Vicar

Celebrating the Renewal of Parish Ministry

Alan Bartlett

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780281079186
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

'After many years as a hands-on Christian minister, Alan Bartlett writes of what he knows well and loves wisely.' PROFESSOR WALTER MOBERLY'Magisterial' CHURCH TIMESThe Church has long been talking about the oncoming challenges of providing ordained ministers to lead and enable local churches. Now structural change is really happening: but those at the sharp end - 'vicars' - are often bewildered and demoralized. This book celebrates the tradition of English Anglican ordained pastoral ministry; it also affirms the value of vicars' ministry and way of life, and the great gift they have for relating to our communities and churches. The 'vicar' (parish priest, pastor, minister) still leads people - those who 'come to church' and those who don't - in prayer and praise, cares for them in their sufferings and rejoices with them in their joys. This deep wisdom has sustained the Church for centuries. Yet, the question must be asked: how can we be better equipped to make prudent decisions about the way church ministry has to evolve now?

Part 1

Theological foundations

1
Introduction

Vicaring

I love being a vicar. Personally speaking, I think it is the highest vocation for a priest in the C of E; though I honour deeply priests with other vocations, not least the chaplains who are often truly the front line of the Church.

Being a vicar is, as it has often been, an impossible role to fulfil adequately, and it is currently becoming more complex and challenging. But I love it: the sense of being part of a great adventure with Christ, trying to discern Christ at work and join in; to see the light go on in someone’s eyes as they realize that Christ loves them. Before a recent school confirmation, we were having a practice with the children. After the bishop had explained what was going to happen, one of the children exclaimed: ‘Does that mean that Jesus loves me?’ ‘Yes.’ Job done, or at least started. Even after 26 years I still pinch myself at the humbling joy of helping to lead Christ’s people in their praises and prayers, breaking open the word and sharing the bread of life, and knowing those with whom I do this, caring for them in their hurts and happinesses and watching ‘my’ people grow in faith, confidence and ministry. But for me the equally great privilege is to be with all sorts of people, whatever their relationship to the Church and at the profoundest moments of their lives, with Christ. To be known, trusted and loved as Christ’s person in this place, in our community, is an immense privilege.

But I am deeply worried because what we have is not quite working.

Problems with vicaring

We cannot pay for the number of vicars that this traditional model of ministry requires. In many places our congregations are increasingly fragile and the whole system is creaking. Vicars are spread too thinly on the ground to exercise this personal ministry effectively. They are often overworked, and frankly too many are demoralized. But just for a moment it is worth noting that the problem is really the C of E’s, in that we cannot sustain the system we created whereby people relate to God through their vicar and local visible church. If we think about the problem from that perspective, it makes the current crisis in the C of E look rather different.

I was on a training day for vicars in multi-church benefices. We were helpfully being introduced to new models of how churches might relate to each other – ‘minster model’ and ‘satellite churches’ or ‘resource churches’ and their neighbours – so that we could sustain our parish ministry. I summoned up my courage and said: ‘But isn’t the problem that our communities know how to contact the Church, and indeed God? They come to the church or the vicarage, or look for the website or find us from “A Church Near You” and then email; but they come looking for a person. And we are struggling to provide that person. Who is the identifiable “person” for them?’ I expected to be howled down. But in fact the trainer (and the cluster of clergy) agreed and began to tell us about dioceses that are experimenting with training and resourcing self-supporting clergy with small groups of lay people, or groups of lay people, to be that ‘person’, the visible face of the C of E for that community, the ‘vicar’. These initiatives are excellent, though rather overdue.

There is a deeper problem. I am worried that as the C of E transfers resources from nationally supported local parish ministry we are really saying that we are losing confidence in our local (parish) churches and in the work of vicaring that is inextricable from them. I trust this is not the case and that as an institution we still believe in a ‘mixed economy’ where ‘doing traditional church well’ sits alongside fresh expressions as a God-given and God-blessed task.1 But I know that many parish clergy feel alienated from the current rhetoric of the C of E and are anxious because their skills and values do not seem to be valued or needed any more. The ‘Experiences of Ministry’ surveys that have fed into Ministry Division reports about Continuing Ministerial Development (CMD)2 have identified that clergy see as their own values and self-description that they are people who pray and pastor – the ‘pastoral paradigm’ – whereas it is perceived that the C of E is requiring its vicars to be entrepreneurial, managerial and evangelistic, where many vicars feel least capable.

