America and Britain: some comments arising from Phyllis Tickle on an 18-month window
Phyllis Tickle has written an intriguing post on the Emergent Village Blog. Here’s a sample:
Within the next eighteen to twenty-four months, denominations and established communions and the Christians who constitute them will decide, consciously or simply by default, whether “church” is first and foremost an experience of communal bonding, spiritual and religious expression, growth in concert with the ages, radical obedience, adoration, and transport or whether it is first and foremost an institution—one that does business and has structure and also structures which are to be supported, and one that is a means for organized interface with, and shaping of, the world external to it as the best means of effecting the Gospel’s principles upon and within culture.
She points out that these aren’t an either/or option, but a question of where the spiritual emphasis will lie – institutional survival or, if I summarize correctly, ‘pragmatic spiritual community’. She then points out the significance of those Emerging Christians who have opted to stay in their denominations as a context for doing Emerging Church. (Sorry to be so passé using that phrase. If you’re offended, just pretend it’s 2005 and you’ll feel OK…). Phyllis Tickle continues:
Whether one calls this third body of folk the hyphenateds or by their sect-specific names of Methomergents, Luthermergents, Presbymergents, etc. matters not. What matters is that they are the “X” factor at the moment, What matter is that they are peeling off in increasing numbers from the institutionalized bodies out of which they have come. As they withdraw, they leave those inherited bodies more and more stripped of their resources and energy, certainly. More importantly, however, they also leave those established, inherited communions devoid of disparate voices and arguably more temporally relevant points of view.
America is always changing, so although it’s only just under a year since I last visited, there seems to be a changing of the waters in regard to the place of Emerging Christians in the established denominations. I would be interested to find out from some of my contacts within such circles whether they agree with Phyllis Tickle’s analysis.
The British situation seems considerably distant from these developments. For several reasons:
- Although we have had new, non-denominational churches for decades, they have not really eclipsed the continued significance of denominational Churches; the Church of England in particular.
- The denominational Churches in Britain seem to have been far better at admitting and welcoming Emergent and Fresh Expression forms of Church; again, the Church of England in particular.
- For those who are interested in Emerging Church, the denominational route (and, boringly again, the Church of England in particular) is at least as viable as an independent option, if not more so
Among Emerging (oops, there I go again! Think ’2005′ people…) pioneers in Britain, the more pressing question pertains to what Phyllis Tickle describes as the ‘adolescence’ of Emergent Christianity (in the sense that it has left behind its ‘childhood’ and stands on the brink of adult public engagement). This particularly focusses on the question of whether, in Britain, Fresh Expressions/Emerging forms of Church run the risk of losing some of their cutting edge by being absorbed into the life of larger expressions of Church by the welcome and support they have received. A key commentator on this question has been Ben Edson. (See his recent piece on ShareTheGuide.org.)
A key factor in responding to this sort of questioning must surely be whether Fresh Expressions / Emerging Churches are becoming more or less effective missional communities by their continued engagement with denominational (or established non-denominational) churches. That’s a very difficult issue to judge, because, in contrast to the picture being painted by Phyllis Tickle of Emerging Churches in the USA, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of any other game in town in this country.
Posted on Thursday, 27 August 2009 by Paul | Posted in altworship,emerging church,good ole cofe | Comments Off
Pass on the cup
So I’m intrigued: how many CofE communicants received communion in both kinds today?
Posted on Sunday, 26 July 2009 by Paul | Posted in good ole cofe | 2 comments
Coming to a Church of England church near you this weekend: communion in one kind
Readers in the Church of England may be surprised to learn that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have written to all clergy recommending the withdrawal of the common cup (ie. the chalice) at Holy Communion, commencing this Sunday. You can get the official word on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s website. This is potentially controversial, as one of the hallmarks of the Reformation was the restoration of communion in both kinds (bread and wine) to all participants. In this, the Archbishops seem to be following government advice.
