Reimagining Ministry

By David Heywood

This text is a comprehensive introduction to mission and ministry in the contemporary Church which enables students to prepare for ministry in a changing church within a changing world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780334047766

David Heywood

David Heywood is Deputy Director of Mission for the Diocese of Oxford. Previously he was Director of Pastoral Studies at Ripon College, Cuddesdon. He is the author of Reimagining Ministry and Kingdom Learning.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Imagining Ministry

Mission: A Quiet Revolution

Kingdom: Yeast in the Loaf

Church: Foretaste of the Kingdom

Ministry: Agents of the Kingdom

Conclusion: Reimagining Ministry

Acknowledgements

No book of this kind could be written without the help of a large group of people, and I am very grateful to all those who have been involved, some of whom have devoted considerable time and effort.

Andrew Meynell and my colleagues on the staff of Ripon College Cuddesdon took over many of my teaching and administrative duties while I was on the sabbatical that allowed me to concentrate on writing.

During that sabbatical I had significant conversations in several parts of the country that gave me glimpses of what God is doing on the ground and allowed me to test out and develop my ideas in dialogue with people in ministry. Thanks are particularly due to Bob Burston, Sandy Christie, Lloyd Cooke, Bill and Karen Crooks, Rob Dewing, Sue Faulkner, Stephen Herbert, Neil Hudson, Paul Hudson, Tom Johnston, Rob Kelsey, David Linaker, Kevin Malloy, Peter Mockford, Rob Mountford, Jackie Mouradian, Peter Robinson, John Sadler, Geoffrey Smith and Rachel Wood.

My thanks go to John and Kath Alexander, Pauline Gilchrist, Jayne Gould, Phil and Heidi Huntley, David Linaker, Emma Street and Linda Williams, who gave me permission to quote their stories.

Tina Hodgett, Neil Hudson, Debbie McIsaac, Matthew Rushton, Graham and Kate Stacey and Tim Treanor read an earlier draft of the book and gave me valuable feedback. Needless to say, responsibility for any remaining shortcomings is mine.

It has been an immense privilege to have been teaching mission and ministry to the students at Ripon College over the last few years and their reflections on their ministry and the discussions that arise in the course of teaching sessions have greatly helped me to work out what I think.

My usual practice is to alternate between male and female for the representative person, thus avoiding the ugly ‘him or her’. This is what I have done in this book. Accordingly the representative minister is sometimes ‘he’ and sometimes ‘she’. I hope readers will bear with me if this should be confusing.

Virtually all my experience and most of my examples come from the Church of England. I hope that what I write will have some relevance to churches of other denominations and to Scotland and Wales, but I leave the reader to judge.

Finally, without the support of my wife Meg neither the writing nor the experience of ministry on which it is based would have been possible.

David Heywood, September 2010

Introduction

Imagining Ministry

The church in Britain is journeying through a time of transition. Over the past 20 to 30 years our understanding of mission has changed out of all recognition. A generation ago most Christians in this country understood mission as something that took place overseas - on the ‘mission field’ - or as an occasional event often involving a big name such as Billy Graham, or as an activity for churches of a particular kind, usually evangelical. Since then this picture has changed radically. Not only has mission become increasingly important, but our understanding of what mission entails has grown and developed. Mission has moved from the periphery of the church to its centre. Today mission audits and mission action plans would not be seen as out of place on the agenda of the PCC or deacons’ meeting of churches in any tradition.

However, our understanding of ministry has failed to keep pace. In many ways, the roles expected of clergy have changed very little in more than a century. And as society changes at an ever-increasing rate, the strains are beginning to show. The reason is that our current ‘model’ of ministry, our expectations of what the church and particularly its clergy offer to society, took shape as long ago as the nineteenth century. As a result the demands and expectations of our existing approach to ministry are increasingly out of touch with the requirements of mission in contemporary society. Hardly a year goes by without the publication of at least one and usually several books voicing a sense of dissatisfaction or examining the related subject of clergy stress. The present volume is a response to that swelling tide. Its purpose is to explore the way the church’s mission has developed over the past 20 years or so and ask what effect our newly emerging theology of mission should have on our understanding of ministry. My conclusion is that, after a generation of transition, the outline of a new model of the church’s ministry, and with it a positive and hopeful account of the role of the ordained minister, may be within our grasp.

