In recent months, a small group has been working to provide a clear theology as a foundation for lay leadership in local churches, and the transition for clergy to a ministry of oversight. The following is the paper I have put together with some input from Bob Jackson, who convenes the focal ministry network.
For the past twenty years or more, the Church of England has been engaged in an attempt to adapt its life and ministry to changing circumstances. These can be summarised as the gradual ending of the era of Christendom, in which adherence to the worldview of Christianity played an important role in social cohesion, and its replacement by a pluralist culture, in which the Church is merely one voice in the public sphere.
In this context, it would be easy to view focal ministry as one more pragmatic adaptation to changing times. However, it is important to resist any such portrayal. Rather, focal ministry is a biblically grounded model with even stronger theological roots than the inherited Anglican model of imported professional ministry. It is a model in which local church members are encouraged to own the life and ministry of their church and work together in a relationship of interdependence rather than dependence on the paid professional.
Focal ministry fits an understanding that all are called and empowered by the Holy Spirit, who pours out diverse gifts on his people (1 Corinthians 12). In this shared ministry, the role of the leaders of the Church’s mission is to encourage and empower the ministry of others (Ephesians 4:12).
Where these twin principles of the empowering leader in mission are owned and lived out, rooted in the love for one another that Jesus and his apostles taught, and that permeate our life together (John 13:34; Romans 13:8; 1 John 4:7), the church grows to maturity and fulfils its call to make known God’s wisdom to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 3:10; 4:13).
When David Hope became Bishop of London in 1991, he introduced a new style of job description for clergy appointments – the new incumbent was to be the leader in mission and the enabler of other people’s ministries. The turnround from decline to growth in the Diocese of London can be traced to that moment. (The Desecularisation of the City, edited by David Goodhew, Routledge 2019, p.269)
Theological Themes
The theology of focal ministry may be summarised under four theological themes:
1. The mission of God
Since the second half of the twentieth century, the Church has been recovering the truth that mission is rooted in God’s nature. The Church derives its life and purpose from the call to participate in God’s mission. As David Bosch wrote, ‘There is church because there is mission, not vice versa’ (Transforming Mission, Orbis, p.390).
The goal of mission is the kingdom of God, and, while we await the fullness of God’s rule on earth, the Church is called to be a ‘foretaste, sign and agent’ of the kingdom (Lesslie Newbigin). It is called to display the characteristics of life under God’s rule in its life together, to proclaim and work for the coming of the kingdom ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. Baptism is to be seen as a commissioning to serve God’s mission in the fellowship of the church. And ministry, which the New Testament scholar John Collins has taught us to understand as ‘commissioned service’, may therefore be understood as the church’s role in the mission of God.
2. The Trinity
Christians understand God as three persons in a relationship of love. God’s love is ‘poured out’ upon us by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5) and the church’s call is to demonstrate that love in its life together. One way that this is expressed is through the diverse gifts given by the Spirit to each of the members of Christ’s body (I Corinthians 12). The church is called to value each of these gifts equally, to, ‘do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,’ but rather, ‘in humility, value others above yourselves’ (Philippians 2:3). In his final instructions to his disciples, Jesus called them friends rather than servants (John 15:14-15). Ministry together therefore arises from unity in diversity rooted in relationships of love and expressed in friendship with a shared purpose. This is the meaning of the Greek word koinonia, which the book of Acts tells us was a feature of the church from the beginning (Acts 2:42).
3. The Holy Spirit
As John V. Taylor reminds us, ‘The chief actor in the historic mission of the Christian church is the Holy Spirit. He is the director of the whole enterprise’ (The Go-Between God, SCM, 1972, p.3). It is the Spirit who distributes the gifts required for ministry as he wills. This means that ministry is primarily a role within God’s kingdom purposes and only secondarily and derivatively an office in the church. Focal ministry is to be seen as a role rather than an office, the shape of which will differ according to the needs of the context and the gifts of the individual focal minister.
