Nearly Forgot

I can only imagine Il Rettore was to blame for prompting the church, completely unsuspected by me untill it happened, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of my priesting on Sunday. We had fizz and cake and I cannot complain because there ought to be more occasions for that. I was also presented with a very striking vase I'd admired when it was under consideration for sale at the Spring Fair, and a certificate from the diocese. I had no idea such things existed - I suppose just remaining functioning is an achievement when I think of all those who have left the ministry!

Strangely the anniversary is never one I pay much attention to unlike some of the people I was ordained with and I wonder why that is. In any case I always think of my ordination to the diaconate as being the moment my status changed in the eyes of society, myself, and maybe even God. Perhaps it was because I never really sought this peculiar existence and would have been perfectly content to remain in the museum world had I been turned down at my selection conference: I thought it was what God wanted me to do, but I could have been wrong. I do always think an ordained person should have an idea of what they might try to do if they lost their faith or just their job, but my shadow life has changed over time. I now think it might be good to work for a dog rescue, but I don't think there's much scope there. Even fantastic Bliss Cavalier Rescue only has one part-time employee helping to save beautiful canines!

"Escape to Danger"

Well, if not danger, mild irritation, anyway. At the beginning of the Clergy Conference at Swanwick it is now the custom to ask everyone to stand, and then those whose first conference it is to sit, and so on until the longest-serving (or -suffering) clergyperson is left standing. This year our suffragan bishop had brought along a bar of chocolate which he claimed had been in his fridge for nine years to reward the final upright cleric and it went to Barry who actually retired three years ago and is house-for-duty so had the perfect reason not to be there. Can't he find anything else to do? I forget whether it was my seventh or eighth Conference: they blur. 

I ran away on two occasions, after breakfast on each morning. On Wednesday I went to the convenience store in the village as I was desperate for digestive biscuits, and on Thursday my destination was the same but I wanted a sandwich to take away for lunch as I was anxious to get back to Swanvale Halt for Ascension Day as soon as I could. On the way I spotted what looked like an ornamental drinking fountain in a Classical arch erected to celebrate the Golden Jubilee in 2002, but on inspection it turned out, disappointingly, to be a seat. Or a niche, anyway, with no obvious purpose if it wasn't a seat. I suppose you could put a vase or something in it to mark a notable occasion, but only if you could get through the iron railings surrounding it.

There was mercifully little breaking into small groups during the sessions. There was one occasion during a presentation on statistics about public attitudes to faith when we were encouraged to talk about ways we felt the environment for faith had changed, and I and two colleagues from mainstream moderate evangelical churches were rather taken aback by another gent none of us knew who stated 'As far as I'm concerned the bishops should be repenting for leading the Church into disaster with all this liberal garbage'. There wasn't really a good reply to that as it wasn't really what we were discussing, but in the spirit of engaging with those I disagree with I should have said something like, 'So do you speak to people outside your congregation who tell you that they would come back to church if only the bishops would be tougher on the gays?' but in fact we ended up talking about the Bible as this chap clearly felt he'd succeeded someone who was so liberal they were barely Christian at all and having found a bookcase of Bibles facing the wall his first act as incumbent was to turn them round to face outwards instead. I quite approve of people reading the Bible so that was a point of contact, anyway.

The highlight of the conference wasn't quite my two visits to the corner shop but the short meeting of the SCP chapter we were able to squeeze into Wednesday afternoon between lunch and the afternoon session on Wellbeing. Seven of us gathered in an upper room and had what turned out to be a very pleasant hour in which we heard about a couple of Catholic-side-of-centre churches served by members which had grown very considerably over the last couple of years through nothing more than faithfulness and diligent care of the things of the Spirit. 'A bit of a life saver' said one colleague. 

Holy Week Weary

Holy Week at Swanvale Halt wouldn't happen without lots of people doing and arranging things, and discussions with colleagues makes the point that there is much they do that I don't have to - driving to Covent Garden to buy its entire stock of flowers like Fr Thesis, or cooking eleven legs of lamb as a neighbour is doing for a Maundy Thursday meal. That sounds worryingly like a pretend seder to me, but even if it wasn't I do try to persuade the church that a mammal doesn't absolutely have to die to provide you with a proper meal. Anyway, not my problem, thankfully. But it all makes me reflect that I shouldn't really feel as worn as I do. 

The Chrism Mass this morning was all right: colleagues of the Other Integrity have been posting images of their own Chrism Masses usually featuring the Bishop of Oswestry bearing up under the weight of his mitre, and for once I felt ours was getting there. I found enough flowers in the garden to make up our own modest Altar of Repose, took communion to someone, and I have every expectation that the Maundy service this evening will be fine and basically if I turn up and say the words all manner of things shall be well. Yesterday I even managed to pop to the Kensington Borough Archives (why is a story for another day) and have lunch with a friend. Kensington High Street is graced by this Victorian temperance water fountain provided by the congregation of St Mary Abbotts, which was restored a little while ago and still works. I think some judiciously-selected non-religious activities may just get me through all the faith!

Requiem for a Bishop

Purcell; Duruflé; Fauré; and Rutter's 'The Lord Bless You and Keep You', which I find a bit soppy but says what you want it to; the Cathedral choir acquitted themselves superbly at Bishop Andrew's Requiem Mass today. Not that the order of service referred to the liturgy in those terms, but it was all very traditional. Even the piece of music that nodded most in the direction of +Andrew's usual Evangelical constituency, Stuart Townend's 'In Christ Alone' (complete with the words about God's wrath that some of us can't sing), is about as close to an old-fashioned hymn form as you get from modern Church songwriters. Serried ranks of bishops in proper black chimeres rather than the red they usually wear nowadays whether or not they are Doctors of Divinity, the Diocesan Chancellor in a full-bottomed legal wig, ++Sarah preceded by the primatial cross of Canterbury, and some Orthodox fellow in a black hood - it was all very fine indeed. The only disappointment was that the Lord Lieutenant came in a suit rather than full uniform. He even came to talk to the Swanvale Halt Men's Breakfast once in that, I must point out. Though he was on his way somewhere else, admittedly.

