IF THE Church of England has a conscious strategy for addressing the present situation — and by that I mean, with many exceptions, smaller congregations, reduced income, and fewer clergy — it seems to be one of putting more and more parishes together under the care of the single priest. We already know that this often causes clergy in such situations to retire early from exhaustion or simply encounter burnout, quite apart from making personal pastoral encounters much more difficult (and thus abandoned by many such clergy).
Alongside this, the predominant strategy for mission seems to be one of encouraging each congregation to be more “Christ-centred and Jesus-shaped”. Now, who can object to that?
But what this strategy seems to ignore, combined with the lumping of more and more parishes together under the oversight of one priest, is that the traditional style of mission in the Church of England has been one closely linked with that of pastoral concern. Someone said to me recently: “Pastoral care and mission have for years been two sides of a single coin within the C of E, but not any longer.”
The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams calls this “friendship evangelism” — and it works. He tells the story of the decision to close a failing parish in the diocese of Monmouth, when he was the Bishop there. A young priest came to see him, and asked whether he might be given the opportunity to be its parish priest for just four years, because “I believe that I could turn it round.” Moreover, in Lord Williams’s own words, “And he did, and it was not rocket science.”
The new priest simply did well what good Anglican priests have been doing for years: he put himself about, and became well known and trusted as “the parson”. He conducted Sunday worship and occasional offices with care and imagination. He was available to all, making no distinction in the care that he offered between those who were churchgoers and the wider community of the parish. He enabled and encouraged others to use their gifts and work with him in an overall ministry of imaginative pastoral care. And, lo and behold! people came, and came back, to church.
Yes, of course, it was “Christ-centred and Jesus-shaped” if you like, but based on the priest and his people meeting people where they were, taking them seriously, and offering them genuine friendship and support.
THIS simply cannot and will not happen with the present strategic response to the situation in which the Church of England finds itself. The parson of any large multi-parish benefice can no longer be what the word “parson” means: the “person” to whom those in any kind of need of the Church can turn to for help, advice, or solace, knowing that they will be taken seriously, because the priest is already a familiar and trusted figure.
The priest of a multi-parish benefice, say of seven or eight different villages (which is not uncommon), simply cannot know or be known in the way that can create the opportunity for a relationship of trust (there will be exceptions). He or she will be spending much more time simply organising the variety of Sunday and weekday services and the like — facilitating the structure, but missing out on the people. And, sad to say, there is no such thing as “computer evangelism”.
But there is a strategy that could work, and that has already been tried here and there, but for the most part abandoned: that of ordained local ministry.
While the C of E remains a Church with an ordained ministry, the local parish priest is a vital component. Of course, there is no way in which we can return to the scenario in which almost every parish, however small, had its own stipendiary priest. But, in many a smaller parish, there is already a group of people who maintain its viability and do what they can to offer friendship and pastoral care. So, why not leave it like that? Because they would be the first to say that the vital component, a local parish priest, is missing.
Yes, missing; but there already, hidden and lacking a certain amount of equipping and the laying on of hands. He or she may already be doing a great deal of what the priest would be doing if there was one. He or she needs to be called out from within the local Christian community and invited to be trained and ordained and given a licence to work within that community. He or she, after appropriate and imaginative training, needs to become the identifiable local parson.
ABOVE all, that person, that would-be “parson”, needs to be a people person: someone who is genuinely outgoing, without being in any sense overbearing, and who actually likes people for who they are. Without that virtue, or gift, nothing else will overcome that radical deficiency.
Yes, in the choices that are made, inevitably sometimes we will get it disastrously wrong, and land a local community with a resident parish priest who proves unsuitable. But, given that the Church will not be giving that person either housing or a stipend, but a licence limited not only geographically but for a time, renewable where appropriate, our disasters need not last too long.
Isn’t this worth trying, not in a piecemeal and half-hearted way, as in the past, but as a national strategy?
The Rt Revd Richard Llewellin is an honorary assistant bishop in the diocese of Canterbury.