The primacy of role over office may be observed in the New Testament. In one of his earliest letters, written shortly after the church had been planted, Paul calls on the believers to, ‘acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you’ (1 Thessalonians 5:12). As Edward Schillebeekx pointed out, these were local leaders in the Christian communities, whom at that stage Paul was simply calling his ‘fellow-workers’ (Ministry: A Case for Change, SCM, 1981, p.9). At a later stage, these local leaders acquired titles such as elder (Acts 14:23), deacon or bishop (Philippians 1:1). Within the New Testament, no distinction is made between elder and bishop. The ‘elders’ of Ephesus are ‘overseers’ as well as ‘shepherds’ of the church (Acts 20:28) and in Titus 1:5-9 the terms elder and overseer are used interchangeably. Thus, we see local church leaders exercising ‘oversight’, as clergy are now being trained to do in relation to focal ministers.
4. Locality
The Church of England has as its strapline, ‘A Christian presence in every community.’ This aspiration is currently under severe strain. Clergy in multi-parish benefices, expected to exercise their ministry across several churches and communities, cannot realistically be ‘present’ to them all in any meaningful way. Many churches are remaining in vacancy for years on end. The Church therefore needs to discover and own a different understanding of ‘presence’ from that embodied in its inherited theology of ministry centred around an ever-present stipendiary priest.
Lesslie Newbigin points out that the word ecclesia is used in two ways in the New Testament. It is either the ecclesia tou theou, the gathering of God, or the ecclesia meeting in a certain place. It is a staple of ecclesiology that the local church is not simply a branch of the universal church but is the universal church present in each locality. While many theologians work out the justification for this position in terms of the Eucharist or the ministry of the bishop, Newbigin sees beyond these to the mission imperative: the local church is that part of the gathering of God entrusted with his mission to a particular locality (‘On Being the Church in the World’, in Giles Ecclestone, The Parish Church, Mowbray, 1988, pp.29-31; reprinted in Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian, ed. Paul Weston, SPCK, 2006, pp.132-3).
In contemporary society, the meaning of locality has expanded beyond geographically based communities. People typically relate in networks based on places of work, education, voluntary activities and leisure pursuits, and it is here that the church needs to be present in the persons of its members. In this perspective, the local church is a network of Christians with a mission through its members to all the places in which they live and work as well as the geographical community in which the church building is set.
Theological Development
The past fifty years or so have seen the rediscovery of this theology of ministry as the Church has slowly moved away from Christendom mode into a new self-understanding as a community with a mission. A chapter by Bishop Oliver Simon entitled ‘OLM in context – a genealogy’ in the volume Ordained Local Ministry in the Church of England (edited by Andrew Bowden, Leslie Francis, Elizabeth Jordan and Oliver Simon, Continuum, 2011) provides a helpful overview of the theological strands behind the development of ordained local ministry, an approach to local church leadership similar in many ways to focal ministry.
Simon looks first to the influence of missionary pioneers such as Henry Venn and Roland Allen. For Venn, the role of the missionary was to plant but not to pastor the church. The church was to become self-sustaining, which required local, indigenous leadership. Similarly, Roland Allen argued that the Holy Spirit was capable of providing all the gifts required for the church to thrive and grow in the absence of the missionary, while the indigenous pastor, sharing the culture and with multiple ties to the local community, was a more appropriate leader.
This missionary experience was the inspiration for the Bethnal Green experiment of the 1960s, in which Ted Roberts became the first locally ordained minister. The characteristics of this ministry were to include:
- a calling from the local church rather than outside appointment,
- a settled rather than itinerant ministry rooted in local relationships,
- a voluntary rather than professional basis, reducing the likelihood of dependency,
- local and practical training,
- specific terms of service, thereby limiting his authorisation to the local community,
- support from a team rather than an expectation of solo practice.
In 1981, the Church of England was offered another opportunity to be refreshed by the worldwide church in the shape of the Partners in Mission process. With its title, To a Rebellious House? the final report included some challenging observations:
We are shackled by an accumulation of traditions … We believe, wrongly, that we can respond to God’s call to mission without disturbing our inherited structures … We are still too dominated by the false view that the ministry of the Church is confined to bishops, priests and deacons. The whole pilgrim people of God share in ministry, and clergy and laity must be trained for this shared ministry (Church Information Office, 1981, p.47).