Resting on the coffin were 'the diocesan crozier', which I didn't know existed, a chalice and paten representing +Andrew's priestly ministry, and a mitre standing for his episcopal role. The mitre was rather nicer than the one he usually wore, and I wonder why Anglican bishops can't have nice mitres all the time. Even +Paul and ++Sarah's mitrae simplices were rather handsome in their plainness. In the picture above you can see the Dean carrying the formal crozier up to the high altar where it was laid, the bishop's pastoral ministry being symbolically relinquished. At least he didn't have to snap it in two like the Lord Great Chamberlain at the Queen's funeral, or we'd still be there.

I've already said that the manner of his dying might well have been +Andrew's greatest ministry and, while nobody wanted to say that out loud today, the same sense did hang in the air. It was a great act of faithfulness and I remember most strongly his expression of relief in his second, and last, pastoral letter to the diocese that his faith had not given way in the face of his diagnosis. He talked in a way so personal that you felt it was a kind of liberation: a pastor shouldn't be personal in a way that throws attention on themselves rather than on Christ, but this end-of-life candour was completely appropriate.

A couple of my Evangelical colleagues insisted on raising their hands in the air during the hymns as though they felt they had to, but the communion worked its spiritual wonders and I found any irritation that flashed into my heart was swiftly and rightly drowned by the amazement that after 2000 years Jesus still gives himself up for all these flawed, ridiculous human beings, of whom I am one. The Passion of the Christ draws sombrely closer.

I had an hour to wait for the next train and rather than even attempt to find any lunch at the Cathedral café I went in the other direction and down the hill where there was a 'Pan-Asian' eatery that served me tea and a spicy Indian potato fritter in a bun drizzled with chutneys. 'There were some really fresh green chillis in that' the proprietor grinned proudly. Indeed there were. 

Visited

It wasn't even the Archdeacon who came to do the Archdeacon's Visitation at the church this week; it was the Deputy Archdeacon, the affable newly-retired Vicar of Crowfield who is clearly in need of some activity to ease himself into retirement (I'm pretty sure he doesn't get paid anything more than petrol money). In fact the last Visitation was the only time when an Archdeacon did do it, and as the Archdeacon then very soon became our Suffragan Bishop I had forgotten he wasn't when he came, if you're following me. On this occasion, Deputy Archdeacon Ray's first task was to swear Colin in as our new churchwarden, taking on the remaining months of the term of office until the Annual Meeting after Easter, and then to examine various register books and policies. This time we were mildly upbraided for not having our Certificate of Public Liability Insurance on display in both the church entrance and the hall, and for the Safeguarding Officer's details on show in the former but not the latter. Nobody has ever mentioned those, but ratcheting-up is the point of these things, so far do's. 'Your Safeguarding Dashboard is a bit of a dog's dinner', Ray stated, rather to my surprise, showing us a screen capture on his phone of a range of amber and red boxes, 'though you're not the worst in the diocese'. I suppose that's a comfort to everyone except the worst parish in the diocese, to whom the rest of us should be grateful. Curiously when I went onto the Dashboard the following day I saw much more green, and was able to turn another box green just by confirming the PCC had discussed something, so I don't know where Ray had got his image from, but again, I'm not disagreeing that more needs to be done.

Then we discussed our draft Church Development Plan. I was a bit conscious that a lot of it involves taking decisions about where to go with various ideas, such as whether to instal AV equipment or employ a Musical Director, rather than actually doing any of these things, but Ray was less fazed by that rather than the fact that much rests on me finding people to run with these ideas and build small groups of congregation members to do the thinking. 'Your initials are next to a lot of this', he pointed out, though I think at this stage it's inescapable that they would be. Poor Colin and Robert, the existing churchwarden, who didn't have a great deal to contribute to the discussion.

'What did you make of the previous iteration of this?' asked Ray. 'Well', I said, 'The fact that it was called the Parish Needs Process and the way it was marketed led us to think that we were identifying what our parishes wanted to do and then the diocese would provide what we needed to achieve our dreams, and it became clear that it wasn't really like that'. 'Yes', mused Ray, 'That's right. I think they've probably learned from that'. Which tells you everything you need to know.

Here's the glorious photo of Archdeacon Colley of Stockton I used for the last Visitation post.

Word from the Pulpit (if there was one)

The readings today were from Jeremiah 23 where God lambasts prophets who prophesy their own fantasies, and Luke 12.49-56, in which Jesus talks about bringing a sword on the earth rather than peace, kindling a fire, and waiting to be baptised with a baptism which is not of water. At the main service I preached a rather rambly sermon which began with God’s rhetorical question through Jeremiah, ‘Am I not a god close at hand, and not only far away?’, and would have ended with the violent imagery drawn from both readings – ‘fire, and a hammer breaking the rock, and a baptism of blood’ – had I not at the last minute veered away to stress how the Cross stands in judgement over us, over the Church and over the world, but the point is that it leads us somewhere better. Somewhere in the middle I touched on the doctrine of the Real Presence – ‘in that cupboard with the gold curtain is the most important thing in your life’ – my own failings (not enumerated in detail), the possibility of some wrong arising in our community which must be named, say a corrupt Council operation, and imagery of angels. There was a lot in it, but I thought it held together, just about.

Over the years I have struggled with understanding the relationship between the pastor and the congregation. What exactly does it mean? Why does the Lord want it to function in this strange way, if indeed he does? I can get my head around the idea that it creates an inescapable relationship (inescapable unless either the minister is driven out or the laypeople leave) and that training in relationship is at the heart of the spiritual life, but why have one person set aside to take this role? You can drag in the traditional Catholic explanation, that ordained people exist to provide the sacraments, but that’s an unsatisfactorily circular argument.