This is not, I hope, an anachronistic book. Our context has changed dramatically since the 1950s, let alone the 1550s. We cannot and should not just try nostalgically (using the word in a negative sense) to maintain a way of being the C of E that in so many ways was a Victorian creation, in that particular social and economic context. How local clergy have exercised their ministry has changed profoundly down the centuries and we need to recognize this so that we can be better equipped to make wise decisions about how it needs to evolve. For example, given that the large majority (over 70 per cent) of C of E vicars do their vicaring across two or more churches, how do we do this now? How do we translate the values of a George Herbert – of whom more later – about presence, visibility and pastoral care, into teamwork, intelligent working and right use of the ordained?

Times they are a changing . . .

We are living through at least two epochal changes. The first is the ‘liberation of the laity’. Whatever the clergy used to say to themselves about being the only skilled Christian disciples in a locality, this is evidently not the case now. In the historical period that has seen the ‘rediscovery of the laity’3 – ecumenically, liturgically, ecclesiologically – how is vicaring to be done in this context of collaborative ministry? We appear not to know the answers to these questions yet, as is evident from the contested language about ‘leadership’ in the C of E, in the continuing grumbles among the laity, especially lay ministers, about clerical autocracy, and from the clergy about not quite knowing what they are for!

Reflecting on my reading about ministry in the Church, going back for almost forty years now, it feels like much of the new material was couched as an attack on traditional ways of being church and specifically on the role of the vicar within that. ‘How can the Church have been so stupid as to believe it should be organized into one man/one church geographical areas?’ Of course, that was a historically clumsy attack. There were good reasons for organizing a Church whose key task was to sanctify (convert) its huge acquired membership by having at least one disciplined element within it, the clergy. Deep development is needed, but it has too often been couched in denigrating terms for the inherited tradition – often from a position of ignorance about the Anglican way4 – and has become linked to deconstruction of the role and value of ordained parochial ministry, vicars. So vicars feel threatened, are tongue-tied about their own vocation and lose their sense of purpose. Christ sent us prophets – Paul, Tiller, Greenwood5 – to help us think about development, but we have not really heeded them until change is being forced on us. And I cannot say too strongly again that this book is not about taking one side in some crazy debate: should the Church put its resources into clergy development or lay training? It is a no-brainer. We have to do both simultaneously. But to make the C of E work we need a high and evolved theological understanding and practice of vicaring.

So, I confess that I am at heart a ‘Gregorian’.6 I believe that if the Church is to be renewed it will be because the clergy are renewed, and especially our incumbents. This is partly for pragmatic reasons. Incumbents are the gatekeepers and bottlenecks to renewal in the C of E. When renewal has been attempted in the C of E and the parochial clergy have been resistant, the result has been schism. Methodism is the clearest example; though I wonder if some of this lies behind the creation of the New Churches in our generation. But I also believe that renewing the parochial clergy is the priority because the C of E at the Reformation opted to remain within the broad tradition of Western Catholicism, with a threefold ordered ministry and a parochial structure. The vast majority of the C of E and of English people still live in this continuing mode of being church and so we need to make it work.

This is rightly having to change as we live through the second epochal change, what is called post-Christendom (though I think that is patchier than its proponents believe), but it is where we have to start. Across almost all of Western Europe, the Church has lost numbers, social significance and political and economic power since the middle of the seventeenth century. It is a peculiar and self-damaging imitation of alleged ostrich behaviour to ignore this. This has not been a continuous process – late-Victorian Britain was substantially more religious than mid-eighteenth-century Britain – and nor do I think it is an inevitable one. But the shift from a monochrome theocratic agricultural society to a pluralist, structurally secular and industrially postmodern society is a reality and it is folly to ignore this new context. It is arguably a unique context, in that the self-conscious dismantling of a religious state is a modern phenomenon.

Having said that, for those of us who have lived and ministered in working-class communities, ‘liquid’ does not adequately describe this world. And I am not convinced that the C of E should regard the shift to a more atomized ‘global’ economic and social order as either inevitable or self-evidently beneficial.7

Our context has changed massively, not least since the 1950s – the last ‘Anglican decade’? Within this contextual change, the C of E also has to adapt, develop and regrow. From the Gregorian perspective, while the Church’s ordained (ordered) ministers remain the bones that hold the Church together, as they have been for almost two thousand years, we now need growing, developing, hopeful, nurtured, living bones within more energetic and self-motivating bodies.

