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Church needs more working-class clergy, Synod to hear

28 January 2025

Financial and cultural barriers to discernment should be removed, paper argues

Sam Atkins/Church Times

The Revd Alex Frost speaks at the General Synod in York last July

The Revd Alex Frost speaks at the General Synod in York last July

THE Church of England should develop a strategy to encourage more working-class people into ministry, a private member’s motion is to argue at next month’s General Synod.

Proposed by the Revd Alex Frost, a priest in Burnley who left school at 15 and worked full-time in the retail sector to fund his ministerial training (Comment, Podcast, 26 April 2024), the motion calls on the Ministry Development Board to produce a “national strategy for the encouragement, development and support of vocations, lay and ordained, of people from working-class backgrounds”.

In his paper accompanying the motion, Fr Frost says that working-class people often find it difficult to respond to a calling to ministry because of middle-class expectations and assumptions throughout the Church.

”The first concern should be whether a person is called by God to a given ministry,” he writes. “Whether they have tattoos or a strong regional accent should not be held against them.”

He gives examples of his own experience as an ordinand, having to use his annual leave to attend compulsory residential trainings, and regularly complete a 100-mile round trip after a week’s full-time work at Argos for a two-hour tutorial.

Many working-class jobs do not fit the Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five pattern, and are characterised by shift work and overtime, he says. This often prevents working-class people from attending training that takes place solely during evenings and weekends.

Other barriers are cultural, he writes. He refers to one working-class candidate who was asked at their selection panel who their favourite artist was. When they replied “Eminem”, they were corrected by the interviewer, who said that they were looking for a painter, not a rapper.

Too often, Fr Frost says, the Church prizes solely academic achievement and qualifications, while the years of “practical, emotional, and life skills”, accrued through working life, are overlooked.

Speaking at a press briefing on the Synod papers in January, Fr Frost said: “My vision would be to see an apprenticeship scheme for people who have a portfolio of work rather than an academic body of work.”

The C of E had a “traditional academic way of teaching our ordinands, and this is an exciting opportunity to change the model completely, to revolutionise it, to turn it upside down, and to be more attractive to the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker”.

Some projects to overcome these barriers are already in place, Fr Frost’s paper says, such as the Peter Stream at St Mellitus College, which provides a bespoke pathway to ordination for people without significant educational qualifications. But a greater diversity of training routes and alternatives to traditional college-based residential education is needed, it says. At the same time, more money needs to be made available for poorer working-class candidates who would benefit from traditional training, but cannot afford it.

“We should not allow residential training to only be a realistic option for those who already have secure housing and financial independence,” Fr Frost’s paper argues. “There needs to be a shift in mindset at all levels to allow people who the Church discerns are called to serve to be supported to do so.”

The same is true for lay leaders, he writes. Something as small as being unable to afford the bus fare to attend the diocesan synod, or not having free Saturday mornings for Reader training, could block some people from a lifetime of potential service.

Fr Frost also suggests that a mentoring scheme might help, through which working-class ministers could meet candidates from similar backgrounds to assist in their journey through discernment and training.

A more working-class C of E, which better reflected the diversity of the nation it sought to serve, would also help to boost vocations and grow congregations, besides making the Church “simpler, humbler and bolder” (in the language of its latest Vision and Strategy), Fr Frost suggests.

In an additional paper to the Synod, the secretary-general, William Nye, writes that research confirms that too few working-class people are getting through the discernment process. About 24 per cent of candidates for panels in 2021-23 were working class, compared with a UK average of 39 per cent.

A separate piece of research into the experiences of working-class clergy was published in 2023, and this prompted all theological education institutions to be made to produce a plan to address “classism” by the middle of this year, Mr Nye’s paper says. There is also other work under way, including better measuring of the socio-economic impact in grants made by the Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment Board.

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