As I was contemplating finishing the sermon with that brutal statement about fire and hammers and blood I imagined myself saying to Giselle the lay reader, ‘Of course you can’t say that’. My feeling would be that it wouldn’t be right for Il Rettore or Marion, when she was with us, or Ted the public school teacher who preaches occasionally, to say it either. I think this is because it is risky. Not only is the expression slightly extreme, but it’s also very directive in a way I rarely am. This is partly what an ordained person sent to a Christian community to speak with the authority of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is for in a way a layperson (even an authorised one), a retired priest or a curate is not. That status both protects the minister in that they are commissioned to say such things, and also raises the stakes when they do: they’re still going to be there next week (probably), and the congregation’s relationship with them is ongoing and not easy to escape, as we’ve said. The possibility of a strong and directive statement grating like grit in an oyster is part of the point, it seems to me. 

Of Course I Didn't Say Anything

... at the meeting this week when a clerical colleague due to leave his role the day after described the frustrations of his prospective retirement. 'I've slipped a couple of non-religious funerals under the radar over the years', he said, 'and I'd like to carry on doing funerals, I enjoy them. But if you have Permission To Officiate in the diocese I'm going to they keep the fees. I'd prefer to do non-religious funerals anyway but that would still be the case.'

Embarrassment and inarticulacy silenced me. I'd never met him before and there would be limited point in protesting even if I could have speedily recovered from my surprise and worked out what to say. It would never occur to me that I would carry out any religious act except as a minister of the Church of Jesus Christ. Although, as we always say, the priest is ordained by the Church in response to and in recognition of the call of God on that individual, nevertheless I am ordained in order to do, and only in order to do, the things the Church is charged by God with doing. It's not a declaration of what a fine fellow I am, and whatever I might do only has value not because I do it but because it's done within the context of the promises of God expressed in the sacrament of Orders. Dear me. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

Holy Week 2025 ...

… has offered a variety of experiences.

Monday: I attend on my Spiritual Director and mention that the Bishop, for the first time ever, is doing my ministerial review this year. 

    Me: I don’t want to say the wrong thing. 

    SD: Would it matter if you said the wrong thing? 

    Me: Well, he is my father-in-Christ to whom I owe canonical obedience – 

    SD: Oh, don’t give me that ****ing ****.

Wednesday: The new Dean at the Cathedral offers to hear confessions at a set time for the first occasion in years. I don’t have much to say but go and find myself tearful with thanks.

Thursday: I and Il Rettore are back at the Cathedral for the Chrism Mass. As always, the Bishop preaches but delegates the service and blessing of oils to his suffragan, which mitigates the point of the whole thing somewhat. I am tired enough to enter a dubious state during his sermon in which I hear every word but can’t recall a single one. (At least I think I am hearing them: I’ve noticed that when I reach the stage of nodding off while reading in bed I can start fully awake and then fail to find on the page the words I have just read absolutely clearly). Fr Donald from Lamford, sitting beside me, makes some theological point I can barely understand. Afterwards Il Rettore asks me what I thought and I tell him the Devil seldom rages at me as hard as during the Chrism Mass. He shares that he felt like walking out during the sermon. At the Maundy Thursday vigil I do my usual exercise of bringing my friends into Gethsemane. Of course Professor Cotillion’s dogs are there, and Bartle barks to keep the demons away while Brindle licks the Lord’s hand to comfort him.

Friday: During the Mass of the Presanctified I get caught out by Drop Drop Slow Tears as the communion hymn and almost can’t carry on. In her new position in a big choral church in the North, my friend Cara has her first experience of prostrating herself in their equivalent liturgy and finds it ‘curiously restful’. Two priests of the Society mansplain administering the chalice to her during the administration itself: ‘I’ll administer it in a way you really won’t like in a minute’, she didn’t say. Paula the pastoral assistant and her husband Peter drop off hot-cross buns on my doorstep which present the ideal way of breaking my fast in the evening.

Saturday: I take communion to Janet, among others that day. We get to the end, and then she says ‘Did I tell you my friend is going to bring me to church tomorrow? I didn’t like to tell you not to come after all. Thank you, I know you’re so busy’. I mentally tot up all the things I have yet to do, from polishing the wall plaques to setting out the crockery for breakfast tomorrow.

Easter Day: A few fewer than in recent years at the Dawn Mass but the other services drew numbers pretty similar to last year. A pink rubber duck appeared in the churchyard, apparently part of a cancer awareness campaign, so it came to the Dawn Mass and I popped a photo on LiberFaciorum.

Decease of pontiffs notwithstanding, happy Easter Week to you all!

Omerta

There is an Area Dean in the church-set TV comedy series Rev, but she has a minor role next to waspish Archdeacon Robert, who turns up at the vicarage almost every week to patronise Fr Adam Smallbone and tip his coffee into the sink. And yet thanks to the horrible scandal of David Tudor the phrase ‘Area Dean’ is all over the place: he was a ‘senior priest’, say the news reports, ‘in charge of twelve parishes’ in the Chelmsford diocese. Well, says anyone who knows anything about how the Church of England works, Yes and No.

An Area Dean is a bit of a dogsbody. You don’t get paid to do it, but generally you do the job alongside your parochial duties: someone who isn’t a parish priest can technically be an Area Dean, but it’s uncommon. They act as a conduit for information between the local clergy and the diocese, and have a pastoral brief over those clergy. It’s a task nobody generally wants, because we’re all busy enough, thank you, and yet everyone likes to be asked, because it shows that the bishop and your colleagues have enough confidence in you to think that you’d be good at it. Or at least no worse than anyone else available.

But appointing the Area Dean in a deanery is very much the bishop’s initiative. Which is why, in David Tudor’s case, it not only baffles that Stephen Cottrell, as Bishop of Chelmsford, kept re-enlisting him to do it when he, Tudor, was subject to a safeguarding order, but that he was ever asked to do it in the first place. Just like Stephen Cottrell, his predecessor John Gladwin would have been perfectly aware of the restrictions Mr Tudor had had placed on his ministry some months before he was appointed in 2008: why did that happen at all? How could the bishop, whichever bishop, really believe that being subject to a safeguarding order didn’t make a difference to David Tudor’s ability to carry out this extra duty? Today, clergy in a Deanery – and their Parish Safeguarding Officers – would have been told that one of their number wasn’t allowed to be alone with children, but this clearly wasn’t the case in Chelmsford Diocese in 2008. Or maybe they were told, and decided not to believe it, a habit which crops up in many of these depressing narratives.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether institutions that are seduced by abusers or the bishops who make mistakes in dealing with them are liberal or conservative, evangelical or catholic; instead the real conflict is between openness and secrecy. Priests get used to keeping confidences, for very good reasons, but perhaps the habit tends to extend into areas it very much should not. The next step is to imagine that keeping the secrets makes you important, and that only you have the wisdom to deal with them in the right way. You picture yourself as one of a special cadre defined by the secrets they keep. That's above the non-existent pay grade of an Area Dean: that's bishop territory. 

