Prior to the announcement of the appointment of Dame Sarah Mullaly, Francis Martin contributed an article to the Church Times reviewing the ‘most pressing issues’ facing the new Archbishop. Predictably, he placed safeguarding and same-sex relationships at the top of the list, mentioning also the legacy of slavery, declining church attendance, the current settlement on women bishops and the Church’s role in royal events.
The list appears to me to be typical of the inward-looking nature of so many conversations about the future of the Church, omitting as it does any mention of the purpose for which the Church exists. Nor does the article delve into the underlying causes of the problems facing the Church. Top of the list, safeguarding, while both urgent and hugely significant for all those affected, is essentially firefighting arising from egregious failures in Church’s governance procedures. The impasse over Prayers of Love and Faith is the result of a failure to agree what it means for the Church to embody both grace and truth in its institutional life.
This suggests that the deeper issues are those that have allowed these to become problems in the first place. Moreover, that they lie under the surface, so that Francis Martin and writers of similar articles fail to discern them. My suggestion is that the most significant issues facing Dame Sarah arise from three shared assumptions, deeply rooted in the life of the Church, each of which cripples our ability to live together in loving fellowship and to witness effectively to the gospel.
1. ‘Ministry’ is an office
An institution exists with a purpose: to sustain and develop a shared practice. Unfortunately, rather than being understood as a means to an end, an institution may easily become an end in itself, since it distributes roles, status and positions of power, which contribute to and sustain the identity of some, at least, of its members. To think of ministry in terms of offices is to focus on issues to do with the institution of the Church rather than the purpose for which the Church exists, which is to play its part in the mission of God.
In his book Diakonia (Oxford UP, 1990), John Collins argues that the root meaning of the word usually translated ‘ministry’ in the New Testament is not so much ‘humble service’ as ‘commissioned service’. For me, this suggests that the Church’s ministry derives from the fact that it is ‘sent’ in mission. Ministry is the Church’s participation in the mission of God. Moreover, God’s mission is the outflowing of the love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Ministry that is genuinely Christian partakes of the character of God. It is rooted in mutual love, the love for one another that was Jesus’ new commandment.
A better way to think about ministry, then, would be not in relation to the institution but to the roles that the members of Christ’s body are called to play in God’s mission. This is something that all Churches have trouble in achieving. For example, the section on ‘Ministry’ in the Lima Document, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, begins by ascribing the source of the Church’s witness to the diverse and complementary gifts given to its members through the Holy Spirit and affirms that it is the Spirit who keeps the Church in the truth and guides it. But it then goes on to describe the ‘ordained ministry’ not as the ministry offered by specific ordained persons but as a kind of abstraction somehow separate from the ministry of the whole people of God but nevertheless, ‘constitutive for the life and witness of the Church.’
There is a clear contradiction here. Which is constitutive for the life of the Church, the Holy Spirit or the ordained ministry? It is a contradiction that affects the life of many churches including that of the Church of England. Whereas in its ordination services, the Church declares, ‘In baptism the whole Church is summoned to witness to God’s love and work for the coming of his kingdom,’ its practice has been to allow the ministry of the whole church to become subordinate to the ministry of the ordained.
A good example of this is provided in a chapter from the book Ordained Local Ministry in the Church of England (Continuum, 2011), in which Andrew Bowden describes the progress of the local ministry scheme in one particular diocese. Five years into the scheme, 27 local ministry teams involving 240 lay members were either mandated or in training. Careful attention to the change of culture that local ministry embodies had released a well of enthusiasm. According to one parishioner interviewed for a review, ‘The atmosphere in church has changed. The whole place feels right – joyful, caring, happier, more relaxed.’
However, the scheme soon began to run into difficulties that have become all too familiar in the life of the Church. New incumbents who, while offering lip-service to the idea of local ministry in their interviews, proceeded to disband their teams and sideline lay ministry; the refusal of Ministry Division to sanction a course of training for local ordained ministers that was not rigorously academic; a new bishop whose vision of ministry focussed on the ordained rather than the whole church; and the diversion of financial resources from the task of building up the ministry of the whole church to other purposes.
All this suggests to me that we need a fundamental change in our thinking. As long as we continue to think of ministry in institutional terms, those with definable offices in the institution will continue to take priority and the ministry of the whole church will continue to be overlooked and under-resourced. A better way to think about ministry might be as first and foremost a role in the mission of God. And just as mission flows from the mutual love of the divine Trinity, so the essential qualification for any ministry would be to share the love of God for one another and for the world, poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
2. Academic theology is the appropriate qualification for leadership in the Church
Christian discipleship is a community of practice. Christian ministry is another, distinct though closely related. And theological scholarship is a third related though distinct community of practice.
Theological scholarship has its own integrity. Mike Higton has presented an ideal of scholarship as a conversation whose twin purposes are the promotion of individual virtue and the common good. Through studying for their degree, students learn the attitudes and ways of thought involved in making well-grounded judgements and submitting these to the judgement of others. To do this, they need to learn and practice specific intellectual virtues, including integrity, attentiveness, patience, humility and openness to the unexpected (A Theology of Higher Education, Oxford UP, 2012, 190-95). It is an attractive picture, but seen in this way, the value of scholarship lies not so much in the knowledge gained as in the virtues cultivated.