To understand the present, we need to understand the legacy of the past. First published in 1980, Anthony Russell’s book The Clerical Profession charts the process by which, during the nineteenth century, the clergy of the Church of England came to occupy the status of a profession.¹ In the mid to late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the typical clergyman was a member of the landed gentry. His income was derived from the land attached to his benefice and the tithes paid by the local parishioners, and in an age when farming was becoming better organized and more productive that income was rising. As a landed gentleman the beneficed clergyman was expected to take part in the occupations of the gentry: he hunted and shot and accepted invitations to dine with his wealthy neighbours. He was usually a magistrate and played a role in the administration of the Poor Law. He acted as registrar, dispensed charity and ran schools for local children. The taking of services was very much less important than it was to become. In the eighteenth century James Woodforde was pleased if he had ‘two rails’ of communicants at Christmas or Easter - that is, about 30 from a population of 360 - and was quite likely to administer baptism in his parlour if the church were too cold.²

But the days when the clergy could be reasonably sure of a good living from the land were numbered. The industrial revolution generated a new source of income which was not tithed; drew vast numbers into the expanding cities; and saw the rise to prominence of the middle class at the expense of the landed gentry The professions formed the vanguard of this rise in social status. In an increasingly technical age a professional was someone who specialized in a branch of socially useful knowledge, such as medicine, the law, finance, architecture or teaching. With the possession of specialist expertise the foundation of their status and income, the professions typically became the domain of the upper middle class.

Over the course of the nineteenth century the clergy made the transition from the landed gentry to the professions. Beginning in the 1840s, colleges began to provide specialist training. There was a growing sense of apartness and specialization. Clergy adopted distinctive dress, the clerical stock, shovel hat and gaiters. They abandoned the habits of the gentry, such as hunting, dancing and race-going and developed a self-consciously serious lifestyle. The rules for the newly established college at Cuddesdon in 1854, still displayed in the college library, forbid smoking as ‘a habit repugnant to the formation of Clerical character’! Most important, the ‘charter elements’ or defining features of their clerical calling began to take centre stage. Some former aspects of the clergyman’s role were taken over by other professions, such as teachers and the new body of professional registrars, leaving them to concentrate on the conduct of Sunday worship and occasional offices, preaching and pastoral care.

Russell concentrates specifically on the Church of England. For other denominations the history was different, but most embraced a similar professional model of ministry. Once established, the professional model has persisted for more than a century. Comparing the clerical handbooks published in the 1970s with those of a century earlier, Russell notes, ‘It is the similarities rather than the changes that are the 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.’³ Towards the end of the twentieth century developments in role of the clergy continued to mirror those of the professions generally Most professions have seen encroachments on their territory: teachers have had to allow teaching assistants to take over some of their duties, solicitors to open up some aspects of conveyancing, doctors to allow nurses to take over some treatments. Complaints at the lack of qualification of those taking over these roles are echoed by similar complaints voiced in some quarters about the perceived lack of training of non-stipendiary and locally ordained clergy. And just as the twentieth century saw the professions opened up to women, so the churches have followed, with varying degrees of protest.

Russell’s clear analysis inevitably prompts the question as to whether the professions supply the appropriate paradigm for the church’s ministry. ‘In any institution,’ he concludes,

the growing awareness that the deficiencies are beginning to outweigh the merits will cause more radical questions to be asked … Therefore, it may be regarded as legitimate to question whether the dysfunctions of the … clergyman’s role as traditionally conceived and structured have not now reached a point where they are beginning to outweigh the undoubted advantages.⁴

Among the undoubted advantages’ he concedes we may want to list the emphasis on training and a suitable manner of life, the increased attention given to preaching, worship and pastoral care and the much improved care of church buildings that followed from these. But over a generation after he wrote, the dysfunctions to which he drew attention are growing even more obvious.

