earth and the treasures of heaven were much more clearer distinguished. Like Higgs, the priest as Watchman needs to be able to read the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of a society’s cultural values in order to see what is truly important, not just what is said to be or thought to be important.

1. This is not to say that there is no place for any kind of surveying in the public places of the city, but the person who fulfils that role is a policeman and not a Watchman, and a policeman is a rather different role. Similarly, the person who stands on the city walls and watches the city inside is also not a Watchman, but rather a prison guard. These roles might be necessary, but they are not our concern for the moment. [↩]
2. Rowan Williams, ‘The Christian Priest Today’, a talk given at Ripon College, Cuddesdon, 28 May 2004. The talk is available from the Archbishop’s website. All otherwise unattributed references in this chapter are to the text published on that website. The Archbishop’s comment reminds me of the acerbic quip attributed variously to Robert Runcie or Bill Vanstone that “Church of England is a swimming pool in which all the noise comes from the shallow end.” The source of the Runcie attribution seems to be an address given to the AGM of the Romney Marsh Historic Churches Trust, 5 June 1999, available online here. The alternative, Vanstone, origin seems to have its roots in his obituary published in The Daily Telegraph, 15 March 1999, republished in Trevor Beeson (ed.), Priests and prelates : the Daily Telegraph clerical obituaries, (London: Continuum, 2002) pp. 214-216. [↩]
3. Samuel Butler, Erewhon (English Library Series. London: Penguin Classics, [1872/1901] 1970), Chapter 15 ‘The Musical Banks’, p. 137-138. [↩]

Before we unpack what cultural literacy might mean it would be good to register a dissenting opinion. Pope Benedict XVI has a characteristically firm idea of what the Church and its people requires of her priests: “The faithful expect only one thing from priests: that they be specialists in promoting the encounter between man and God”¹. This means that “there is absolutely no need for the priest to know all the latest, changing currents of thought; what the faithful expect from him is that he be a witness to the eternal wisdom contained in the revealed word”. In other words, “the priest is not asked to be an expert in economics, construction or politics. He is expected to be an expert in the spiritual life.”² This might seem to be an assertion of an older, restricted, expertise for the priests of the church, a conservative revision of “rendering unto Caesar”. But Benedict XVI is too good a theologian to fall into that trap. In one of the innovations of his pontificate, the Pope has instituted regular Q&A sessions with various groupings within the church. He has met the priests of the diocese of Rome twice now, and in the session held in the summer of 2007 he responded to a question about his beliefs on the human side of the priesthood. The Pope’s response was clear:

Catholicism, somewhat simplistically, has always been considered the religion of the great “et et”: not of great forms of exclusivism but of synthesis… we cannot always live in exalted meditation; perhaps a Saint on the last step of his earthly pilgrimage could reach this point, but we normally live with our feet on the ground and our eyes turned to Heaven. Both these things are given to us by the Lord and therefore loving human things, loving the beauties of this earth, is not only very human but also very Christian and truly Catholic… this aspect is also part of a good and truly Catholic pastoral care: living in the “et et”; living the humanity and humanism of the human being, all the gifts which the Lord has lavished upon us and which we have developed; and at the same time, not forgetting God, because ultimately, the great light comes from God and then it is only from him that comes the light which gives joy to all these aspects of the things that exist.³

Even a dissenting opinion can be tempered by the great et et.