SLOW priesthood
MadPriest and RevSam have been having a conversation about work, priorities, working hours and so on. This is MadPriest on being a priest:
I stick to 3 jobs as defined by the Ordinal. Preside, teach, visit. I got rid of all jobs outside of the parish, including at deanery level and never attend meetings or courses unless my people will definitely benefit from my attendance. I got rid of my need to be in charge, even if I thought I could do a better job. There is no reason why the local church leadership should not come from members of the laity. This even includes PCCs. Certainly people can be found to do most of the admin jobs and do it far better than someone trained mainly in the niceties of Biblical hermeneutics and church history. I stopped worrying about the Protestant work ethic. I don’t care if I’m not busy. Nobody acknowledges the fact when you work all hours anyway.
All this leaves me with plenty of time to do do my pastoral work properly. Visiting, arranging funerals as if each one is a major society wedding, walking round the parish, talking to people in the street. And you know what Sam, everything still gets done and people believe I am the only priest in the neighbourhood who does his job, even though I am the laziest sod in the priesthood.
I aspire to be lazy but haven’t achieved it yet. But like MadPriest I too have re-aligned a lot of what I do over the last year or so. Even in a Chaplaincy (where the popular myth is that we only work in term time) it’s entirely possible to take on more and more and more things, not only beyond the call of duty but beyond the limit of human capacity. I chopped out a large number of things that weren’t necessary, stopped doing other people’s jobs for them, and found that not only did I have enough time left over at work to do the important things, but was less tired when I got home, and managed to write a book in my spare time.
Wait – Books? Writing? – where does that come in the Ordinal? (unless you include it in teaching, I suppose…) But because of that, I also like Rev Sam’s response to MadPriest, which includes this:
"…in the end I did come to a resolution and a sense of peace: that a) I was called to parish ministry, but b) I had to work out for myself what it meant for ME to be a parish priest – not what being a parish priest was in general, but what sort of ministry is God specifically calling ME to – and that the model of ministry that I had been trained and formed for was not appropriate; that in fact, if I allowed that model to dominate who I was, that I would simply be repeatedly broken."
I like MadPriest’s comment because it takes you back to the starting blocks – why am I in this job? What am I supposed to be doing? And what did I just accidentally get talked into along the way? But I like RevSam’s development because it recognises there is more than one way to skin a cat. MadPriest’s conversation with RevSam is serious food for thought for anyone in ministry whose work load has got out of control.
12 Responses to “SLOW priesthood”
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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Hi Maggi
My conversation with my friend Sam, which was off-line to begin with, arouse from my serious concern that Sam was working far too hard for his own good. When I speak to my parishioners I try to help with the physical and mental issues in their lives as well as the spiritual (which you cannot separate from each other, anyway). Quite often I advise them to slow down and resist their employers attempts to get them to work all hours and their own desire to be constantly busy. I cannot warn somebody that they are in danger of destroying their family life and their own health if I am obviously not paying enough attention to the work/social balance in my own life. I personally hate the idea, but, like it or not, the priest/minister has to lead by example. I expect, as an university chaplain, you find yourself in this situation more often than me – although, is it still just gentlemens’ degrees at your place?
“I got rid of all jobs outside of the parish, including at deanery level and never attend meetings or courses unless my people will definitely benefit from my attendance.”
Sounds pretty congregationalist. I thought Anglicans belonged to a diocesan Church, in which much of our strength comes from not just being local.
(Disclosure – I work for a diocese…)
I can’t quite believe posts like this. I too worked out a similar model of being both a hospital chaplain and a parish priest. But when I applied it in two parishes and a hospital it evoked viciousness, constant personal abuse, endless complaints to bishops and archdeacons (which I fielded and were ALL dismissed, but took energy and time) and a level of malice which I still find hard to take in. From, of course, only the Christians at all levels, not the human beings that I ministered to. In the end neither I nor my family could take it any longer, and I have stopped working within the church. So where are these wonderful places where you are able to live out the model of ministry/priesthood that you, and I, have developed? Was I just unlucky? I suspect that you have managed to collect just that critical mass of supporting people to just enough outweigh the others. Or is there another reason? Do tell me. If I knew I could return.
Does the cliche, “Look busy, Jesus is coming” apply here? Understanding our needs and how we are driven to meet them is a first step in disentangling the whole vocation/hours/worth internal dialogue.
I’m reminded of this, too
“A delightful post by Sean Madden featuring a poem by his wife Rebecca. It reads;
Have you lost your heart,
your soul?
Your zip, your zest?
Your youthful idealism?
Your lust, your thrust?
Your path? Your way?
Your sense? Your yes?
The door that once was
open —
Has it swung closed?
Does your inner garden lie
unwatered, neglected?
If so then walk
into the fields & woods
SIT
don’t be afraid to be alone.
There you will find
what you have lost.”
What I like about MadPriest’s prescription is that it accords value to the non-ordained parishoners. Of course there will be many people able to pick up leadership and administrative chores within the church family. Sadly, many of those will also be every bit as busy as the clerical error!