As I’m not a parish priest anymore, with the responsibility of implementing this policy, I feel somewhat free to give my opinion. That opinion is from someone who has no medical training whatsoever, so take it on that basis…
The last significant ‘flu pandemic was in 1968 – so-called Hong Kong ‘Flu. During that time, weekly consultation rates rose to a peak of over 1200 per 100,000 (ie. over 1 in 100 visited the doctor each week with symptoms). At the moment (25 July 2009), with Swine ‘Flu, weekly consultation rates are at just under 200 per 100,000. Quite how many people currently have swine ‘flu is probably impossible to know.
However, the point is this: in 1968, the common cup was not withdrawn in Holy Communion. So what’s changed? After all, this is a bad ‘flu, not bubonic plague or cholera.
Simon thinks the difference in the response is to do with there being a potential breakdown in confidence in taking Holy Communion in church – which, given our media-saturated age, may be true. A big factor, for me, is that people (and therefore governments) seem to be far more risk-averse than they were in 1968, a year which I somehow managed to survive (along with the vast majority of the Church of England).
Perhaps somewhere there are lawyers breathing the phrase “duty of care” into some ecclesiastical ears. But I can’t help feeling that this is massive overreaction. The people most at risk from this ‘flu are already ill – and they already know that they will need to take extra precautions to avoid infection. But I doubt whether withdrawing the cup from the Church of England communion services is going to make any significant difference to the spread of the disease, and hence the risk to those who are already immuno-suppressed or who have chronic illness.
Other changes apparently coming in are:
- Communion wafers will be placed in the hands, not (as in some churches) directly in the mouth or on the tongue
- In some places, Holy Water stoups are being drained
- Priests and distributors of the Communion are being urged to avoid touching people’s hands while giving them the bread/wafers
- Communion by intincting bread/wafers in the wine is being stopped – apparently, it’s more likely to spread disease than drinking directly from the cup, since we have nastier and higher-numbers of bugs on our fingers than in our mouths
Then of course, there’s shaking hands (or in some places, hugging and kissing) at the Peace… Maybe that’s why the Church of England managed to survive the 1968 ‘flu outbreak. It was before the arrival of Holy Communion – Series 3 and ‘The Peace’. People kept in their pews and didn’t try to snog each other.
Posted on Saturday, 25 July 2009 by Paul | Posted in good ole cofe,politics | 7 comments
How come the Pentecostals have all the fun?
We need more of this kind of stuff in the Anglican Church … BOH!
Posted on Friday, 6 February 2009 by Paul | Posted in altworship,emerging church,good ole cofe,humour,music | 4 comments
Mainline churches: the real reason for decline
The underlying problem of the mainline churches … is the weakening of the spiritual conviction required to generate the enthusiasm and energy needed to sustain a vigorous communal life. Somehow, in the course of the past century, these churches lost the will or the ability to teach the Christian faith and what it requires to a succession of younger cohorts in such a way as to command their allegience … In respose to the currents of modernity, denominational leaders … did not devise or promote compelling new versions of a distinctively Christian faith. They did not fashion or preach a vigorous apologetics …
…Many of them have reduced the Christian faith to belief in God and respect for Jesus and the Golden Rule, and among this group a growing proportion have little need for the church.
Perhaps some now unforeseen cultural shift will one day bring millions of baby boom dropouts back to the mainline churches. But nothing we discovered in our study suggests the likelihood of such a shift. If the mainline churches want to regain their vitality, their first step must be to address theological issues head on. They must … provide compelling answers to the question, “what is so special about Christianity?”
(Benton Johnson, Dean R. Hoge and Donald A. Luidens, ‘Mainline Churches: the real reason for decline’, First Things 31 (March 1993) 18. Quoted in Marva Dawn, Reaching out without dumbing down (Eerdmans, 1995) 46.)
