A Pastoral Handbook for Anglicans

Guidelines and Resources for Pastoral Ministry

Billings S Bradley

• Publisher: Broughton Publishing Pty Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780987045898
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Konfessionen

This is now the third edition of the Pastoral Handbook for Anglicans, following on from the two earlier editions prepared and published in 1988 and in 2001 respectively. The Pastoral Handbook seeks to provide useful and practical guidelines to Anglican ministers that are grounded in, and arise directly out of, the sustained practice of ministry over an extended period of time. It is shaped and informed throughout by the Scriptures, Anglican pastoral theology, and the liturgical resources provided by A Prayer Book for Australia 1995, with reference also to applicable canon law.

As is the case in the previous two editions, the provision of Anglican ministry in the context of Christian initiation (baptism, confirmation, reception), marriages and funerals are each addressed in detail, with attention to recent developments in these significant areas of ministry. A new section addresses pastoral ministry in other circumstances, such as ministry with the sick and dying, and the reconciliation of a penitent. A further entirely new chapter has been provided by internationally renowned theologian Dr Stephen Burns on ‘Pastoral Ministry Today, ’ which sets the practice of Anglican pastoral ministry in the social and missional context of early 21st century Australia.

Although produced in the Diocese of Melbourne, the Pastoral Handbook for Anglicans has been written with a wider audience in mind and is offered as a resource for the national church.

Chapter One

Pastoral Ministry Today

Stephen Burns

This chapter engages with trends and trajectories in Australian society, and these as they impact the church. ³ Reflection centres on:

1.Ministry around pastoral services;

2.Cross-cultural community-building;

3.Fresh expressions of church.

But by no means do all persons who seek the church for pastoral services think alike or have the same expectations; not all migrant experience is akin; and fresh expressions of church can be diverse. More than that: nor do the gifts, convictions and preferences of all congregations, public ministers or other Christians fit with only one of the modes of ministry explored in what follows. For these reasons, the words ‘some’ and ‘may’ are important in my reflections, and their configuration in phrases like ‘some people may…’ Regular use of provisional words reminds us that what we are exploring is not solid moulds into which all people fit, or blueprints to which all people conform, but something more complex. We need to make connections across trajectories as part of deft thinking about pastoral ministry today.

Furthermore, although these reflections do not shy away from facing the cultural flux in which the church offers ministry, here and now, in Victoria, it also needs to be grasped that some things stay the same: God loves the world, and God is ‘infinite in mercy, welcoming sinners’⁴ in Christ Jesus. Jesus is good news; he is risen, redeeming, and reliable. In Christ we might yet, as one poet puts it, ‘taste bread, freshness, the honey of being’.⁵ The Spirit bestowed by God is still moving over the face of the earth, making home in open hearts, breathing life through the scriptures, and giving signs of the divine reign.⁶ In the strong name of the Spirit-filled Jesus, liberty from hurt and harm, justice for the last and least, new life and unusual kindness all occur. God is faithful.⁷

These starting convictions matter because confidence and joy in the gospel contains, copes with and enables the squaring up to difficulties which is necessary to flourishing in pastoral ministry amidst the ‘changes and chances’⁸ of contemporary cultures. And those changes are rapid. Since the last edition of this Handbook—in 2001⁹—much has shifted in Australia, and the Anglican Church is caught up in it. A lot of the church growth that has occurred in the last decade and a half is related to the incoming of ethnic minorities and other immigrants. Other growth has happened in communities with reconfigured relationships to historic Anglican forms of liturgy and polity, but that nevertheless embody deepdown Anglican verve about proclaiming the ancient and durable gospel afresh in each generation.¹⁰ Yet these key growth points notwithstanding, national census material for 2011¹¹ reveals that numbers of those identifying as Anglican, and those attending Anglican worship, are on the slide. Anglicanism is among other old-line traditions that are marked in many places by what Gary Bouma calls ‘increasingly geriatric assemblies’,¹² in which two or even three generations of younger persons are absent.

In the same period (since 2001) global Anglicanism has shown new fractures. In some ways, the Anglican Communion at large has been marked by features that have a long history in its Australian form: diocesanism, unilateralism, and clenched withdrawal from wider forums.¹³ These have each played their part in the drama of the Communion in recent years. And the global strains in our tradition around some churches’ welcome, and others’ rejection, of lesbian, gay and transgendered persons, are connected to quite local issues, at least if Australian commentators are correct to point to the church’s official (which is not necessarily to say, popular) views of sexuality as a stumbling-block for onlookers. For example, recent research on youth ministry in Australia contends that ‘the majority of young people look at the churches with some suspicion and even disdain. Many see them as irrelevant and out of date. They see them as exclusive and intolerant, even repressive, particularly in relation to different expressions of sexuality.’¹⁴ A particularly stark and distressing—and utterly unavoidable—truth is that, as Royal Commissions have shown us, the church’s cultures have sheltered those who would abuse the vulnerable young, and so young and other people’s suspicions have sometimes been sadly well-founded.