Christian ministry, however, is a different community of practice. Craig Dykstra suggests that the kind of knowledge required for a leading role in the life of the Church is fourfold (see ‘Pastoral and Ecclesial Imagination’ in For Life Abundant, ed. Bass and Dykstra, Eerdmans, 2008, 41-61):
- An understanding of relationships and the ability to develop mature relationships, to call out the gifts of church members, encourage and enable them to grow in love and confidence, all of which requires a high degree of emotional intelligence.
- An understanding of the way organisations work, to be able to build up the church as a loving community, encouraging and enabling its members to work harmoniously together.
- The ability to discern and respond to the culture of the neighbourhood and wider society in which the church is placed and which it is called to serve.
- The ability to bring a knowledge of the Bible and Christian theological tradition to each of these three tasks.
It will readily be seen that this is a different kind of knowledge from the more rigorously abstract knowledge that is the goal of theological scholarship. At the heart of the knowledge required for ministry is ‘practical wisdom’ that mediates between general principles and specific situations, that discerns the way biblical and theological principles apply in each individual situation. This is a knowledge gained through experience and reflection, rather than through lectures and assignments.
‘Much of the dissatisfaction that currently exists comes from the belief that present patterns of training are either too academic or at least are too influenced by university models,’ declared Archbishop Robert Runcie in an address given in Great St Mary’s, Cambridge in 1986 (ACCM, ‘Education for the Church’s Ministry, 1987, 9). He was echoing a perception that has been widespread in the Church for many years and continues today. Moreover, research continues to demonstrate that academic training disables ministry (see my article, ‘Why does “academic” theology disable ministry?’ Practical Theology 15.4, 2022, 354-364).
In contrast, research from the Auburn Institute in the United States suggests that people training for ministry are not helped by abstract, decontextualised knowledge but grow in the skills and understanding required for church leadership
- when the practice of ministry is kept continually in view throughout their training,
- that they are most helped by teachers and mentors who encourage them to integrate their understanding of Scripture and theology with real-life situations,
- and that wisdom for ministry grows through reflection over the long haul punctuated by moments of crisis in which transformative learning takes place.
So, a deeper issue facing the Church might well be that we continue to assume, in the face of all the evidence, that theological scholarship per se is the essential qualification for ministry, rather than the ability to apply the Bible and theology to the practical issues of daily life.
3. Authority in God’s kingdom is hierarchical
I was once at a meeting of ministry development reviewers at which an archdeacon asked how many of the clergy in their reviews had referred to the diocesan vision. The answer was not a single one! This makes we wonder about the value of the considerable time and effort that goes into the formulation of diocesan visions. There are 42 dioceses with 42 diocesan visions, each one a particular take on the Christian message. The Christian vision is the revelation of who God is and the nature of his love for the world.
In a recent article exploring the place of chaplaincy within a mixed ecology, the authors share their experience: ‘Some bishops take chaplaincy seriously, others do not; some want complete control and license them as if they’re Readers, others shun chaplains for fear of getting something wrong and being blamed. It is a postcode lottery whether you get support, apathy or even hostility’ (Julian Raffay, Mike Firbank, Mike Haslam and Louise Yaull, ‘Chaplaincy within a mixed ecology’, Practical Theology 17.6, 2024, 551-556).
The same could be said for almost any other area of ministry: team ministry, lay ministry, focal ministry, pioneer ministry, self-supporting ordained ministry. Diocesan policy depends entirely on the predisposition of the diocesan bishop. More seriously still, the quote suggests the lack of any sense of shared good practice, no mechanism for establishing shared good practice, and quite possibly the absence of any concept of good practice. What this adds up to across the Church is an almost total lack of leadership.
It is not that bishops are personally deficient. Most bring considerable experience and the best of intentions. But they are caught up in a dysfunctional system in which each is expected to act as an autocratic king or queen in their own diocese. And behind this lies the assumption that authority in God’s kingdom is hierarchical, which flies in the face of Jesus’ explicit teaching that such was not to be the case (Luke 22:24-27).
Not only hierarchical but almost completely unaccountable. The Church Times this week recalls Bishop Sarah Mullaly’s comment: ‘In the NHS I was clear to whom and for what I was accountable, and I was supported, challenged and appraised by them. I have tried to find the same accountability in the Church, but it does not seem to exist’ (Church Times News 14/2/25, quoted 10/10/25). Here we have, in a nutshell, the cause of so many safeguarding failures and the declining levels of trust in the hierarchy.
All this leads me to suggest that our assumption that the authority of bishops must be hierarchical is a major cause of the Church’s problems. Of course, there is a place for oversight in the life of the Church, but it will take a future post to outline a possibility for the way the bishops might exercise this in a non-hierarchical way.
In Conclusion
The Church Times calls the lack of accountability at the heart of the Church’s governance a sickness. And finding the cure is surely infinitely more important than the issues suggested for the new Archbishop’s to-do list. These are merely the symptoms of a malaise that is crippling the Church. The causes of divisions over policy and safeguarding failures may lie much deeper: in shared assumptions that have nothing whatever to do with the gospel. Perhaps it is time to challenge the structures of power that allow them to go unexamined.