Posted on Monday, 1 September 2008 by Paul | Posted in emerging church,good ole cofe,theology | 1 comment
St Paul had it easy
The first thing to say is that I think the whole shift of culture in the Church of England after the report Mission-shaped Church has been wonderful for anyone who wants to risk trying to plant Fresh Expressions of Church. When I think back just seven years, the Church of England was comparatively in the “dark ages” as far as church-planting is concerned. At this month’s General Synod, we discussed the final stage of the process which makes it culturally and legally possible for a group of Anglican Christians to plant a church outside of a single parish boundary, and not necessarily wedded to a Parish structure. This becomes possible through a mechanism called a “Bishop’s Mission Order”. It will mean many Fresh Expressions, Alternative Worship communities and Emerging Church groups have a vehicle, within Anglican structures, to exist, flourish and enjoy full legitimation. All great so far …
However, the “Code of Practice” which has been drawn up by the House of Bishops, and which governs how Bishop’s Mission Orders can work runs to 83 pages, six chapters and five appendices. Although essentially an enabling document, it speaks volumes about a large Church which is shackled to structures inherited from a past rooted in Christendom, and for whom the call to become truly missionary (or missional, if you prefer) has come late, perhaps too late, in its history.
Here is a quick look at a simplified “Procedure Flowchart” which explains the process of how a mission initiative (actual or planned) would go about getting legitimation through a Bishop’s mission order. Pretty, isn’t it? Pretty complicated… (If you click on the image, it will download it in PDF).
Having read the document, I found myself thinking, again and again, “what are we afraid of?” The overwhelming fear seems to be that certain territorial or ecumenical feathers may be ruffled by the appearance in an area of a new, young, fast-changing form of church which people are attracted to, but which cannot be controlled by more established Christian power structures. A lesser fear also lurks, based on the assumption that spontaneity, innovation and rapid development will always end in tears, and the fear that this might besmirch the “good name” of the reliable product of the Church of England. Of course, once in a blue moon, this can actually happen (as it did in the case of Nine O’Clock Service).
I have to shrug my shoulders reluctantly and accept that megaliths such as the Church of England do have a low fear threshold when it comes to legitimating anything which is fast-moving, subject to change, hard to understand and therefore hard to control. But at the same time, I wish more people would recognize that we (ie. the CofE) have to be far more afraid of the haemorrhaging of attendance from so many parish churches who stick to the established script, for at the moment it looks like a slow and irreversible death from a thousand cuts. Although I do not believe the parish model to be completely broken from a missional point of view, I do think that it is holed below the waterline as a “default” mode of being church. My guess is that for every one example which works (from a mission point of view) there are probably about forty which are not working and have very little likelihood of ever working again. So the need for the Church to have a “mixed economy” of modes of being church is far more urgent than most people realize. The very kind of communities which we need are those which are fast-moving, subject to change, hard to understand outside their context and therefore hard to control. We need to trust the Holy Spirit a bit more when it comes to mission, and legal or quasi-legal structures a good bit less, because law – however useful it is – does not drive mission, but is there to cater for the odd occasion when things go wrong. So the document (which delights in the catchy title Dioceses, Pastoral and Mission Measure 2007: Part V: Mission Initiatives Code of Practice) had me with my head in my hands on
occasion. I’m grateful that it makes possible what it makes possible, but it doesn’t necessarily make it easy, nor does it necessarily make it possible in a short space of time – especially when it’s not operating in sympathetic or confident hands. I couldn’t help wondering what St Paul would have done in Asia Minor if he needed to go through this kind of rigamarole. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that the whole Church of England (and, sadly, it would appear, the House of Bishops) also need to rediscover that generous Catholic missional spirit we see between people like St Paul, Apollos and others, which worried less about territory and ownership, and far more about the message getting out and transforming the world.
