A Confident Priesthood

On Monday evening it was the Archdeacon’s Visitation service at the Cathedral, where all the churchwardens from the parish churches, of all ages, shapes, sizes and churchpersonships, go to swear undying allegiance to the Bishop and hear the Archdeacon preach a variant on his usual sermon which, he always stresses, is not about drainpipes and insurance policies. One of our Swanvale Halt churchwardens is new this year, and this was her first proper engagement. Two more would follow in quick succession this week: a safeguarding training evening and a church council meeting. Gosh.

I sat during all this and contemplated the pillar next to me, which I realised was covered for some distance up in strange, small parallel scratch marks. A mischievous angel whispered in my ear that these were, according to legend, made by Bishop Reindorp as he marked off the days until his retirement, gnawing the hem of his surplice during Evensong. I will have to spread this fact now. On reflection, I’m not completely sure it was an angel.

In fact the spiritual entity, whatever it was, was misinformed as George Reindorp went on from Guildford to be Bishop of Salisbury. But it prompted me to look him up. Some while ago his former parish of St Stephen’s, Rochester Row, Westminster produced a booklet about his time there (1946-57) bits of which found its way into an article in the Church Times. A priest who went to the parish in the mid-1950s as a curate had kept Fr Reindorp’s letter to him before he arrived. ‘I want to see your manuscripts [of sermons] not less than one week before you preach’, the prospective curate was advised (and I use ‘advised’ in its strongest sense). ‘Learn by heart a) the Ten Commandments, b) the long Exhortation at Mattins and c) the exhortation from the 1928 Prayer Book …’ and so on, through paragraphs headed ‘Money’, ‘Punctuality’, and ‘The Vicar’s Wife’. I especially like this bit:

A small point with implications. In this parish there is a Vicar, and Mr Shepherd, Mr Case and Mr Todd. Don’t be led off by high-church coddlers into Father this or that. I like the term, but it is not expedient with this parish set in the midst of Cardinal Griffin’s Mission on one side, and a very "extreme" neighbour on the other. Then there are the loveable folk who refer to Philip Case and Bill Todd. Be advised by an old hand. Look polite and say, "Do you mean Mr Case?" It only has to be done once! Only a small point, you may say, but begin as you mean to go on.

Reindorp insisted on absolute uniformity of practice among all the clergy of the parish, and absolute uniformity of opinion, at least in public. ‘Don’t let it be dreamed that you could think differently from the Vicar on any important matter, although in point of fact you could willingly murder him’. In fact, he told curates that they were in their training parish to learn and not to think.

And then there’s the bit at the heart of the whole thing:

Above all, be prepared to challenge anyone. You are not ordained to be liked. When you leave St Stephen’s more people should love God than when you came, even if they can’t remember your name, and though some may not come to that knowledge till long after your departure.

Of course the curate in question, Timothy Raphael (later an Archdeacon) ‘found this maddening’ a lot of the time, but recognised in Reindorp someone who knew what he was doing, and in whom others could have similar confidence. ‘He cared about people rather than ideas. He had no great academic ability, nor claimed any. No one has ever infuriated me more, given me more, or supported me more.’

My own practice is less directive, partly by inclination, partly because of the time we live in. I inherited my first curate at Swanvale Halt and Marion came to us as what’s known as a Self-Supporting Minister from a moderately Evangelical background: she probably won’t have a parish of her own to run, and I wouldn’t have felt it appropriate to enforce on her complete uniformity with what I do (I have put in her final appraisal, however, that her disinclination to wear a maniple is an area for development). All that stuff from Reindorp’s letter about clergy being addressed as ‘Mister’, too, comes from a very bygone age in which the authority of the ordained person was deemed to be suitably maintained by a sense of distance.

But sometimes I wonder that I am not firm enough about some things. I want to believe that I choose my battles, and the issues that are worth drawing an absolute line on are few, but that can be an excuse for a laxity that does nobody any good. You’ve got to communicate that this business of the spiritual life is important, that choices have to be made, and that they are serious; and perhaps that requires not that a parish priest be rigid about any particular thing, but give the impression that he or she might be when it matters, and has no thought of being popular. ‘When you leave Swanvale Halt, more people should love God than when you came’.

(Most of the nicest pictures of George Reindorp available online seem to come from his famous Christmas cards, which usually showed him doing something priestly (including talking to the Queen), but they’re copyright to Getty. This one is from Guildford Cathedral, and shows him keeping an eye on the Supreme Governor of the Church of England signing the deed during the consecration of the Cathedral in 1961. He only wore his fantastically gigantic mitre once, on this occasion, before Mrs Reindorp told him it looked ridiculous. ‘The vicar’s wife’, he wrote in his letter to Timothy Raphael, ‘seldom interferes’; but, one might add, when she does … ).