Power to the Laypeople

We weren’t sure whether Paula’s licence as Pastoral Assistant had expired, and it took ages before I was able to find someone at Church House who could tell me. Pastoral Assistant, it turned out, was no longer a licenced role: we should have had a letter from Bishop Jo about it at the end of 2019. Neither I nor any of the three people in the parish with PA licences could remember getting a letter from Bishop Jo, but fair enough. PAs were now PAs as long as they and their incumbent wanted them to be.

But that wasn’t, it seems, a one-off: the Diocese is completely changing the ‘Lay Training Pathway’, as I was told in a meeting on Tuesday. Once upon a time, Pastoral Assistants, Occasional Preachers and Worship Leaders were all trained centrally, on their own specific courses, and either ‘locally recognised’, ‘centrally authorised’ or ‘episcopally licenced’; now the intention is simply to let parishes get on with it in all these three areas and if people want to have any training they can take part in the relevant modules of the Local Ministry Programme, the training schedule for priests and deacons. When Sylv, the most active of our PAs within the church, did her lengthy and demanding course, she came out of it with an obvious sense of confidence and of being equipped for what she wanted to do, so it was worthwhile in her case, but the diocese maintains a lot of potential PAs are put off by the training and what they want to do is ‘empower the laity’. Mind you, they also want to avoid the situation where a church has half-a-dozen Occasional Preachers all stabbing their diocesan paper of authorisation with a forefinger and demanding their full entitlement of five sermons a year or whatever. I was baffled by the distinction between the new ‘Lay Pastoral Visitors’ and the old ‘Pastoral Assistants’ who have ‘done more training’, when you would that thought that the training was tailored to the role rather than determining what role you have. Oh well. A liturgical church is less likely to need ‘worship leaders’, and as for Occasional Preachers I allowed local teacher Tim to occupy the pulpit (if we had a pulpit) without a demur as I was sure he wouldn’t preach heresy or upset people too much. I’ve always thought I could do what I wanted in that respect anyway.

I had to explain that I was keeping myself muted because there was off-screen noise at my end, but I didn’t explain the noise in question was an online seminar on another screen with Professor Ronald Hutton talking about the contribution of occultists Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente to modern paganism. I think I managed to get the gist of both, but it was a close-run thing, I can tell you.