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labour of each. For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building. (1 Cor 3:5-9)
It’s not difficult to redraw the version of the “Procedure Flowchart” which led to the planting of the Church of God amongst the Gentile communities in Asia Minor. Even with the co-existence of Judaizing opposition groups who were seeking to undo (or “correct”) their work, it still took off and became the womb of Eastern Christianity.
Posted on Wednesday, 27 February 2008 by Paul | Posted in altworship,emerging church,good ole cofe,humour,rants | 4 comments
As the dust settles at General Synod
I’m spending most of this week at the General Synod, which is the main legislative governing body of the Church of England. It normally only gets a ripple of interest from the British media, but on Monday there was a scrummage of photographers who were there to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Presidential Address, which – it had been advertised – would contain some remarks following the hoo-hah after his comments last week about the relationship between British civil law and elements of Sharia law code in British Muslim communities. You can read his presidential address on his website.
The media’s reporting of his speech was histrionic and islamophobic. Even the BBC website, normally a balanced source of news, succumbed. Politicians, knowing this, sought to distance themselves from his comments. I was phoned up on Friday by the Daily Telegraph as part of a poll they were taking of Synod members regarding Sharia Law and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Predictably, I was asked whether I thought the archbishop should resign. After a snort, I indicated he had my full confidence and support. The comment by the researcher was, “yes, we’re getting that response from rather a lot of the Synod”. In the end, only two members of the Synod said that they believed he should go. There are nearly 500 members. That’s 0.4% of the Synod, which is significantly lower than the lunatic fringe one can normally rely upon existing in most human organisations – particularly church ones. The BBC website the next day reported these two members under the headline that the Archbishop was under growing pressure to resign.
If the Archbishop was guilty of anything, it was of overestimating the capacity that Britain currently has for having an informed and genuinely open debate over the place of Islam in British society. His remarks show a commendable openness to explore, with seriousness, the desire expressed in different ways by British Muslims for recognised space for the practice and expression of their faith and culture in the public sphere. This might include exploring possible ways to permit a connection between religious authority and the governing of civil affairs in way that, to a limited degree, both Jews and Christians presently enjoy. The archbishop, in expressing his remarks, was showing Christian leadership by example in treating the Muslim as his neighbour. If we are to love our neighbour as ourselves, that must surely include a willingness to dialogue, which in turn does not insist on limits and preconditions before the dialogue exercise begins. True dialogue must always imply that either side is willing to be changed by the process.
By contrast, many politicians and political commentators contributed to the controversy with doctrinaire assertions about the relationship of faith to the national state, most of which were based on philosophical thinking from the Enlightenment. David Blunkett, former Home Secretary, when interviewed on the BBC’s Today programme, referred to Rousseau and Locke as if they were the Last Word which could not be challenged or questioned. Yet the point is that much Western thinking on faith-state relationships assumes faith difference to lie within a single majority religion (Christianity) located within the contextual unity of a single culture. The fact that we are no longer in this situation, with the presence of many who are in effect of no faith, and others of widely-varying faiths and cultures, indicates our need for a nuanced exercise in listening, dialogue and debate conducted with considerable maturity assisted by wise, responsible and courageous leadership. Nevertheless, the week’s news showed that our present political consensus is wedded to a secularist approach, which either cannot or will not understand that for most people of faith, God’s will will always be more authoritative than the State’s will. It would seem that British political opinion is conforming itself more and more to French models of secular democracy, which in that country seem in danger of fostering tinder-boxes of seething cultural resentment. Too few of our younger politicians seem to appreciate that Britain’s historical acceptance of Faith as an intrinsic part of its public life has yielded, as a by-product, religious leaders with a place in the constitution who have unique expertise and insight to help in any discussion of how an alienated religious minority might be included and find their place in the public square. Sadly, many commentators last week suggested that the Archbishop’s comments were nothing other than a part of some hard-line drive to resist inevitable secularizing forces. By alienating even the established elements of religion, inclusion of alienated religious minority communities is made less likely, not more. Through immigration, it is likely that British society has become far more religious, not less. Stock political solutions drawn from European secularization, founded on philosophy which is two centuries old, may serve to back the forces of social fragmentation, rather than the forces of social cohesion. This is bitterly ironic and deeply worrying.