The first set of problems emerged from the nature of the transition to the professional model. As Russell points out, for the Church of England at least, the potential advantages of the professional model were never fully embraced. The system of patronage did not change, so that the clergy were never able to exercise control over recruitment and deployment. As a result there were huge disparities in income between men who were essentially doing the same job and uncertainty about career development in a situation where preferment depended on favour. No professional equivalent of the General Medical Council developed and, because of the persistence of the parson’s freehold, no system of discipline, no way in which the bishops could uphold basic standards of performance, no co-ordinated professional development nor even the expectation that there should be such a thing. Among the professions, the clerical profession remains the most unprofessional!

The second area of dysfunction applies more widely than the Church of England: the existence of a professional clergy creates a passive laity. Congregations become the clients of the clergy, whose role is to minister to them: to provide the services they want and the pastoral care they need. With the growth of consumerism in the twentieth century, this tendency has become even more marked. The pressure is on, in the words of one Pentecostal minister, to ‘pull off a good Sunday’, to send the congregation home satisfied enough to come again.

The other side of this coin is the myth and expectation of clerical omnicompetence. In 1983 John Tiller drew attention to a vocational leaflet entitled Wanted: Leaders in Tomorrow’s Church, describing the work of the clergyman in the following terms:

He will be a leader of the church’s worship and a man of prayer, whose oversight encourages others to discover and exercise their vocation and gifts. He will be a planner and thinker, who communicates a vision of future goals and seeks with others to achieve them. He will be a pastor and spiritual director, who is skilled in understanding, counselling, supporting and reconciling both groups and individuals. He will be a prophet, evangelist and teacher, who proclaims and witnesses to the Gospel, and who makes available today the riches of the church’s tradition and experience. He will be an administrator and coordinator, with responsibility for the Christian management and organisation of the local church’s resources …

As Tiller comments, such a description is likely to attract only the foolish or the conceited. ‘There is little point in writing job descriptions of this sort,’ he writes, ‘because there are few people with the necessary skills to fulfil them.’⁵ Yet nearly 30 years later the myth and expectation of omnicompetence persists. Justin Lewis-Anthony’s book If You Meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him! is but the latest protest.⁶

The professional model, with its separation of active clergy from passive laity, further means that the primary reference group for the clergy is other clergy. Anyone who has ever been to a deanery chapter or ministers’ fraternal will know how quickly and easily the conversation turns to the professional concerns of the clergy. The church of which I was vicar, St Paul’s Edensor, now St Paul’s Longton Hall in Stoke-on-Trent, gradually developed an increasingly significant role in the local community. As we did so, our church co-ordinator Linda Williams became the principal hands-on leader of this aspect of our ministry, managing our church’s youth project and developing our relationship with a local Residents’ Association. It seemed logical that when our diocese set up meetings about the relationship of church and community I should ask her to attend as our representative. After two or three of these meetings, however, Linda asked if I would stop sending her. Everyone else she met at such meetings was a member of the clergy, and few had any idea how to treat her. It was as if, despite sharing the same ministry, she, a lay person, was separated by a glass wall from them, the clergy

This separation of the laity from the world of the clergy and the clergy from that of the laity leads directly to the third area of dysfunction: the marginalization of the clergy In an industrial society work becomes 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, largely unrewarded, the domain of women and thus in the prevailing culture of lower social status. And it is with the private, domestic sphere, the worlds of home and leisure, that the work of the clergy is principally concerned. In these terms, much clergy‘work’, visiting people in their homes and organizing leisure time activities, becomes ‘non-work’, constantly struggling to be taken seriously.

Moreover, the second half of the twentieth century has seen the rise of a pluralist culture in which the specialist knowledge of the clergy is no longer self-evidently valuable to society. Unlike teachers, doctors and architects, there is no commonly held sense of where the clergy‘fit’ in society, or even whether they fit at all. At the same time, even more of the clergy’s distinctive roles are being taken over: that of pastoral care by an increasing army of counsellors, rehabilitation centres, advocates, pregnancy advisers and life coaches, while even their liturgical functions are being taken over from within the church by readers and lay preachers. As John Bowden concludes, the clergyman is

[m]ore often than not an odd man out, involved in great pastoral tension over what he should or should not do, puzzled over his status and above all isolated and removed from the general life of society, following a completely different lifestyle and being robbed by virtue of his status of the involvement with others which he so much needs.⁷