‘Not true enough . . .’

We also need flexible bones – if that is not too nonsensical. The most chilling sentences I have read in recent years about the future of vicaring come from the pen of Jessica Martin. Jessica gave up (if that is the right word) a career as a Cambridge academic to become a vicar. She writes:

I am personally convinced by the arguments for the English parochial system – convinced enough to have left another deeply rewarding vocation in order to serve it. I am convinced by its inclusive generosity, by its commitment to areas abandoned by most other forms of civic engagement, by the profound spiritual and practical possibilities of its civic and community role . . .

I became a parish priest thinking that if one simply worked hard enough and with enough enthusiasm, if one were flexible and imaginative and generous and physically visible (it is an incarnational model), then the tradition would flourish . . .

Perhaps I missed something obvious, but six years later I know that this is not true . . . well it’s not true enough. Community goodwill is worth much, and we throw it away at our peril; but unceasing effort makes churches semi-viable without filling them . . .

Even in the comparative comfort of my small group of commuter-belt parishes, no amount of energy, no amount of expended time or imagination, can make the Church thrive on the old model utterly unchanged.8

As I finish nine years as a Durham vicar, this is my experience also. It is ‘not true enough’. We have tried to be accessible, imaginative, outwardly focused in mission but the demographic is dispiriting (our older church members are disappearing at a faster rate than we can grow new ones). We are not yet very good at attracting new fellow disciples of Jesus. And the strain of the current workload is not sustainable. Change is essential. But I do not hear accounts of what this change will look like that quite convince me. Part of the purpose of this book is to explore possibilities for change that may be nearer ‘enough’. To undergird that exploration, I will try to lay some theological foundations in these opening chapters.

I hope that by drawing explicitly on some ‘Classic Anglican’ sources (Cranmer, Hooker, Herbert),9 the book will be able both to have some reflective Anglican depth as well as demonstrate the scale of the change. There is real treasure in our Anglican heritage, even if we must not in a fundamentalist way try to reproduce it now. I know that Herbert in particular has come to be seen as the bane of English Anglican parochial clergy, as his manual – The Country Parson (1652) – has allegedly got under our skin with its anachronistic and unrealistic vision of parish ministry.10 But if we set up a dialogue with, say, Herbert’s values rather than simply his practice, we will have a more life-giving conversation. What truths and values do we need to keep or reshape? As we do that historical theological work so we will be able to see more clearly where change needs to come. The Ordinals will also be an important conversation partner since they set the theological framework within which vicars operate. There is deep wisdom in how the Church has organized itself for centuries, and this book will try to have a conversation with that traditional wisdom in our new context.

My training has in part been as a practical theologian, so as well as weaving into the book my own experiences and observations from a quarter-century of ordained ministry, I will try to deepen them by use of practical theological methods.11 In addition to stories there will be reflection on what is happening anthropologically, sociologically and psychologically, as well as theologically, in these events. Why do so many of the families who have suffered a suicide still bring their young men to our churches for their funerals? Why did the mum of one of these 18-year-olds ask to hold his funeral with us, even though she had become a member of one of the New Churches? Because this is the church her family have known – even distantly – for generations. Because this is where, she said, ‘they will feel safe’, even at this moment of heart-rending grief. Because, I think, she felt that vicars can be trusted to do this right. They are ‘God’s sensible people’, not least because they wear archaic clothes! None of this was connected explicitly to her new-found faith in Jesus, but it is the context in which we live and the role that we embody. And in keeping with good practical theological method, there will be some practical ideas to take into ministry.

The Church and country still need vicars

Of the writing of bo...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Whose world is it anyway?
• 3 What on earth is the Church for?
• 4 The mysteries of place
• 5 Signs of the kingdom
• Part 2
• 6 In persona Christi – and not
• 7 No more FKB (‘Father knows best’)
• 8 The Chief Exec?
• 9 Joy and throne and hair shirt: the Bible and vicaring
• 10 Sacraments of the present moment
• 11 ‘You’re the man who talks about God’: evangelism neither bashful nor cheesy
• Part 3
• 12 Self-fulfilment or self-sacrifice or self-fulfilment?
• 13 Are vicars sad?
• 14 ‘Do justice . . . love kindness . . . walk humbly with your God’
• 15 Jesus-likeness
• Conclusion
• 16 Success?
• Notes
• About the author