The sad part of last week’s coverage is not whether or not it has detracted from the Archbishop’s authority. Monday’s immense standing ovation by the General Synod after the Archbishop’s Presidential Address indicated that within that body, at least, he continues to enjoy overwhelming love and support. No – the sad part is that it has indicated something far more worrying: that presently Britain lacks the political courage and the public ability to discuss the place of Muslim communities within the public sphere with anything like fairness, wisdom or maturity. Our press, both editors and journalists alike, seek rich professional pickings by trading on an undercurrent of Islamophobia amongst the chattering classes, reflecting a subterranean racism lurking under most of “middle-England”. Only a glance at the BBC website discussion boards makes this abundantly clear.
Perhaps in this respect, the Archbishop’s comments could be regarded as “prophetic” and like most prophecy within the Bible, it clarifies a deeply uncomfortable situation. The past week’s events have shown us a picture of the condition of Britain, from the top of power downwards, that we would rather not have been forced to acknowledge. And, as Jeremiah on occasion was wont to do, perhaps Rowan Williams is asking himself whether it would have been better not to have given voice at all, since to do so merely makes the pain seem so much worse. At times like this, it feels like holding onto an article of faith that only the truth can set us free, however painful the discovery, and however challenging the task it assigns us.
Posted on Wednesday, 13 February 2008 by Paul | Posted in good ole cofe,politics | 2 comments
Shooting ‘em up in Manchester Cathedral
It’s not often that a church-related news story goes huge, but the annoyance of the Dean and Chapter of Manchester Cathedral has really struck a raw nerve with the Sony Corporation. Ruth Gledhill is following the story and provides a good update on things as far as today (Friday).
It’s always a good idea to check things out for yourself, so in that vein I visited the YouTube site. You can watch it too if you so wish. I’d be interested in your comments. (It goes on a bit: 10 minutes of carnage.)
I was ordained in Manchester Cathedral. I don’t think there were any aliens in it at the time, although come to think of it …
Posted on Friday, 15 June 2007 by Paul | Posted in good ole cofe | Comments Off
Three posts on clergy life – coda – you get the priests you plan for
Gosh, Rev Sam’s post has really got me going! Having slept fitfully last night with a woman who’s suffering the adrenaline rush of having just been told her school is to be OFSTED’d next week (she’s the head-teacher; oh, and my wife incidentally…) I became aware of another train of thought Sam’s post had triggered, which wasn’t covered in the ‘Three posts’.
The role of the English parish priest is shaped these days by the circumstances of the Church in Britain. Most lay people now know that when you hear senior clerics talk about a new ‘strategy’, you reach for your gun. For the past 15 to 20 years, when dioceses have produced documents called strategies, what they have really produced is decline management plans. The primary trigger for change has been financial. The costs of running the ministry have gone up (mainly because of pension costs, and decline in central funding). The income is static. The financial support base (the proverbial bum on pew) is static or declining. A plan is needed, otherwise the diocese will go bankrupt.
In essence this means paying for fewer priests across the board. So a round of consultation ensues. This usually involves putting together groups of lay representatives who have little knowledge of each other’s situation, together with the clergy and some senior diocesan person. The result, in nearly every case, is some kind of boxing and coxing affair so that none of the churches have to close, priests (either existing or future) are shared across various kinds of combinations, and laudable things are said about the need for collaborative and lay ministry (as if these weren’t already happening). I have friends right across the Church of England, and it seems that there is very little variation on this theme. There are several things that ensure that this kind of activity will never be ‘strategic’:
- Those most affected by any change are the grass-roots paymasters. So they have the influence which shapes the policy ‘across the board’.
