IT WAS my East Sussex C of E primary school that first offered a religious perspective on life. Daily assemblies with Gospel readings from the Authorised Version, hymns from Percy Dearmer’s Songs of Praise to resonant piano accompaniment — these evoked a dimension beyond. But it was when I moved to the outskirts of north London and became involved in the life of an Evangelical parish church — heavily influenced by the Billy Graham crusades — that my religious experience became shaped and structured.
Here, it was sin, repentance, and conversion, and St Paul’s epistles and the Old Testament rather than the Gospels; and there was a general assumption that any young man who could stand up and speak might be called to “the ministry”. So, a partial sense of calling was there from my mid-teens. But university called in the mean time, and I went to read English at Bristol, where the Shakespearean critic L. C. KnIghts was professor. When I asked him — warily — whether I should really be reading theology, he responded disarmingly: “There is something to be said for the world of the imagination.”
So, the imaginative world of literature won out over the literal world of the narrowly Evangelical version of church, although “theology” crept in under the guise of a two-year, part-time university course in biblical studies and church history. Later, while undertaking the PGCE and starting to teach English, I explored life’s bigger questions with inquiring sixth-formers through literature. Participating by now as a family in a more inclusive kind of parish church, we felt at home, and I was licensed as a Reader.
SHORTLY after this, a teaching-career move to rural north Oxfordshire took us to a village where the parish priest — formerly an RAF chaplain — had also just arrived. Together with a villager who was a retired theologian, we formed a ministry partnership, supporting worship and church life in our benefice of four rural villages. As a Reader, I loved leading worship in our ancient churches; and, in our parish priest, I saw for the very first time a model of ministry that was about personal concern for, and service to, others rather than telling them about sin and salvation.
Could I be called to this kind of ministry? As a teacher, I had no doubt about the value of my work in school, and sensed no need to abandon it. But I felt a clear sense of calling to further, ordained ministry. Thankfully, the Oxford diocese was at this time running a non-stipendiary ministerial training course under the direction of Canon Wilfrid Browning: a three-year, part-time course, rooted in the Oxford Faculty of Theology, and in the setting of Oxford’s theological colleges, chiefly St Stephen’s House. These were vibrant, demanding years.
ORDINATION, when it came, was unequivocal: I was called to serve both in my school workplace and in our parish. Whether that involved teaching sixth-form students or directing school dramas, or leading evensong in a draughty church for a dozen people, it was all of a piece. And, when another teaching career move took us to north Yorkshire for a deputy headship in a large Church of England comprehensive, I was similarly placed in a parish setting. Teaching in school, leading a school eucharist, and presiding and preaching in one of our three parish churches — all were involved.
On moving south, after some years, to a headship, I was licensed at the school as both head and chaplain. Even so, before long I found myself asked to support parish ministry — sometimes out of the blue, as on one occasion when a parish priest absconded with a churchwarden’s wife and a celebrant was needed. . . So, like many retired vicars, I, too, have been called on to fill gaps, cover vacancies, and generally keep the institution going. And that’s fine.
IT’S fine, but it’s not really. Forty years of ministry — NSM, or SSM, or whatever term you want to use (more of that later) — has shown me just how shaky the parish structure of the Church of England is. It’s so dependent on the capability of the individual parish priest, and on personal qualities. And, when there is no priest, everything devolves on the shoulders of the churchwardens and PCC — as it has done in my former parish in the Ashdown Forest, which still has no official ministerial cover after my retirement as Priest-in-Charge three years ago.
There are still, almost unbelievably, huge differences in understanding about what a professional approach to ministry is. As an education professional, I always knew what was expected of me: the rules and expectations were clear, and in recent years have become clearer still. But what constitutes good priestly behaviour? To my intense regret — and bewilderment — I have come across more “unprofessional” behaviour among parish clergy than I ever encountered in the world of education.
MY FIVE “retirement” years as a parish priest — I had not planned to be one, but our archdeacon asked me to take on the Forest parish — also showed me how dysfunctional our institution can be. Its complex systems of permission for changes to parish churches, its bureaucracy, its apparent reluctance to provide pastoral care or oversight for those in ministry — all surpass by far the frustrations of educational leadership. I think I can count two, possibly three, telephone calls from a bishop during all my years of ministry.
And as for names: I am simply a priest of the Church of England, Catholic and Reformed. I happen not to be paid by the institution. My ministerial years have been fulfilling, and, I hope, valuable to others and to the Church. But the Church’s clericalism, its moribundity, its failure to have any really clear, strategic view of how the unpaid priesthood might enable the institution’s survival in a future of financial and human resource shortfalls — these are desperately worrying.
ONE former NSM trainee colleague used to say we were “free priests”. The opportunity offered by “free” priests to the life of the wider Church needs to be further explored, more valued, more effectively used. As “secular” clergy, we have a perhaps unique chance to help people to sense a dimension beyond — even, to some extent, to embody that dimension within the everyday world.
But lurking somewhere may still be a suspicion that “free” priests are not proper, and don’t really count. I once asked the head of a theological college whether he trained men (as it was then) for unpaid ministry. He replied, “No, all our students have a genuine vocation.” That a vocation both to secular work and to ministry may be real, genuine; that a priest, whether paid or not, is a priest; that ministry is a calling, an invitation, to share in the work of Christ; that it has more to do with listening than telling; that the realms of faith and of imagination are intimately related — these are convictions I’m left with. It has been a remarkable journey.
The Revd Dr John Caperon is a former head of the Bennett Memorial Diocesan School, Kent; a former director of the Bloxham Project; and a former parish priest in the Ashdown Forest. He is author of A Vital Ministry: Chaplaincy in schools in the post-Christian era (SCM Press) and co-editor of A Christian Theology of Chaplaincy (Jessica Kingsley).