In my previous post, I outlined three transitions the Church of England needs to make to engage with a rapidly changing society. These transitions imply the need for a refreshed and reimagined model of ministry, both lay and ordained. One of the comments I received on Facebook was from Isabelle Hamley, the principal of Ridley Hall. Isabelle told me that the three transitions I had named are part of the college’s vision. But on the other hand:
‘It can be difficult in practice because if a TEI focuses on stretching the imagination of what church is and tries to move towards this future, we get criticised by newly minted curates for not preparing them enough to do the traditional tasks of ministry; but here we name that tension and the fact that we are aiming to prepare people for a changing world and a changing church.’
I’m assuming that by the ‘traditional tasks of ministry’ we are not talking about such things as leading worship or preparing and leading baptisms, weddings and funerals. I would expect these to be adequately covered if not before ordination then in IME 2 (curates’ training). I’m assuming that the criticisms arise from pressure on the newly minted curates to adopt the traditional role of the clergy as professional expert and solo practitioner upon whom the rest of the church is dependent.
In this post, I want to suggest not only that what Isabelle outlines is exactly what training institutions should be doing, but that they might go one step further and teach their students how to counter the expectations, whether from congregations, training incumbents or bishops, that they should conform to the traditional role of the ordained minister. The reasons are that this model represents an obstacle to God’s mission, and piles increasing levels of stress of clergy who try to conform to it.
A Dysfunctional Model
The problem for both clergy and congregations is that the professional model is a paradigm or mental model, a set of assumptions deeply embedded in the Church’s social imaginary, its concept of the way relationships should function in the typical congregation. As a result, we are habituated to looking through these assumptions rather than looking at them to critique and evaluate them. They are embodied in a set of expectations at every level of the Church about the way clergy and congregations should relate. And they are deeply dysfunctional.
At a Faith in Research conference in 2017, Kathryn Kissell reported on her research with ministers facing stress. Her starting point was that, ‘Facing unrealistic congregational expectations, dealing with conflict and managing the diversity of the pastoral role act as significant sources of ministerial pressure.’ However, by training them and providing a support group to enable them to resist unrealistic expectations, not only were these members of the clergy enabled to adopt healthier styles of ministry but their congregations also became healthier.
In The Clerical Profession (SPCK, 1980), Anthony Russell outlined the transition by which clergy moved from being largely members of the landed gentry to become members of the professional classes. One outcome was an increasing focus on what Russell calls the ‘charter elements’ of the clerical calling: Word, sacrament and pastoral care. This was a response to the loss of many of the functions clergy had previously exercised, such as magistrates and registrars. Once established, the professional model remained largely unchanged at the time Russell was writing. He points out that when comparing the clergy handbooks of the 1970s with those of a century earlier, ‘It is the similarities rather than the changes that are most striking. Though the detailed advice takes account of the differing circumstances, the headings under which it is given, and the assumptions on which it is based, are largely unchanged’ (page 274, my italics).
The question this raises is not merely whether the survival of a model of ministry designed for the nineteenth century into the twenty-first is a good thing, but even more significantly whether the model has an adequate theological rationale. It suggests that the idea of the clergyman as professional expert whose role revolved around Word, sacrament and pastoral care was the outcome of a social transition rather than a theological reimagination and that the theology that developed around it might be seen as subsequent rationalisation.
Moreover, might the same be largely true for the curriculum of theological training. The advent of training courses for clergy from the 1840s onwards was designed to secure professional status. Just as doctors, architects, engineers qualified through mastery of a particular branch of knowledge, mastery of theology became that qualifying threshold for the clergy. But as Robert Runcie, himself a former theological college principal, declared in 1986, ‘The rationale of theological education in the Church of England has never been made fully explicit’ (‘Theological Education Today’, an address at Great St Mary’s, Cambridge, quoted in Education for the Church’s Ministry, ACCM, 1987).
In the twenty-first century, things are changing, and many readers will wonder whether the situation is really as bad as I am painting it. But as Isabelle Hamley’s comment reveals, traditional expectations persist and are strongly defended in some quarters. And because it is so deeply rooted, the traditional model continues to exercise its influence.
For this reason, in the Introduction to Reimagining Ministry (SCM, 2011) I attempted to look at the model and enumerate its dysfunctions. The following is a summary and update:
1. The model was never fully professional. Because the system of patronage did not change, there was no coherent control over recruitment and deployment and no way that bishops could uphold basic standards of performance. Among the legacies of this situation today are the patchy nature of both continuing ministerial development and pastoral supervision. Whereas in virtually every other people profession continuing development is mandatory, for the clergy it remains an option of which many fail to take advantage. Similarly with supervision: whereas the adoption by the Methodist Church of pastoral supervision for all clergy has already proved immensely beneficial (see Jane Leach, A Charge to Keep, Wesley’s Foundery Books, 2020), the Church of England still drags its feet. As a result, its clergy miss out on the benefits of realistic accountability that flow from regular supervision, not to mention the regular affirmation that they are doing a good job.
