Monthly Archives: May 2014

What’s Church For? A Job for Life?

Should locally licensed ministers have a job for life?

Last time I had a moan about the lack of a clear culture of retirement from Anglican ministry. I want to stay with that idea but come at it from a slightly different angle, and do some thinking about the expectations of lay ministers who have been ordained and/or licensed to a particular parish. Let’s hear about the fictional, though all too real, parish of St Mildred’s Newtown.

In the past St Mildred’s was a moderately thriving church, with well-ordered Book of Common Prayer worship and good community involvement. In its heyday there was an emphasis on vocations which was thought to be highly successful, in that it produced five home-grown Readers and two Self-supporting ordained ministers.

But now the church has grown tired and elderly. The Readers are all in their sixties, one of the SSMs is over 70 and has Permission to Officiate, and the other is in her mid-60s but not in good health. They are all dearly loved by the congregation who have seen them nurtured and growing in their ministries down the years, and who enjoy the pastoral care they provide.

Then the vicar announces his departure to a new parish. As people begin to think towards the future, and set about preparing a parish profile, it becomes clear that they desperately need to attract some young families. They note the research which says that senior ministers are likely to attract people within ten years either side of their own age, so without being in any way ageist they set about the search for a young priest with loads of experience and wisdom, but who is lively and young-at-heart.

File:U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Marshall with the 1st Battalion, 45th Engineer Battalion, 157th Infantry Brigade, First Army Division East, his wife, Amanda and their young family, celebrate the holidays early 131208-Z-IB445-027.jpgJim is eventually appointed. It is his first incumbency, having served a curacy in a thriving church in a nearby diocese. He relishes the challenge of turning around the decline which has characterised St Mildred’s for decades, and brings loads of exciting ideas. He begins to get to know the team he has inherited, and relationships are cordial. But as time goes by it becomes apparent that they don’t quite understand what he is trying to do. If only we could get back to the days of reverent BCP worship, they believe, all our problems would be solved. Similarly they show little concern for Jim’s desire to bring the church into a digital age: they don’t see the need for a website or a facebook page. Soon it becomes abundantly clear to Jim that the team he has inherited have become the single biggest obstacle to moving the church forwards, and of course they have the support of the congregation who, whilst wanting to attract young families, have no idea of the cost and change involved in doing so. Jim tries to win people over, but the opposition is very strong, and is centred around those who ought to be his closest allies. And the worst thing is that there simply is no mechanism for moving them on and building his own team.

Of course this is a made-up story, and nothing like it ever exists in real life, but isn’t it time that we began to think seriously about inherited teams, those whose focus is in the past rather than in the future, and ways for mission-shaped ministries to grow without opposition from other leaders? Are locally licensed ministers really in a job for life, or might it be appropriate for them to move around if they can’t grasp the vision of new senior leaders? One church leader reported saying to his disgruntled colleagues ‘I’m so sorry that you have been unable to catch the vision of what this church must become’. We shouldn’t say that but then leave them in place as leaders of the opposition.

OT Lectionary May 18th Easter 5 Genesis 8:1-19

Part 2 of the Noah cycle sees the ark and its cargo coming in safely to land as the water recedes and dry land is once more revealed. This part of the tale again contains some important theological themes, a historical question, and even a bit of irony.

 

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The word ‘remembered’ in 8:1 translates an important Hebrew word zacar. It is used several times in the OT, most notably in Ex 2:24 where God sees the suffering of the enslaved Israelites and ‘remembers’ his covenant with Abraham. On a first reading it looks there, as here, that God ‘remembers’ because he has ‘forgotten’ – ‘Oh my goodness – those poor Israelites! I was meant to do something about them but I’ve just been so busy lately …’ In fact the word has a different meaning: it means something like to recall to the front of one’s mind because action is required now. This is very different from having passed out of God’s sphere of consciousness: it means that their concerns are next on his agenda. It’s easy to feel when we’re already feeling down and abandoned that even God has given up on us. This story reminds us that nothing could be further from the truth. It’s just that he doesn’t always work to our timetables or schedules. But then we already knew that, didn’t we? And salvation, when it does come, often comes gradually. It was one thing to have landed safely, but to stay locked in the ark until the waters have receded enough for them to return to normality must have been an agonisingly slow and frustrating process. God has ‘remembered’ our need of salvation; Jesus died on the cross to win it, but we are still locked into a life where we’re not yet truly free. Sometimes that feels incredibly frustrating.

Talking of timing, I note with interest the sheer number of time references in this passage, which raise the question of its historicity or otherwise. Liberal theology would write this story off as a primaeval myth, and people might well point to The Epic of Gilgamesh, which tells a similar story from the background of a different religion and culture, and with its hero much less pronouncably called ‘Utnapishtim’. Others would suggest that there was indeed a significant flood in the Middle East at that period of history, as archaeological evidence confirms, but that different cultures told its story in different ways. And all would agree that the real point of this story is to highlight human depravity and God’s righteousness and saving mercy. So why are there so many chronological references? Most fairy stories are set simply ‘Once upon a time …’ with a notably vague setting in history. But here we have a series of timescales between the events of the story which make it feel almost historical. I’ll leave you to decide that one.

Finally, as one who is not known for being an animal-lover, I like the irony in v20 (strictly speaking in next week’s instalment) of the poor creatures who, just as they were breathing a huge sigh of relief at having survived a watery death, find themselves burning to death on an altar. Sometimes life just sucks.

What’s Church For? Church as ‘Retirement Home’

When is the time to retire?

Here I am still ranting on about the elderly nature of my bit of God’s church. Last week I made a plea for the active recruitment of younger clergy: this week I want to talk about the other end: retirement. My thesis is simple: we don’t have a culture of retirement in the church, and this is profoundly unhealthy.