- This produces managerial timidity among those who have the greatest over-all vantage point.
- People always opt for minimum change, unless a long-term change preparation (not management) process has been adopted beforehand.
- Enforced change is the hardest change to make genuinely creative and strategic. When the prospect of enforced change is imminent, people are most resistant to taking creative risks – they go into survival mode, which is highly conservative. (This is sometimes called the ‘rabbit caught in the headlights’ effect.)
- People will agree to anything as long as they think the key structures will remain in place: these are i. My church, ii. Services pretty much as normal, iii. A ministry structured in a way as similar as possible to the one that’s about to change. After the changes happen, they seem to forget the other things they agreed to, and things revert to a state of minimum alteration. The strategic component dies with implementation of change.
- Churches in such plans are essentially congregations in competition with each other for limited resources: this is not conducive to creative collaboration or innovation.
- After one such ‘strategy’ scheme, lay people become understandably cynical with anything that claims to speak about growth and innovation but really is about saving yet more money – so should a genuine strategy come along, it becomes more difficult to implement.
- Everyone seems to forget the parable of the seed, which needs to die if anything is to grow.
A principal culprit in all of this is the received model of ‘the priest in the parish’. Both received models, ‘priest’ and ‘parish’, have proved very ineffective at bringing about a genuinely apostolic turn by the Church in this country. The thing is that they ‘work’ in their own terms. A solitary priest can serve a parish church, keep it going, and in some cases help build up that church either by being very gifted and charismatic, or by adopting good policies of nurture (Alpha courses etc.) The problem is that this does not work across the whole. There are points and places where the demands of the situation are just too much (inner-urban contexts, for example) or the church has dropped in numbers and effectiveness to the point where it cannot be turned around. Yet this model is the one that most people in churches cling onto or crave. There needs to be a breaking open to ‘new ways of being Church’ to quote a modern cliche. More importantly, people need to think more about what is necessary for the good of The Church, not merely ‘my church’. This is the single most important thing to happen: a change in horizon, leading to shift in concern and a change in motivation. This is what I mean by ‘the apostolic turn’ at the start of this paragraph. Only when ‘the apostolic turn’ happens for lots of lay people will a genuinely strategic process start to open up in the Church as a whole.
In the meantime, we are getting the priests that we’ve planned for. Clergy are given extra parishes, but without any genuine re-education of lay expectation, or with adequate preparation and training of lay ministers before they arrive. A multi-parish benefice is more administratively intensive that the cumulative administration of two parishes, because there is parish-A work, parish-B work, and parish A+B work. Clergy find themselves sitting on more and more committees. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult for the priest to just be a priest. Essentially, he or she is running a small, dispersed corporation with two or more centres of activity. The only way to retain anything resembling the traditional pastoral model is to ignore the increased demands for co-ordinating leadership. If that is left to lay people, they will have to straddle the multi-location model instead. Few have the spare time to do this effectively. Few care with equal vigor about the next door church. The perspective remains parochial in the best and worse sense of this word.
For the Team Rector of a group of 15 or more outlying rural parishes, theirs is essentially a managerial task. The ‘priestly’ bits of visiting, teaching and leading worship can only be peripheral to the central role of administration. Again, you’ve got the priest you planned for. If someone asks when that planning took place, it happened when the path of least change was adopted, rather than a williness to make radical changes in the interest of the good of the whole Church. I know a good number of ordained priests who have left the stipendiary ministry because they felt that being stipendiary inevitably led to becoming a manager, and they didn’t have time to focus on both management and what they felt they had been called into the ordained ministry to do. This is a great loss to the Church of England in one sense, but the principle holds at national level too: you get the priests you plan for. It may be this instinct which led to a recent thought-provoking post by Bishop Mike Hill, where he wondered whether the best way of providing innovative, apostolic leaders was not to pay them.