Away Fixture

This Sunday I was at Canley next door to Swanvale Halt, filling in for Sue the priest-in-charge, who was away. Canley is much, much older than our church, Norman in origin at least, and has a more modestly centrist tradition. Still, the green chasuble arrived back from another church where it had been borrowed in time for me to wear it.

Not all went as smoothly as that. A member of the congregation apparently fainted on the way in to the church and fell, knocking his head and requiring a call to 999. The sound system buzzed and whistled unaccountably. A party of Americans walking a pilgrim route didn’t turn up as expected (perhaps they were as discombobulated by the attempted assassination of Mr Trump as everyone else was), but a couple wanting to light a candle in memory of a deceased friend did, and Canley isn’t the kind of church that has candles hanging around for that purpose.

I was able to help out at Canley because Il Rettore was holding the fort at Swanvale Halt. Retired though he is, he does appreciate having an altar once a month, and has been standing in now and again at other parishes which are in vacancy. Vacancies are another matter. In Hornington Deanery we have two parishes which are vacant currently, and Curtbridge Deanery next to ours is positively devastated. Meanwhile the incumbent of Sands & Piddenton in our Deanery which contains several small churches is on long-term sick leave. And the Area Dean tells me that he was in the Diocesan War Room with our Archdeacon and suffragan bishop a few days ago watching them push little models of clergy across the map, as they do, and heard them remarking about how I had only one church to manage, and I had Il Rettore around, so could I not look after Sands & Piddenton pro tem as well? Donald, the retired hospital chaplain who worships with us, seems to have evaded their attention: nor will I draw it to Claudia, who used to be a worshipper at Swanvale Halt before she was ordained and, now she is newly retired, appears keen to return ‘home’.

This seems to me a misapprehension of what it means to be a retired priest. Retired clergy take different views of how to continue their ministry once they are no longer in full-time paid work. Il Rettore, as I’ve said, likes to preside at the Holy Sacrifice occasionally, but Fr Donald is less concerned with that and merely says that he will fill in if I ever need him to, as he indeed has done when I’ve been ill or on holiday. I don’t know what attitude Claudia will take. We have another retired priest worshipping with us who has chosen not to exercise their ministry in any public way at all. None of these souls are simply ‘members of staff’ for me to dispose at will. If I had a stipendiary curate I might well say to them (in a way Il Rettore never did to me) that conditions in the Deanery were such that I thought we might both help out in this or that church, but retired clergy have done their bit. What they do is, as far as I’m concerned, voluntary.

If the Archdeacon or the Bishop wants to phone up Donald, or Il Rettore, or Claudia when that time comes, and politely ask if they might consider going to another parish to help out one Sunday or two, fine, but I am not telling them to do anything. Nor would putting them on the Swanvale Halt rota so I can go elsewhere be anything other than crazy. I think.

Perpetual Guest

It took the local council a matter of minutes after the Prime Minister stood in the rain in Downing Street and announced the date of the General Election to phone up Grant the churchwarden to book the church as a polling station on July 4^th. In fact I expect it’s the hall that will be used rather than the church, as it was for the Police & Crime Commissioner election in May, a rather less exciting affair it must be said but our first experience of performing this public role. This week I’ve also been trying to sort out the hustings event traditionally hosted by Churches Together in Hornington & District, which won’t be at Swanvale Halt because of the limited parking locally. The Greens have yet to nominate a candidate for the constituency (they only have till tomorrow) and our incumbent Tory MP has yet to reply; disconcertingly it was the Reform candidate who was first back to me. Perhaps he has more time to check emails, or alternatively a laid-back agent who doesn’t do it for him.

It all leads me to reflect again on the oddness of the Church of England parson’s position in society. In so many ways we are the go-to persons, and our churches the default venues, for such events. But equally we operate in a society whose assumptions are secular and non-sectarian and I would really not have it any other way. On Tuesday morning I looked in my diary and found the inscription ‘2pm Willow Grange’ and embarrassingly had to contact the Bishop’s secretary to remind me what it was I’d agreed to come to. The event was part of what the diocesan staff call ‘Tent Week’ when the bishop invites cohorts of folk across the diocese to have tea in a marquee in his garden. This particular gathering was for those involved in ‘the ministry of listening’ for which I qualified as a Local Vocations Adviser, apparently, along with the Chaplains, Mentors, and Spiritual Directors. Anyway, the point I am coming to is that we had a short talk by a pleasant woman priest whose name and role I can’t remember who mentioned the experience of ministering in contexts we do not control, where we are guests, and which are sometimes indifferent to us and sometimes actively hostile. It made the event slightly more than pointless (though there may have been a point in simply showing my face as it's likely to be the only time I will be in the proximity of the bishop for some time). 

In my parish, I do have a clear identity and status signalled by my distinctive dress and my link with the big old stone building with the little steeple in the centre of the community, but in another way the parish isn’t mine at all. It is a space I have a responsibility for, and yet do not control in any way. There is nobody I can command. I am always a guest, and just occasionally one who nobody is quite sure what to do with. But then I suspect that may have been the Lord’s position as well.