This isolation of the clergy from the general life of society coupled with the pressure to make church life satisfying and attractive to an increasingly sophisticated culture means that whole areas of mission may easily slip below the radar. Imagine, for example, a couple bringing a child for baptism. The minister’s concerns are likely to be situated in the explicit’ domain of faith. She will want to make sure that they are comfortable with the service and understand the promises they are to make. For the parents, however, there may be a range of other issues associated with the ‘founda-tional’ domain.⁸ Their experience of the miracle of childbirth and the new responsibility of parenthood may have heightened their awareness of the spiritual dimension of life. They may also be thinking about some important ethical issues. Within the baby’s lifetime the world is likely to face a severe environmental crisis and they are aware of the need for the present generation to take into account the needs and rights of their posterity. If both work full time they may prefer to arrange their lives so as to have more time at home as the child grows up, but with the financial pressures they face and uncertainty of the economic situation, this may not appear possible. What they may be looking for above all is help in finding a satisfying wisdom for living’: the values that should shape their lives and bring a sense of wholeness and integrity to the choices they are faced with.

Many church members face a similar situation. They face both ‘foundational’ issues and ethical challenges in their daily lives, whether in paid employment or simply on the ‘frontline’ of daily life. For teenagers the pressure of exams in a school system increasingly geared to the demands of paid employment raises foundational questions about human worth and identity. The increasing number of children being cared for by grandparents while both parents work full time raises questions about the shape of family life and the relative priority of money and relationships. And those in paid employment face a range of ethical issues. Many would love the opportunity to reflect on these and arrive at a Christian understanding to guide and shape their daily lives. Moreover, as people of integrity they may also be playing significant pastoral roles in their places of work as colleagues who would never dream of going to a Christian minister seek them out. The opportunity to think about the issues involved might help such people to provide an even more valuable Christian presence in society. But this is another aspect of mission that the professional model, with its concentration on church-related concerns, fails to address.

Finally, not only does the professional model create problems of its own, but in contemporary society the standing of professionals in general is in question. Recent years have seen a spate of criticism of the work of architects and a catastrophic fall in the status of teachers. Whereas only a few years ago most people visiting a doctor expected simply to receive and follow her advice, now it is common to self-diagnose by means of the internet before making an appointment and if the patient is referred for a hospital appointment, she maybe asked to choose the hospital she prefers. This decreasing respect for professional expertise affects the clergy in a similar way. As John Drane summarizes, ‘The old Christendom-style paradigm, which placed ministers on a pedestal, has no future in the culture of the Global North. The underlying assumption on which it all depends, with a clear demarcation between experts who know it all and other people who need it all, has long since been superseded.’⁹

The way forward

The professional model of ministry is long past its ‘best before’ date. Over the past 20 years or so the search has been on for a new and more satisfactory model. In The Country Parson, published in 1993, Anthony Russell foresaw the need for the clergyman to train, equip and motivate a group of people in each parish who would form the local community ministry Robin Greenwood writes of the priest as ‘navigator’ whose most important role is to offer oversight to the ministry of the whole church. John Pritchard calls the clergy‘conductors of God’s local orchestra’. And David Clark, in Breaking the Mould of Christendom, makes a plea for the church to recognize the importance of the dispersed ministry of all God’s people in society¹⁰ Explorations like these, attempts to ‘break the mould’ of our current understanding, are typical of a time of transition.

But before exploring what such a new model might look like, it is worth pausing to ask what exactly the professional model is. Philosophers of science are familiar with the idea of‘paradigms’ and system theorists and many others with the idea of‘mental models’: deeply embedded shared assumptions about the way things are in a given field, from scientific exploration to running a business. Such models or paradigms are shared: they are the common currency of everyone working in the field - all the scientists in a given area of research, all employees of a particular business, all members of a particular church. And they consist of assumptions: things taken to be true without question that form the basis for resolving problems and planning courses of action.¹¹ We might say that these paradigms or mental models are ways of imagining the situation. Many of the most profound and far-reaching developments in the history of science, such as Newton’s gravitational theory and Einstein’s theory of relativity involved an act of the imagination: a new way of seeing or imagining the universe.¹² In business, write Peter Senge and his co-authors, progress depends on the ability to suspend existing ways of seeing