In the meantime, my thoughts return to Mad Priest’s kindly criticism of Rev Sam, and the unease they provoked in me. If priests are called to serve the Church, then like it or not, we have to serve in ways that we are asked, however flawed they may be. It is going to become much more difficult for priests like Mad Priest to move to new posts, as increasing numbers are shaped by the kind of ‘strategy’ outlined above. Perhaps a priest who really wants the time to pray deeply, form seriously transformative relationships with people, preside over worship and teach the Faith, and still have quality time left for their own human and family development is going to have to seek a ministry outside the formal and stipendiary structures of the Church of England. You get the priests you plan for.
Posted on Saturday, 3 February 2007 by Paul | Posted in good ole cofe | 11 comments
Three posts on clergy life (3) – visiting
Sam’s post on clergy workload speaks eloquently of the way the importance of visiting was drilled into him by his training incumbent, and how it ultimately contributed to an experience of burnout, requiring a period of a year out of full-time ministry. Visiting is one of those nostrums of the work of the clergy. Like Sam, I too was trained on the assumption that second to leading worship, visiting was the most important thing clergy should be doing. Some of us will have heard the saying, ‘a visiting parson makes a church-going people’. Trite, but punchy. I know from my own experience that some church members believe that the best way of my going about my time is to spend my hours wandering from street to street, knocking on the doors of my parish. Hmm…
The Visit is one of those tools that all church leaders have in their ‘toolbag’. Used correctly and at the right time, it can be very effective indeed. For example, a visit from the church leader to a newly arrived couple at church will often ensure the link with the church is fused for the long-term. When the church leader calls, people get a sense of their significance to the wider body. It builds key relationships. It is not, however, always the best use of the priest or minister’s time: it just depends on the nature of the locality or parish of the church in question.
Random door-knocking is even less likely to be an effective pastoral or missional method. The area of my two parishes has a high number of bedsits and flats. The population is mobile. 47% are aged in their 20s. In the last (2001) census, a far higher percentage than the national average described themselves as having no religion. A far lower than the national average described themselves as ‘Christian’. Many households are filled with short-term letting students and young professionals. Most occupants work during the day, leaving their homes by 8.30am and returning at the end of the day. Compare this kind of parish to one, perhaps forty years ago, where most residents stayed in the area for decades; where women stayed at home, at least after the birth of the first child. In the latter, a visit from the clergy would be likely to find someone in, and establish a link which would be relevant years later. In the case of my parish, most doors lead to empty flats, except during the evenings – which in my case are taken up with church meetings. Even were there to be someone in the premises during the day, it’s unlikely that the visit would make any meaningful impact, often because the resident would have moved away inside of a year. Many flats these days have electronic entry systems anyway, where the residents only open to expected or known callers. The myth of the visiting priest is eclipsed by the facts.
The myth of the visiting priest is further shattered by the realisation that when it used to happen with any frequency, it was either in small rural parishes, or where an urban parish had about three curates – quite common right up to the 1970s. Solitary parish priests with parishes of in excess of 10,000 people, who are feeling guilty for not visiting more, should be exorcised of the power of this nostrum. Visiting isn’t a panacea. Sometimes it’s bad use of a priest’s time. Occasionally, it’s exactly what the priest needs to do.
In my situation, I have found a far more effective way to build relationships is to go where people like to go. In this area, it’s to meet for a coffee in one of the excellent coffee bars in the neighbourhood. I have also discovered that although church meetings trump the possibility of a visit in an evening most nights, it is possible to meet over lunch with people near their workplace. It’s human contact where people are, rather than the quiet pad of clerical feet down empty streets, that makes the difference.
So we need less clergy training (especially in training curacies) based around nostrums such as the visiting clergyperson. Instead we need some creative, common-sense and strategic thinking, in order to build up the human contact which is essential in all Christan work, by clergy or by others.
Posted on Saturday, 3 February 2007 by Paul | Posted in good ole cofe,uncategorized | 5 comments