Bottom Up (or another part of the anatomy)

The Deanery Chapter gathered yesterday to hear the head of the Mission Department at the Diocese talk about lay ministry. That's what the deanery secretary had told us, but he didn't, except in passing. Instead he said he was there to 'begin a bottom-up conversation about how we resource parish ministry in ten years' time'. 'I want to record these conversations', he went on, putting a small flashing device on the floor, 'and I'll feed it all into an AI processing program to pick out the details later'. That made sure most people didn't want to contribute anything at all. He outlined his impression of the pressures on parishes, particularly in terms of finding laypeople to fill important roles, and suggested that we were working within a structure designed for a time when 45% of the population was in church on a Sunday at a moment when that figure is more like 1.5%. The diocese would work with parishes to try to provide for the continued existence of worshipping communities into the future, 'developing creative solutions tailored for local circumstances', etc. etc. It would all have sounded more convincing did we not know that the parish of Manton, which fell vacant just before Christmas, has already been told there's no question of their previous full-time incumbent being replaced and instead they will have someone on house-for-duty. Bottom up? Certainly, if you'll excuse the vulgarity, the phrase 'my arse' comes into any response. 

Still, there's a serious question to be asked about the pattern of Anglican church life in a choppy and uncertain future. As some of my colleagues complained, worshippers simply will not willingly be relocated from one church to another, even for a Sunday, and the reason for this is not just cussed awkwardness but because their experience of Christian community, and therefore of Christian discipleship, is deeply linked to a particular place. 

The point is that we are called into community, and that community, the group of people with whom we journey and experience what it means to be Christians, has to have a degree of continuity over time. It has to be deep and committed, especially because, in the Catholic way of looking at it, it isn't something we fundamentally choose ourselves, and Christian churches are not primarily voluntary associations of people who come and go as they decide. We acquire obligations and those obligations shape who we are becoming. We enter into a something which existed before us and will exist after us. The primary way the life of the Christian community is shaped is the action of the Holy Spirit through the sacraments. Each community is eucharistic and baptismal; each community hallows time through the rhythm of its daily prayer. 

Signs of continuity are not absolutely necessary, but they are helpful. They include the buildings we worship in, which acquire their own personalities. We have a relationship with those physical surroundings and they come to shape our spiritual lives and imaginations. Ordained ministers are another sign of continuity because they are sent into the community from outside it, and occupy an office in a visible sequence unfolding across time. Bishops are the paramount mark of the continuity of the Christian community, linking together individual, local communities into an Apostolic lineage. You can imagine Christian communities persisting without historic buildings or ordained leadership, but their presence makes continuity easier to maintain. Without them, they may well drift in many directions, and the task would be all the harder. 

Reviewed

Every two years we clergy go through a Ministerial Review. I think that as one of the dwindling band of incumbents with freehold, technically I don't have to do this, but in theory it's a useful occasion to try and allow the kind of outside scrutiny of your ministry which would be absolutely standard in secular life but rather rarely happens in the Church, so I have. Reviews have, as far as I'm concerned, never been that helpful; the results have been vague and while supportive not made for any forward movement. I wasn't expecting much better this time round when I asked the churchwardens, the head teacher of the infants school ('a representative of the local community') and Giselle the lay reader ('a colleague in authorised ministry') to send in their forms to the retired canon who's moved into the diocese and agreed to do this kind of work. I wonder if they're paying him or expecting him to do it for free?

In fact I came away from the canon's nice house on the road into Guildford more enthused than I started. He'd picked up on my hankering for some kind of conversation with someone outside the parish to assess what I'm doing inside it, and perhaps deal with the endless nagging suspicion that I'm missing something. We also talked about faith-sharing and the potential of Forest Church - and what happens in the future. How exactly might I assess whether I still have work to do in this parish, or ought to be somewhere else? There will be a point at which a move will become unrealistic; it will be too late. I ought, at least, to face the question. 

Radio Vicaring

It may be - I forget - that the Reverend Alan Franks has been vicar of St Stephen's, Ambridge (and its linked parishes which The Archers refers to but never covers, for even longer than I've been at Swanvale Halt. This would be unusual but it fits with the way the Church of England in the show works. The local diocesan, the Bishop of Felpersham, appears so occasionally that it took a while for the writers to realise it was stretching credulity for the Rt Rev Cyril Hood to occupy the position for nearly 30 years as they dragged the same actor, Peter Howell, back in to the studio every time they needed episcopal input. Bishop Cyril would have been about 90 by the time he retired, and that's even older than Eric Kemp.

A few days ago Revd Franks was confronted with the appalling Rob Titchener asking to be baptised. Even though Mrs Vicarage Usha saw this instantly as one of Rob's mind-games, one can understand Alan (who's only spoken to the wretched man a couple of times) feeling obliged to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even he could see the ructions that baptising Rob might cause among the other members of his flock who he had deceived and harmed, yet it took his wife to remind him that he had a responsibility to protect them. To any of us who might imagine ourselves in a similar position the answer was blindingly obvious: to get a neighbouring colleague to deal with the matter. In reality people move around between parishes for baptisms all the time because they have pre-existing links with this or that church (or occasionally because a church makes demands on the families of baptizands that are simply impractical, and are sometimes designed to be). We all accept this happens and the polite thing is to inform the home parish when it does; it's no big deal. But Revd Franks tied himself up in emotional knots before calling the Bishop who told him to do what anyone else would already have decided days ago.

Alan Franks, it seems to me, invariably gives the impression of being hunted around his parish and always wanting to be somewhere other than where he is, and talking to anyone other than the person in front of him. It was understandable that he didn't want to speak to the dreadful Titchener, his brother, or anyone else who wanted to refer to the matter, but unless he's beaming pacifically at people leaving the church on a Sunday morning Alan never seems to want to talk to anyone. While all this was going on he got into a conversation with another character about ghosts which he clearly couldn't wait to escape from. This is odd because he seems able to come up with quite concise and convincing answers to questions in a far more ready manner than I ever can. A parish priest, it's true, spends a certain amount of time talking to people they'd rather not, but most of us I think learn quite quickly never, ever to let our impatience show on the surface because anyone other than the thickest-skinned souls will be very hurt by it. Perhaps the Vicar of Ambridge just isn't having much fun and needs to move on. I wonder when his next Ministerial Review is? Mine's next month.

