Mutual Enrichment

The SCP was in something of a glum mood the other day (a splendid and very widely-applicable word, ‘glum’, I don’t use it enough), contemplating the depredations of evangelicalism across the diocese (and I hadn’t even raised the matter of the proposed parish share system).

The very first post I made on this blog, eight years ago, concerned a tall tale told in the parish of Elmham near Lamford, which I strongly suspect was put about by the then incumbent of that church, a man of some peculiarities himself. Fr Donald looks after Elmham now, and is in rather better favour with the powers-that-be than his predecessor. Because Donald is thought of as a safe pair of Anglo-Catholic hands he occasionally has ordinands or curates from evangelical parishes sent to him to get a dose of an alternative way of doing things, and has lately been working with one of these, a curate who’s been ordained for two years now. ‘He said that before he came to us he’d been warned that he should on no account receive communion from me, because I was gay and he’d go to hell,’ Donald told us. He’d go to hell! I related this to Ms Formerly Aldgate who commented ‘it’s like the idea people had in the ‘80s that you could catch gayness’.

That kind of prejudice is one thing, and Donald said the curate had admitted that ‘the idea seemed completely unsustainable within two days of me getting here’. More concerning, perhaps, was what Donald had also found out about this new priest’s experience: two years into his curacy and he’d only done one funeral service; he’d never led a school assembly; never taken part in a meeting of a community body. That’s not what his church does. Any kind of community-based, pastoral ministry isn’t on the agenda there. Clergy there are preachers and ‘mission leaders’, not pastors. The assembled SCP members fulminated and huffed about how pastoral ministry was the core of being a proper priest. ‘That’s what I got ordained to do’, said one.

When a church gets bigger, and more laypeople get involved with the work of the Body of Christ (which is exactly what you want to happen), it’s all too easy for a clergyperson to think that their role of leadership and strategy means that they should always delegate pastoral, community stuff to laypeople. The temptation is to create a hierarchy of church activity in which taking communion to an old lady who can’t get to church, or visiting a family with a poorly child, or helping distraught next-of-kin with a funeral service even if they’ve never been anywhere near the church, or speaking to a group of fidgety six-year-olds, or – God help me – going through with schizophrenic Trevor for the tenth time in a week why he isn’t being persecuted and needn’t be afraid, is fundamentally less important than writing a sermon or reorganising church committees. Perhaps I see this temptation more acutely because I’m not much of a pastor and am bad at it, and heading out to the hospital to see a member of the congregation is something I have to grit my teeth a bit to do. I didn’t get ordained for the sake of this aspect of the work, but it’s vital – it is, in metaphorical terms, washing the feet of Christ’s poor.

To miss it out or downgrade its importance is to miss what being an ordained person is, not just because it’s part of what you’re supposed to do, but because it’s part of what the Body of Christ is supposed to do and you are in yourself a sacrament of the Body of Christ. That is why you’re ordained, set aside from the laos as a whole. You represent what the whole of the Church is intended to do, and if you didn't do it, eventually nobody would. The pastoral ministry would wither from the heart of the Church first, and then from the whole of it.

Of course most evangelical churches are rooted in their local communities and do exactly the same kind of pastoral work as Anglo-Catholic ones. Also the training of curates in this diocese does insist that they should have experience of pastoral stuff, which may be exactly why they get sent to places like Elmham, not merely so they can learn what a thurible is and which way round you wear a chasuble. What a placement will find harder to do is to combat the instrumental, technocratic concept of priesthood which seems to be creeping across the Church – and that’s the deeper issue.

And at some point I will post something vaguely cheerful.