2. The existence of a professional clergy creates a passive laity. In a piece of small-scale research as part of the Church’s Living Ministry programme, Hilary Ison and Liz Graveling followed the progress of two members of the clergy moving from curacy into first incumbency (Living Ministry Focused Study 1: Collaborative Ministry and Transitions to First Incumbency, July 2019). Both were making the transition from large, well-equipped churches with significant shared ministry to smaller churches without a tradition of lay involvement. Both encountered embedded cultures of deference to the clergy and detachment from the church’s life and mission. One commented on the occasion when, in a throwaway remark, he described the PCC as a leadership team. The response was, ‘We’ve never been referred to as that before … but it sounds great.’ Another reported the words of a long-standing church member who referred to the church’s Annual Parochial Meeting as ‘your meeting’.
Remarks made in meetings I have chaired include, ‘It’s your job vicar to get more people to come to church to help us pay our parish share,’ and, ‘I don’t ask you to help me with my job. Why should I help you with yours?’ The detachment of the laity may often reinforced by a deficit in the skills of listening on the part of the clergy and a tendency to become over-responsible. But whatever the reasons, such disengagement is disastrous for the church’s mission, which requires a relationship of interdependence between laity and clergy and a willingness on the part of most if not all to take ownership of the church’s life and mission.
3. The myth and expectation of clergy omnicompetence. In 1983, John Tiller drew attention to a vocational leaflet describing a clergyman as a man of prayer, planner, thinker, pastor, spiritual director, prophet, evangelist, teacher, administrator and co-ordinator (A Strategy for the Church’s Ministry, CIO, 1983). Self-evidently, no one can fulfil these roles. They require not only a range of skills wider than one person can be expected to possess, but differing personality types. The wise leader looks for others who possess the skills and passions they lack and forms a team of people to share their wisdom and provide mutual support. But this can only be done by refusing to conform to the outdated, nineteenth century model of the solo practitioner.
4. The clerical mentality. The problem with training institutions, a colleague of mine used to say, is that they socialise people into a clerical mentality. The professional model, with its separation of active clergy from passive laity, means that the primary reference group for members of the clergy is other clergy. In Reimagining Ministry I shared the story of my church administrator, who managed our church’s youth project and took the lead in our engagement with the local Residents’ Association. After attending two or three meetings set up by the diocese to explore community mission, she asked me to stop sending her. Everyone else at those meetings was a member of the clergy, and they didn’t know how to treat her: it was as if she, as a lay person, was separated by a glass wall from them, the clergy.
5. The marginalisation of the clergy. From this separation of the worlds of clergy and laity flows a further dysfunction. In our industrial and post-industrial society, work is separated from home. Work is the defining activity of the public sphere, predominantly rational, technical, financially rewarded and thus of high status. Separated from these are the concerns of home, the domestic sphere, still predominantly the domain of women and of lower social status. And it is with the private, domestic sphere that the work of the clergy is principally concerned. As a result, church members view the life of the church as disconnected with their working lives and clergy lack the skills to help the members of their congregations address the challenges of their working lives in ways that reflect the gospel. The 2017 report Setting God’s People Free draws attention to a survey of 2009 in which 59% of Anglicans said that their church did not equip them well for life in the world of work, the home, or anywhere else, and quotes a senior civil servant, who told them, ‘At no time did my clergy colleagues ever take any interest in my working life, ministry at work, or offer to provide support such as prayer with regard to my employment. This was despite the fact they were aware of the pressure I was under’ (pages 4,16). I am all too aware that, as a parish minister, I fell into the same trap when a member of my congregation was responsible for making multiple people redundant from his firm.
The Way Forward
Today, the professional model is being superseded as the function of pastoral care is taken over by a host of often better qualified professionals: counsellors, rehabilitation centres, advocates, pregnancy advisers, and life coaches. Meanwhile, the ministry of the Word is increasingly shared with lay ministers. Clergy are faced with an increasing challenge of role identity and definition. It is no wonder that many hold on every more tightly to their sacramental role as the defining feature.
And yet it is the expectation that they will function as solo performers on whom the rest of the congregation are to be dependent that piles increasing pressure on hard-pressed clergy. It is high time to move on to a model of interdependence in which clergy and laity work together as colleagues for the sake of God’s mission.