Among the Archives

For the last several months I’ve become something of a weekly fixture at the History Centre in Woking, working through first wodges of service registers and more recently copies of Crockford’s to investigate the clergy who have served churches in the diocese at the Catholic end of the spectrum. I can’t find any indication that I’ve mentioned it here before, so I admit now how crushingly dull a lot of this has been. At the History Centre you can order up to ten documents from the stacks in advance, though you can request more once you’re there. Oh dear, I thought before I started, how restricting that will be, but I discovered that working through ten old service registers over the course of three hours or so was quite sufficient to exhaust and render me almost incapable of speech. I rarely saw a church in the middle of a transition from one way of doing things to another, though here and there you could tell when a new incumbent had brought a sudden change of direction. I found books where clergy doggedly recorded every time they said Morning or Evening Prayer, even when alone, and ones where they listed the times of services but not what they were. I found churches which helpfully recorded numbers at every service, but this was rare: most of the time, until priests became defensive about how many people were turning up (or weren’t), only totals of communicants were noted down. I discovered the odd rude remark scrawled in a margin by a frustrated incumbent. I recoiled from the aroma of mould and marvelled at teacup rings or mice nibblings.

Going through the lists of clergy uncovers a couple of very late exchanges of livings, some interesting connections between churches, and several clergy passing through the big mission parish of St Mary’s Portsea. Few of them go on from serving a Catholic parish in Surrey to anything more high-profile, but given the career structure of the Church of England this is no great surprise and you could probably say the same of any sample of incumbents. It’s very clear how the turn into the twentieth century leads to the increasing dominance of theological colleges in the training of curates: go back before WWI and it’s rarer and rarer for a priest to have been to one, and before 1900 it’s extremely uncommon. But I did find that Fr Lushington, who caused such ructions at Thorpe, had been trained at Sarum College in the 1870s; and, even more strikingly, Vincent Musgrave of Hascombe had attended Wells College as far back as 1853. That would have made him exceedingly unusual: there were only about 15 students at Wells then and none of the other colleges would have had many more in an age when there were far, far more clergy about. Gems, my beloveds, gems. 

Clerical Cavalcade

When I wandered into St Mark’s Farnborough South a little while ago, I wasn’t expecting the Anglo-Catholic adventure playground I discovered there. As I begin compiling lists of clergy I discover that those who’ve served St Mark’s are also more remarkable than you might expect for this unreported, uncelebrated suburban parish.

During my visit, the good folk of St Mark’s alleged that the church ‘had never been forgiven’ for going Anglo-Catholic at some point, but I’m not yet sure when that point was. Looking at the clergy I know about so far, L.G. Tugwell (1904-11) served curacies at St Saviour’s Battersea and Holy Trinity Guildford before becoming Anglican Chaplain at Frieburg, all appointments you might expect of a High Churchman. Basil Philips (1911-23) studied at Keble College and Wells Theological College and had done his curacy at Dorking before coming to Farnborough, and was briefly succeeded by the celebrated Bernard Keymer (1923-5). Now Keymer had been curate at the moderately Anglo-Catholic St Mary’s Portsea where future Archbishop Cosmo Lang was vicar (mind you, there were a dozen curates in the parish at that stage), before becoming Vicar of Eastleigh and then a military chaplain. His war service was heroic as he won the MC for rescuing soldiers trapped in barbed wire, and after the Armistice was appointed the first chaplain of the RAF college at Cranwell. Presumably it was St Mark’s connections with first the RFC and then RAF that led to him moving there.

Frs Tugwell, Philips and Keymer all have the stamp of moderate High Church clergy, but I think it was their successors who took St Mark’s to the top of the candle. The next vicar after Mr Keymer was – take a deep breath – the Revd the Viscount Mountmorres. William Geoffrey Bouchard de Montmorency came from Irish aristocracy, and succeeded to his title unexpectedly in 1880 at the age of eight, after his father, the 5^th Viscount and a magistrate, was assassinated in the midst of the Irish Land Wars. Unlike the rest of the family William went to England for his education, firstly at the Anglo-Catholic Radley School and then Balliol. After graduating he travelled and became an expert in ‘tropical economics’, the tropics in question being mainly in central Africa. In 1904 Montmorency took part in an expedition to the Congo with the journalist Maurice Dorman and both wrote up their experiences, his Lordship in The Congo Independent State: a report on a journey of enquiry, and Mr Dorman in A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State. The Viscount reported quite favourably of some at least of the people he met (the Bonjo and Dongo tribes, for instance, were ‘a splendid, intelligent, and fearless race’), but his journalist companion dedicated his book to the ruling Belgian authorities and devoted it to refuting reports of the Belgians’ ill-treatment of the natives – it is ‘distressing to read, showing a complete lack of sympathy with the Africans’, says the British Museum, to which Montmorency sold his collection of African artefacts in 1911. He’d also dabbled in politics, sitting as a Moderate Party (that is, Conservative) member of the London County Council for Tower Hamlets from 1894 to 1898, and finally in 1911 could be found lecturing in an Edinburgh cinema to accompany a film about the lives of the late Edward VII and George V: ‘he possesses the gift of vivid description’, reported The Scotsman, ‘and his running commentary on every depicted item … is not only happily phrased, but always interesting and instructive’. By then the Viscount had probably already decided to follow a clerical life: he went to Cuddesdon college and was ordained in 1913, serving his title at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, an advanced Catholic parish, before moving to Swinton in Lancashire as Rector in 1917 (he was also a Royal Navy Reserve chaplain). 1925 was the year he relocated to Farnborough, and remained for ten years, before leaving for St Paul’s, Wokingham, but he was only able to enjoy those grander surroundings for a year until he died. Despite two marriages Montmorency only had a single daughter, so on his death the titles passed to his cousin Arthur, the incumbent of St Modoc’s, Doune, in Scotland, who thus became the second ordained Viscount Mountmorres in a row. There’s an interesting character.