Though aspects of this situation are clearly bleak, there is nothing to be gained from evading the facts. We need to remember that if we are to engage here in pastoral theology, it involves ‘resolutely refusing to engage in theological discourse that fails to engage unpleasant or inconvenient aspects of human life.’¹⁵ Yet it also remains that despite shame and trouble, care in various modes of pastoral ministry continues to offer very precious opportunities to invite persons to Christ and the gospel, and to serve as a portal to the best that Christian communities can offer. The realities of decline and abuse do, however, invite a sturdy reframing of pastoral ministry in intentionally missional mode, and with very careful lines of accountability. In the current context of mission, neither knowledge of nor goodwill towards the churches can be presumed amongst the so-called general population. In terms of accountability, abuse and settings that enable it must be stopped. Taken together, these factors mean that what pastoral ministries involve in the current climate is not simply continuous with what they may have involved in times past when it was possible to hold quite different assumptions about the general population’s religious sensibilities, their knowledge of at least key pieces of Christian tradition, and their openness to and respect for the church’s representatives. This is no longer the case. So ministries of pastoral care are not for the faint-hearted, though they must be filled with gentleness; and they are not for the change-averse, as they require robustness and grit to engage sensitively and creatively with cultural conditions that are not as before.

Reaching Out Through Pastoral Services

In the 2011 national census something like 463,000 people in the Melbourne area identified as Anglicans, but perhaps only around 25,000 of them regularly attended a congregation of the church for public worship. The space between those who are regular worshippers and those who identify as Anglican is sometimes called cultural Anglicanism. This is a form of cultural Christianity that has, in Australia and elsewhere, at least in the past, been passed across generations with very little, or just nominal participation in congregational life supporting an Anglican identity. A mark of cultural Anglicans is that whilst they are not regularly involved in church on Sundays, they might use the ministries of the church community and of a pastor at times of significance, need, celebration and commitment. So pastoral services are important to consider with respect to persons who approach the church at the time of a death in the family, or who may exert influence upon a decision in the family to approach the church to solemnise a marriage or to seek the baptism of a child.¹⁶

Sympathetic studies of this kind of connection to church life suggest that at least some such persons are likely to understand themselves in relation to the Christian tradition, most especially in their embrace of the ‘golden rule’: ‘do to others as you would have them do to you’.¹⁷ For some, this may be a conscious way of identifying themselves with God, or with Jesus—albeit not necessarily exclusively so, as they might, and rightly, associate such a rule also with several great faiths. Such a connection is, though, a point of contact with biblical memory and with Christian values; it is a place at which a pastoral minister can meet cultural Christians.

It ought also to be acknowledged, with gratitude, that such persons may well also pursue an active prayer life of some kind. This is another significant point of connection with what the Church represents and offers. What seems to be less common amongst cultural Christians—whichever tradition they may approach in times of need—is a feeling for very much Christian doctrine, or a prayer life informed by contemporary liturgy. That is, identification with the golden rule might be made quite apart from systematic clarity about aspects of the ‘content’ of the faith. The prayer of cultural Anglicans, if it is shaped at all by liturgical forms, is more likely to draw on the Book of Common Prayer (1662) than A Prayer Book for Australia (1995). The non-doctrinaire approach held by many cultural Christians may also lead to their self-identification as ‘spiritual, but not religious’—though this is a descriptor that shelters a very wide variety of perspectives, of which cultural Christianity, and cultural Anglicanism in particular, is just one small strand.

When welcoming and engaging with cultural Christians, it is therefore important that pastoral ministers do not assume too much—such as doctrinal commitments—but rather focus on the point of contact that is owned and acted upon in the other’s decision to seek the church’s ministry for some reason. It is good that people pray; it is good that they refer to things that Jesus said; and it is good that they seek the rites of the church as their elders perhaps taught them. Nevertheless, to Christians with a lively personal sense of the abundance of divine grace, cultural Anglicanism might seem to have a somewhat minimalist faith. So it may seem strange for such Christians to listen to those pastoral ministers who see this form of engagement with the Church as well and good. (Most might agree at least that it is better than nothing.) The English Anglican theologian Alan Billings, for example, argues in his book Lost Church¹⁸ that in his context (Kendal, Cumbria, in the north of England) it is a mistake to regard people as simply believing, or not, and/or attending, or not. Rather, he suggests, many people continue to think of themselves as belonging—and doing so without necessarily either believing much or attending often, at least beyond occasional pastoral services and perhaps a few festival days.

In another book, Secular Lives, Sacred Hearts,¹⁹ Alan Billings writes movingly of the integrity of the ‘thinking-with-small-fragments’ of Christian faith that can and often does go on amongst cultural Anglicans, and it is likely that this goes on here as in Britain. For instance, in seeking baptism for their children, cultural Christians may not think of themselves as affirming the Trinitarian faith that the Church’s liturgy presumes. Even so, what they are thinking may be very significant for them. For example, cultural Christians may recognise the baptism service as an important time to gather friends and family around a child, for something like a ‘showing’—a thought Billings connects to the Epiphany theme of ‘appearance’ and the nativity story of the magi bringing gifts to the infant Jesus.²⁰ Families coming to baptism may connect with that story, Billings claims, as their little one is being showered with gifts by family and friends.

Of course, connecting cultural Christians’ experience of baptism to Epiphany-tide stories of the magi is unusual; it is not where the baptismal liturgy places weight. But, Billings argues, it provides access to the good news of Jesus that builds upon the basics of the golden rule. And just as a sense of the golden rule may not depend much on acceptance—or awareness—of other parts of scripture or Christian teachings, so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to the 2018 edition
• Introduction
• Chapter One—Pastoral Ministry Today
• Chapter Two—Christian Initiation
• Chapter Three—Marriage
• Chapter Four—Funerals
• Chapter Five—Other Pastoral Services
• Appendix One—A sample parish policy for pastoral services
• Appendix Two—Pastoral Offices and Surplice Fees policy