Reading Christopher’s crie de coeur, I’m reminded that people weaned on being spoon fed by all-active-all-doing clerics will comfortably recline into passivity. (I experienced the same when teaching at a university, I designed a course for students to do the learning with my help rather than the passive lecture only system – every bit as much as vicious as Christopher’s story). So, it will take time to support a congregation’s growth into active membership.
Just because clerics are good (hopefully) and teaching, visiting and presiding does not mean that they’ll necessarily be good at leadership and management.
I have been a minister in the URC for nearly twenty-five years and would humbly offer this advice to colleagues who wish to serve with grace and sanity: Learn to say Yes without bitterness and No without guilt.
I am, in fact, quite the opposite of a congregationalist. My prioritising allows me to be a priest. Members of my congregation, who are interested in such things, attend all the diocesan stuff and then report back to the PCC. We are most certainly not isolationist. We simply try to allocate the tasks to people who want to do them/are best qualified to do them. This way you give worth to people because you are saying you can do this on your own. Diocesan types are always going on about collaborative ministry but 99% of them will not let go of their power and authority. A priest is a servant, sometimes a prophet, but never a leader. The paradigm for this is Jesus himself.
I get a lot of flack off other priests. I think this is because many of them came into the priesthood for the wrong reason. They wanted to be in charge. When they discover the pain and nastiness that comes with pastoral work they suddenly decide that “theologically” its the laity’s job to sit up all night with someone dying of cancer. The reality is that CofE people believe that Christ/The Church is visiting them only when it’s a priest visiting. I don’t like that but it’s true and I’m not ging to argue with them at their time of most need.
I think all admin. tasks from parish level to diocee should be undertaken by the laity (paid or unpaid depending of the job) which would leave the bishops and priests completely free to fulfil the promises they made at their ordination.
A bishop looks after his priests and teaches his people. The priest looks after and teaches his congregation.
As usual, I agree with MadPriest, but with an ammendment. I think it is worth working toward the situation in which everyone in the church (I hate the terms ‘clergy’ and ‘laity’ which assume a divide not present in the NT) accepts their responsibility to ‘care for one another’. But in my view neither of the two extremes will cause that to happen – ‘clergy’ telling ‘laity’ ‘It’s your job, why don’t you do it?’ or ‘laity’ telling ‘clergy’ ‘It’s your job, why don’t you do it?’
In my comment on Sam’s original post I made the point that we pastors do full-time what a lot of lay-people do part time, in order to help them do it better. So in my view, we model for people what Christian caregiving is all about, and we take them along as they are willing and gradually get them involved in it so that the ministry is shared, as the New Testament says it should be. This isn’t going to happen if we browbeat people. Jesus’ model is ‘Come with me, watch me, and then have a go yourself…’ Discipleship, I think it’s called.
I don’t think Jesus was a priest, was he? That’s something we’ve assimiliated from somewhere way outside of Christ, isn’t it?
I’m glad for you, MadPriest, that you have a congregation resourced so well as to enable you to dodge any admin and do what you see as key to your role. Unfortunately some of us are in parishes where our few laity don’t do admin, aren’t committee people, and are intimidated by anyone representing power. Because we live in a marginalised place and they’ve been marginalised, disempowered and deskilled throughout their lives.
I’m a collaborator by instinct but I do a lot of the admin etc, because I can, whilst many of the laity do a lot of the pastoral work, because they shine at that, and co-lead worship, because they bring local integrity to it. I spend quite a bit of time training people up who want to do a bit of admin, or who want to learn to read, lead prayers, preach. I also sit up all night with people dying of cancer, and often a lay person will be there too. I’m learning from them as often as they’re learning from me. And I make sure I get time out of all this activity for reading and relaxation.
I know that the shape of ministry you propose is designed for you alone, but it’s been posted here as a model for us all and as such I think it’s too (priest-laity) polarised. And internally flawed. Surely a servant accepts that often they’ll be given tasks to do that they don’t think they ought to be doing? Surely a prophet might be open to revealing the priest-laity differential as a false dichotomy? Surely Jesus was a ‘leader’ who went to ’synod’ – I mean synagogue, same difference – as a matter of course?
thanks for these comments, very helpful reflections from different perspectives. I agree with Christopher that the difficulty is often less to do with working out priorities, and more to do with surviving the pressure, and when that pressure is extreme and inhumane, it really can be unworkable (I was in a post like that once -I think it’s bad luck, yes, but a more common experience than it should be). I also agree with John and Sam and others that a) dividing clergy and laity is not good, and b) even when you strip the job back, you still have to allow for the job to be shaped to each person and each locality. I still like the heart of the challenge MadPriest sets out, which was his “…serious concern that Sam was working far too hard for his own good”. That’s a charge that mopst clergy, and plenty of non-ordained minsters, (and especially this one!!) need to examine regularly.
I’m glad that people have found the discussion useful; it’s something that in the end we just have to work through for ourselves. I think the hardest aspect of it all is actually changing the expectations that laity have within the CofE – ie, much of the time they want a George Herbert figure, and the daily reality is much different. One very intriguing aspect of this is the churchmanship question – I’m finding it much easier to be with evangelicals as a result (despite being distinctly Anglo-Catholic) because of the emphasis on every-member ministry. It’s the cultural inheritance that most needs to be overcome.
I loved this discussion. Thank you ALL. Food for thought indeed