For William Montmorency’s last two years at St Mark’s, his curate was Cecil – or Charles, sometimes – de Lyons-Pike. Under normal Anglo-Catholic circumstances I would suspect him of having invented the double-barrelled name, but his father Charles, a Shropshire-born solicitor who practised in Bloomsbury, also used it so Cecil/Charles is not to blame. He began his professional life as a schoolmaster, eventually (after being rejected for military service) becoming head of Holland House School in Hove. One pupil at the time was the future author Patrick Hamilton who ‘remembered de Lyons-Pike as being a young, bespectacled man who was extremely High Church. On one occasion he shocked the school assembly by saying to a boy “You’re the one who called Walker’s cousin a damned bloody fool”. After he had doled out a thrashing, he commented “You didn’t expect me to repeat that, did you?”’ In 1922 de Lyons-Pike moved the school to Burgess Hill, renaming it St Peter’s Court, and left in 1927 apparently after deciding to be ordained. He attended the theological college at Ely and was deaconed in 1928. St Mark’s was his first appointment, where he moved smoothly from curate to vicar in 1935 after Fr Montmorency moved on. Fr de Lyons-Pike stayed until 1952 and I will tell you what happened to him next in a minute.

His successor was Francis Wheeler. Mr Wheeler was yet again a non-standard figure having been ordained in Accra in 1926, an outpost of the Anglican Church where anything other than Anglo-Catholics were thin on the ground. He was principal of St Augustine’s College at Kumasi, and served three English curacies at St Michael’s Shoreditch, Christ Church Woburn Square, and St Michael’s Paddington, before becoming priest in charge of Holy Trinity, Marlow, Vicar of East & West Hanney, and finally incumbent of Wheatley in 1944. Somewhat over 30 years before, Mr Wheeler’s predecessor there had been burned in effigy in his own garden after trying to introduce a Sung Eucharist to the parish church, so, for a priest who believed schoolchildren should be ‘taught to sing the Mass, starting with the Kyries and the Sanctus’, it might be wondered whether this Oxfordshire village was really the right place. According to the history of the Church in Wheatley (written in 2006, coincidentally, by John Prest who was my tutor at Balliol), Fr Wheeler certainly doesn’t seem to have been that happy. Having already written a book entitled Modernity (1929), which concluded that Modernity was generally to be regretted, his Primer of Pastoral Theology (1948) finds reason to denounce lipstick, the cinema, and jazz (‘negroid in origin’), and assumes that the modern clergyman’s work will largely be confined to a small and dwindling group of committed people: ‘the flock is far less biddable, far less disposed to listen obediently … The influence of the pulpit has waned until it has become practically negligible … You may stand at the door of the fold and call persuasively “The Bible says …”, “The Church teaches …”, but there will be little or no response from the majority. They have never been in the fold, they feel no need of its security, and as for the shepherd, he is superfluous’.

Mr Wheeler lists his pastoral, theological and devotional works in his entry in Crockford’s; he doesn’t mention his novels. These were a string of thrillers set before, during, and after the War with European conflict as the backdrop; the exception was the fourth, the supernatural chiller Unholy Alliance (1951), which included a depiction of a Black Mass so lurid the Vicar of Wheatley had to deny he’d actually been to one.

By 1952 Francis Wheeler had stuck it out in uncongenial Wheatley for eight years and decided on a move. He went to St Mark’s, and remained there for thirteen uneventful and, one hopes, less frustrating years. The good folk of the Oxfordshire parish found that their new priest was none other than Fr C.R. de Lyons-Pike, swapping livings with Mr Wheeler in what must have been one of the last arrangements of its kind. Perhaps Wheatley had become more accepting of Anglo-Catholics, or time had rubbed off some of Fr de Lyons-Pike’s sharp edges in the decades since Patrick Hamilton encountered him at Holland House School, but his six years there seemed rather happier than his predecessor’s time. At least, John Prest says, a widower when he arrived, he ‘lost no time in marrying his housekeeper’s daughter’.

Fr de Lyons-Pike is (I think) the figure on the left of this picture, and I suspect that’s Fr Montmorency in the middle – not sure of the chap on the right. That’s enough clergy!

Renewing the Kit

Essentially derived from the winter gown most medieval people might have worn from time to time, a cassock is the most basic item of the clergyperson’s kit. No matter what liturgical setting I’m functioning in, the cassock is the level below which I will not descend. Take from me my cotta, my chasuble and alb, but leave me my plain black! 

Ever since I was at theological college, I have had two cassocks. They were made by lovely Mr Taylor (a man captured by nominative determinism if ever anyone was) at his shop along the Cowley Road in Oxford, and have done sterling service for nearly twenty years. Thankfully my dimensions haven’t altered very much over that time! It was Mr Taylor who first alerted me to the fact that I am a bit wonky, my left shoulder being higher than my right.

The first warning I had that my cassocks were not immortal came quite some time ago when I tore the lining in first one and then the other while putting them on. Gradually the damage extended and this became more and more irritating as it was progressively harder to get my arms where they should be. Then I began to notice that the cuffs were wearing at the folds. There was no alternative but to replace them.

Sadly Mr Taylor, who has for all this time kept me supplied with ecclesiastical gear even after he’d decamped from the Cowley Road and set up shop in an industrial unit in rural Oxfordshire, had given up making cassocks. I turned to a well-known firm of clergy outfitters who I’ve dealt with very satisfactorily in the past, and tackled the options on their website – fabric, buttons, cuffs, number of back pleats. The company is based some distance away and unless I wanted to catch up with them at a church resources conference or something my measurements would have to be sent on. Helpfully the website gives a comprehensive list of what’s required and my sister was willing to wield a tape measure. There was a bit of a delay after the fabric I’d requested turned out to be ‘unsatisfactory’ to the company and had to be replaced with something similar: ‘only the weave is different’, they assured me.

But there are risks involved, especially when you’re spending something like £400 on a single garment. Medium barathea turns out to be quite heavy (about a third as weighty again as my old cassock) and I think the second cassock I order will be in a lighter fabric. We’ve also been a bit generous in measurements and the new cassock pokes out about an inch below the hem of my alb which looks ungracious. I’ve discussed this with the makers, and as they didn’t offer to alter it for me it looks like that job falls to me!