By this stage, the Church had already begun to put into practice the idea of a ‘local non-stipendiary ministry’, the guidelines for which included:
- a call from the local congregation,
- ministers functioning as members of a team,
- which was to include lay people,
- training that paid attention to the context,
- and ministry confined by license to a particular locality.
The definitive statement of this emerging theology was given in a report of 1987 entitled Education for the Church’s Ministry, often abbreviated to ACCM 22:
The ministry of the Church is a corporate one in the Church’s task, but the ordained minister recognizes the activity of God in and for this corporate activity, represents it to the members of the Church, focuses and collects it in a co-ordinated pattern and distributes it in the service of God’s work in the world. But this work is achieved only insofar as the community of the Church recognizes, trusts and sustains the ordained minister in the faith, integrity, hope, vision and love by which he or she recognizes the activity of God in it. Corporate and ordained ministry therefore animate each other, each focusing the activity of God – the work of the Holy Spirit – in the other; each therefore ‘brings the other to be’ in the way which God’s mission in the world requires. They are interanimative in the Church’s performance of its task, and therefore in its being.
Written by the late Dan Hardy, the language of the report is not easy to understand. However, the picture of ministry that is conveyed is one where the ministry of the whole church serves the ‘church’s task’, which is the mission of God. It is neither exclusively clerical nor congregational. Rather, clergy and laity ‘animate’ one another in the context of a shared ministry in which the role of the clergy is to empower and equip the ministry of the whole church. Focal ministry, supported by local teams and overseen by clergy is but one expression of this overall picture.
Since the acceptance of these principles, the Church has seen the blossoming of ‘fresh expressions’ of church and new worshipping communities to form a ‘mixed ecology’. The theological basis for these developments was articulated by Rowan Williams in the foreword to Mission-shaped Church:
If ‘church’ is what happens when people encounter the Risen Jesus and commit themselves to sustaining and deepening that encounter in their encounter with each other, there is plenty of room for a diversity of rhythm and style, so long as we have ways of identifying the same living Christ at the heart of every expression of Christian life in common (Church House, 2004, p.vii).
In 2016, a report by the Church Army estimated that around 40% of the leaders of new Christian communities were what they called ‘lay-lay’, that is lay people who were not trained and licensed lay ministers (The Day of Small Things, pp.62,106-127). The lay-led fresh expressions of church, where the incumbent was filling a more distant oversight role, were developing at least as well as those led by the ordained. With so many new congregations now led by lay people, and the theological foundation for the appointment of indigenous church leaders supported by a local ministry team firmly in place, the ministry of lay people as focal ministers in traditional churches would appear to be a logical step.
The Alternative Theology
There are many in the Church who find it difficult to square these developments with their understanding of the Church’s inherited theology of ministry. Angela Tilby, writing in the Church Times, dismissed the ambition of the Myriad organisation for 1,000 new churches led by lay people on the basis that a church that was not led by a member of the clergy could not be called a church. A respondent to the survey by the ReSource organisation into the experience of charismatic renewal wrote, ‘After retirement, I spoke at a meeting on church planting and folk were appalled that I had overseen several church plants led by lay leadership teams.’ And when the Oxford Diocese was promoting its scheme for Personal Discipleship Plans, one area dean refused to countenance the idea of training lay people as mentors of one another.
What is the basis for the theology that rules out any idea of lay church leadership and even in some cases lay ministry? In an ‘Afterword’ to a volume entitled Local Ministry: Story, Process, Meaning (edited by Robin Greenwood and Caroline Pascoe, SPCK, 2006), Dan Hardy contrasts two types of theology of the church. One is the theology we have described, that finds the unity of God in Christ through the church’s consistency of action in the diversity of its mission and ministry. In other words, it is the church on the move, dedicated to the work of God’s kingdom, drawing on Scripture and its theological traditions to understand what God by his Spirit is doing in the present; in the words of Rowan Williams, to identify the presence of Christ in each expression of church life.