In a recent visit to the Church Times jobs website there were 49 British parish posts on offer, of which 11, over a fifth, were on a House for Duty basis. (In other words, for non-Anglicans, they were expecting mostly retired clergy to work for nothing but get free housing.) I don’t know what proportion of Anglican parishes are currently being run by ‘retired’ clergy, but I know that we’d collapse overnight if they were all suddenly raptured.

Of course for many retiring clergy the offer of a free house is a life-saver. If you’ve lived in tied accommodation all your life and haven’t somehow managed to get on the property ladder it can be a very difficult thing suddenly to acquire a retirement home. But I’m more concerned about what our increasing reliance on elderly people is doing to the church, particularly when coupled with our relative failure to recruit younger ordinands. I’m also concerned about what it is doing to them.

‘Ah, but …’ I hear you say. Surely there is no place in God’s church for retirement. Nowhere are we told that St Paul stopped gadding about and settled down to grow vegetable marrows. Good old Moses was still at it on his 120th birthday. I’ve heard all sorts of sermons on this very theme. But I think there is another side to this. For a start you can’t simply read a 21st century retirement lifestyle, complete with state pension, B&Q Diamond card and bus pass, back into biblical times. With a low life expectancy most people simply did not have much of a chance to grow old gracefully. And what about the claims of St Paul (or whoever wrote the Pastorals) in 2 Tim 4 that he had fought the good fight, finished the race, kept the faith, and was now awaiting the crown of righteousness in store for him? What about Jesus throughout Hebrews having finished his earthly work and sitting down? We’re not good at finishing things. We prefer facing a task unfinished.

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I once heard that in the USA 80% of those who resign from Christian ministry enter the construction trade. It was suggested that this is because at the end of a project you have something concrete (literally!) to show for it. But the work of Christian ministry rarely has these built-in end points. There is always more to do, and we are socialised into feeling guilty if we’re not busy doing it. Many of us have been so busy, and so bad at work-life balance, that once we retire we fear we’ll have nothing at all to live for. I once worked with a guy who had given his life on the mission-field in Asia. He was unmarried, had no close family, and in fact had no life at all outside his voluntary work for his parish church. Well into his 80s he was still going, although to be honest not particularly strong. Another parish I knew had a priest who had been there since before some watershed date and so did not have to retire ever. He was well into his 90s, and people were simply waiting for him to pop his clogs so that the church could move on.

So what should we do? I believe we should be helping Christian disciples to believe that retirement is an honourable estate, and preparing them more thoroughly to enter it healthily. We should mark it with a significant rite of passage after which life does not simply go on as before. We should make space for the considerable gifts which older people have to contribute to the life of a church, but without expecting them to run it themselves. We should find a way of ending our dependence on retired clergy to keep the C of E show on the road, and if that means some churches have to die, so be it.

Let me say again that chronological age is not to be equated exactly with youthfulness or otherwise. But I leave you with a question, one which I often ponder myself: when I do eventually get past my sell-by date, and am doing the church no favours by continuing, how will I know?

OT Lectionary 11th May Easter 4 Genesis 7

The Noah’s Ark cycle, beloved of Sunday School children and Hollywood alike, faces us with some profound theological dilemmas. The story actually begins in chapter 6, where God looks at the state of the world he made, and is so deeply disturbed by what he sees that he regrets having made it in the first place. There’s your first dilemma – how can the all-knowing God regret anything? Has it all taken him by surprise? Then comes his decision to act on his dismay by destroying everything he has made. Does it mean that God has lost control of his creation, and that the only way to stop the spiralling evil is total annihilation? Clearly not: there are two things here which can help us make sense of the story. First of all is God’s deep grief. In Gen 6:6 we’re told that God is deeply troubled, not that he was livid with anger. His actions may seem those of someone who is fuming at the injustice of it all, but the text paints a different picture. This is more about salvation than judgement. You get the same thing a few verses earlier in 6:3: God’s limiting of the stretch of human life is an act of mercy, otherwise we’d all be caught in an eternity of evil and strife, which is very different from the eternity of peace and harmony which was his intention for the human race. So here, God’s destruction of evil has behind it the intention of saving the human race from sin. The only problem is that sin doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it requires sinners. You can’t stop sin without stopping people doing it.

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But then there is the motif of mercy. This is not an angry act of vengeance by a peeved despot. God looks around, and he spots Noah. He is different. He really is trying to live in righteous and godly ways. There is someone undeserving of punishment, someone who can provide a new start for the human race. So Noah is called to be the captain of the boat which will sail into the new world, and through whom humans can be saved.

One of the reasons, I believe, that this story is so difficult for us once you get beyond the Sunday School models of little animals, is that in so many ways it subverts our culture’s understanding of God, life, the universe and everything. We don’t like a God who destroys stuff, even if it isn’t in anger (which frankly isn’t that convincing – it looks like anger to us!) We don’t think that Noah could really be that much better than anyone else, and we don’t hold with his family being lumped together with him: surely it’s about our individual response to God? In so many ways this story is counter cultural, but if we can get beyond our outrage it can nevertheless speak to us.

It speaks about the seriousness of sin and evil to a tolerant age. It speaks about a compassionate God in an age where we don’t like him doing anything nasty. It tells us that God thinks ‘corporate’ when we instinctively think ‘individual’. It teaches us that while God may not be big on ‘animal rights’ (I’m not convinced that animals have any rights, lacking as they do any responsibility), he still cares enough about his creation to save those which have no use as food. And it speaks of a God who desires not the death of a sinner, and will look around for those who are righteous, but will not shrink from destroying those who seem bent on destroying others and themselves. All this is deeply unpopular to our way of thinking, but I believe it is what the text says. And next week, of course, we’ll get the happy ending.