An Elevation

Before yesterday I’d never hosted the SCP at Swanvale Halt church, and was surprisingly nervous about doing so. Part of my anxiety was over food. We have our lovely café just opposite the church, but that’s not open in the evening, and there’s nowhere else you can sit very close at hand: there’s a pizza takeway and a kebab shop in the next street, a Greek food van some distance away, and a couple of Indian restaurants of (to me) unknown quality in far-flung parts of the parish. But round the corner is a fish-and-chip emporium, so I took orders from my colleagues, let the friers know in advance, and once mass was over dashed out in the rain to collect it all. It worked out fine, even if I did confuse one attender with someone who never made it through the traffic and the deluge, and ended up with an extra bit of cod. We huddled at the back of the church to eat, hoping not too much of the aroma of grease and fish made it through to Slimming World in the church hall, and trying not to turn the discussion into a complete whingefest.

Fr Donald now has far too much to do at Lamford and so I have ascended to the rectorship of the Diocesan Chapter of SCP. My first step, apart from arranging the next gathering at the Cathedral in September, will probably be to try and learn who everyone is, and order an SCP badge which I don’t even have yet. Whether I can actually do anything practical remains to be seen.

Come Holy Ghost, Do

On the second day of the Triennial Clergy Conference this week, I went for what was a short walk down the hill and back again, and got dreadfully lost, eventually making my way back to the conference centre hot, exhausted and half an hour after the beginning of the afternoon’s first lecture, but I got a nice photograph of some cows from a footpath I shouldn’t even have been on.

There were a lot of words. Revd Isabelle Hamley gave us a series of Bible studies examining examples of spiritual change (when the Bishop asked us to share with our neighbour what one insight we might take away from the conference, Fr Benjamin beside me claimed that it would be Revd Isabelle’s revelation that her native French has no separate words for tortoise and turtle – ‘I tell my husband, it’s just the same animal in a different place’); Bishop Ruth Bushyager of Horsham encouraged us to subject everything we did to the test of whether it took people forward in discipleship; Dr Sam Wells of St-Martin-in-the-Fields urged us to start doing ‘interesting things’ (the Church had abandoned all these to the Welfare State in 1948, he maintained) beginning with more interaction with our communities; and Bishop Tim Wambunya, who told us a tale of discrimination which has led to him going back into parish ministry in Slough. There was other stuff, but they were the headliners.

Over the years I have become less prone to plunge into a depressive spiral at the Triennial, questioning the worth of my ministry and even of my own existence. Partly this is because I’ve learned to see my clergy colleagues as just as frail and ridiculous as me, and their self-confidence, where it exists, as a bit of a show. It’s just as well, because the Diocese of Guildford’s descent into monocultural Evangelicalism has now reached the point where it feels hard for any other kind of crop to flourish. Accounts from my colleagues indicate without any shadow of a doubt that if Bishop Andrew can wrest a church from any kind of high-side-of-centre orientation, he will, without any regard to what it may have been in the past, or the health and viability of its current congregation. To stand in the main hall at The Hayes as we did this past week for Morning or Evening Prayer, and find oneself surrounded by people holding their hands in the air ‘like they’re trying to grab God’s bollocks’, as my old vicar Fr Barkley so picturesquely put it, does make one feel less than fully at home. I tend to keep my mouth shut because I know hardly anyone will understand anything I feel inclined to say.

I was glad I stayed for the final eucharist, though. The outgoing cathedral dean presided, a woman, I have been told by two people independently, ‘who doesn’t give a shit anymore’, not that that was particularly in evidence. The Bishop presided and, notwithstanding what he does, his words usually come across rather well. This time he decided to finish his sermon by reminding us of the truth of our ordination by singing the Veni Creator. For someone it was the most natural thing in the world to follow him intoning ‘Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire’ with ‘And lighten with celestial fire …’ – only sotto voce – and within a moment or two that whisper went round the whole hall so those of us who knew it were all joined in with that ancient hymn linking us, not just to Anglicanism past, but to the whole of the Western Church. A glorious moment, if a lonely one.

Visitation From On High

The Archdeacon sat in the vestry with me and Hannah the outgoing churchwarden and went through a stack of documents, ticking them off a list. This was, as far as I can recall, the first time since I arrived in Swanvale Halt that the Archdeacon had himself done the usually-misnamed Archdeacon’s Visitation: in the past it was invariably delegated to the Area Dean. The Visitation traditionally focused on going through the Inventory of the church in question, checking that we hadn’t sold or stolen any of the silverware in the two years after the previous one. It’s a peculiar performance measure. Other topics included making sure we had the correct notices displayed (there is some debate as to whether this includes the Table of Kindred and Affinity). For one Visitation some years ago I happened to be away and it was churchwarden Patrick, a blithe and laid-back character, who dealt with the then Area Dean; he answered almost every question with a smile and ‘I don’t know about that’. It was just as well that they knew one another of old, but even then we were issued with two sides of A4 listing all the things that we must make sure we’d done.

Now the focus of the Visitation has changed. We were asked to lay out copies of our Health & Safety Policy, Safeguarding Policy, gas and electricity certificates, and insurance documents, and get out the service registers (although as far as I know the last are not legally-required documents at all and there used to be bitter and recalcitrant clergy who didn’t keep them). The Archdeacon had a checklist on his laptop, to confirm that we at least had something that looked like the kind of thing we should. Having passed that hurdle, we moved on to discussing the Church Development Plan about which the Archdeacon was very supportive and encouraging and made a couple of suggestions about points the diocese might be able to help with. We finished with a wander round the churchyard looking at the flowers.

OFSTED it’s not, and neither should it be. I’ve heard stories from colleagues in other dioceses of Visitations which begin with the legal checking-of-documents bit but then move on to a closed-door discussion between the Archdeacon and PCC members from which the incumbent is excluded – people being told ‘you are not allowed to attend’ – and the result of which the priest is sometimes not even informed, apart from a vague ‘it went well’. It sounds like the Church’s traditional love of secrecy and power-games under the guise of accountability, and I’m relieved we haven’t gone down that route here.

(I found this image by Googling ARCHDEACON. It depicts Revd Colley, Archdeacon and former Rector of Stockton. With his biretta, stole and shoulder-cape, he is clearly a Sound gentleman. But why is he, with so very serious an expression so we must assume he isn't taking the mickey, carrying a trumpet? Should this be standard issue for all archdeacons?)