The alternative is a theology in which the being of the church is pre-defined, its life and ministry the same for all times and places. The Lima document, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, attempts to hold these two positions together.The section on ‘Ministry’ begins with a sub-section entitled ‘The Calling of the Whole People of God’ and states:
The Holy Spirit bestows on the community diverse and complementary gifts … All members are called to discover, with the help of the community, the gifts they have received and to use them for the building up of the Church and for the service of the world to which the Church is sent (p.17).
Then follows a sub-section on the ordained ministry, in which the report states:
In order to fulfil its mission, the Church needs persons who are publicly and continually responsible for pointing to its fundamental dependence on Jesus Christ, and thereby provide, within a multiplicity of gifts, a focus of its unity. The ministry of such persons, who since very early times have been ordained, is constitutive for the life and witness of the Church (p.17).
The ARCIC (Anglican – Roman Catholic International Commission) final report of 1982 is similarly ambiguous. One the one hand, ‘The ordained ministry can only be rightly understood within this broader context of various ministries, all of which are the work of one and the same Spirit’ (p.30). On the other, ‘Nevertheless, their ministry is not an extension of the common Christian priesthood but belongs to another realm of the gifts of the Spirit’ (p.36).
To resolve this tension, Stephen Pickard (in Theological Foundation for Collaborative Ministry, Ashgate, 2009) proposes a theory of emergence. He uses biological emergence as his analogy but might equally have drawn on sociological theory. In this type of theory, a more ordered state develops from a less ordered one by the emergence of elements that are greater than the sum of their parts. Pickard suggests that ordained ministry plays this role, contributing a greater level of order to a situation in which God’s people are called to work together, each contributing their varied gifts, in the service of God’s mission.
Can this bottom-up theory of orders be reconciled with the more top-down approach, in which ordained ministry is seen as an integral element in God’s plan for the church from the beginning? I suggest that it can be, on the assumption that the role of the ordained is understood along the lines of the ACCM 22 report, as existing to enable and empower the ministry of the whole people of God. In that case, whether given directly by God and belonging to a different realm of the Spirit’s gifts or emerging from the charisms bestowed on all by the Spirit, the purpose of ordaining a few is to enable the ministry of the whole church to flourish.
Conclusion
For those who hold a theology of the indispensable leadership of local churches by a set-apart priesthood, there is a wholly understandable lament that this ideal is no longer practical because there are far too few priests to go round. The reality is large multi-church benefices, widespread and lengthy vacancies, many churches no longer meeting every week for lack of the essential priest, and some closing altogether.
These organisational attempts to maintain the theory that the inherited model is still working are in practice resulting in its destruction. Priests with multi-church responsibilities fill their lives with rotas, buildings, meetings, paperwork, church crises, endless car driving and time out with stress. Energy and time for mission and ministry, their priestly calling, is limited or non-existent. An oversight and focal minister model devolves day today responsibility in individual churches to others and sets the stipendiary priests freer to focus on their core calling – to mediate the sacramental grace of God and to lovingly oversee the flourishing of the ministry of God’s churches without being ground down by them. This model is not about usurping the role of the priest, but about recovering it.
So, if the role of the clergy is understood as enabling and equipping the ministry of the whole church,, both theologies unite to welcome the oversight and local model of leadership now rolling out in so many places. Focal ministry, sometimes exercised by ordained ministers but more often by lay people, is currently contributing to the flourishing of the church in a variety of places in England and Wales. This flourishing is under threat, however, not only from the variety of adverse circumstances that can affect any new initiative, but also from the opposition of those who view it as an illegitimate development in the life of the church.
But this is not the case. Focal ministry, is, in fact, an entirely legitimate development, wholly in keeping with what we read of the life of the New Testament church and with all the Church’s theological traditions. It is an element in the way that the Holy Spirit is leading the church to adapt to its changed circumstances and offers not only life in the present but hope for the future. As it is an act of obedience, a response to what people believe God is initiating, the setting up of focal and oversight ministry is not merely a strategy – it is an alignment with the movement of the Spirit.