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An Open Letter to all Denominational Leaders ...

By Hedgehog.

... and others involved in making ministry appointments

To whom it may concern

Once upon a time, there was a perfect world called Christendom, where there was a minister in every church, plenty of money to pay them, churches full of happy people, and there was no eventuality which could not be solved by either ignoring the problem or by throwing people and money at it. The edifice of Christendom was characterised by a culture of risk aversion.

Unfortunately, the dream could not exclude reality forever. Eventually, the day came when Christendom found itself with too many buildings which were too expensive to maintain, too few clergy (who were also expensive to maintain), not enough money and no spare capacity to deal with emergencies or to take new opportunities.

The rulers of Christendom met regularly to assess the situation and to find ways of ensuring that the illusion of order and unchangeability which had for centuries been drip-fed to unsuspecting Christian believers could still be imagined to exist. They spread the clergy ever more thinly, asking them to work harder and harder to sustain the illusion that every local church had its own personal, resident minister, even if in reality she (and by now it often was a she) lived many miles away and was only part-time anyway.

But the citizens of Christendom were not to be fobbed off that easily. They noticed that things were no longer how they imagined they were supposed to be. They realised that fewer and fewer people were receiving pastoral visits and that they no longer had a full spiritual diet every Sunday. Village churches often had only one service per month, or, if they had more than that, they were led by lay people, not proper clergy.

The people also noticed that their few remaining clergy were looking more harassed and stressed that they had in the past and that they were taking more time off with sickness, some of which illnesses were more like depression than a ‘proper’ illness.

So the people demanded action from the rulers of Christendom. They demanded their own resident minister to care for them when they needed caring for. They also demanded that resources were made available to do whatever it took to fill all the empty pews in their churches.

So the rulers met and came up with a strategy. They had noticed that some areas had many fewer people living in them than others, so surely, they reasoned, they could not require as much person-power as the more densely populated areas. If that were so, here was all the spare capacity they needed. All they had to do was group small areas together to make one big area; and what was more, they could leave some areas small and use the minister’s spare capacity to appoint him or her to a denominational role. Everyone would be happy in this world which they called New Christendom.

But they weren’t!

Why not? Because the culture of risk aversion is still deeply embedded in the thinking of most denominational leaders, that’s why. And the basic premise (that a clergyperson with half the population will have only half the workload of the clergyperson with double that number) is seriously flawed by a lack of recognition of the realities of local church life.

The reality is that a minister with five little churches does not have the same workload as a minister with the same number of people, but only one church. He or she has a far bigger job. The only thing he or she will do less of is hatches, matches and dispatches - baptisms, marriages and funerals.

Apart from that, pretty much everything is the same or worse. For one thing, there are five church management committees to attend (and probably chair), instead of one. There may well be five sets of accounts to manage. Even if the grouping is a so-called United Circuit or United Parish, there will often be five sets of accounts, five Local Church Councils, five buildings to be maintained, as well as a Group or Benefice Council. There are five times as many ministry and relationship issues to address, and five times as many miles to be travelled between the various locations. And there will be 25 interchurch relational issues to balance with all the delicacy and concentration of a plate juggler. Hardly surprising if a plate crashes to the ground occasionally.

And what about the situation where a minister has an area or diocesan role as well. Let’s imagine for the sake of simplicity that the two roles are supposedly divided 50/50. The little parish which he or she serves will get 50% of a priest. Right? Wrong! And here’s why.

There is only one Sunday in each week, so the small population parish gets a disproportionate amount of clergy time dedicated to Sunday. One third of a half time minister will be taken up with Sunday, as opposed to one sixth of a full-timer. But that’s good, isn’t it? No, because it means that only 2 days is left to do everything else, whereas the full-timer has five.

And then there are all the things which are just a normal part of clergy life, such as clergy meetings of one sort or another. Would it be acceptable for a half-time minister to only attend half a Fraternal meeting, or perhaps every other Fraternal meeting? I doubt it! Or should they take half as many services in the parish or only fill in half the forms, visit the school half as many times, attend half as many choir practices or preach half as many sermons (that might be a popular idea!)? Should a half-time cleric only attend half of each PCC meeting, or maintain half of each church building? Of course not!

And anyway, there is no such thing as a part-time minister of the gospel. That is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. One is either full-time (24/7 in the modern jargon) or you are not a local church minister/Parish Priest. You may be all sorts of things, including a very effective chaplain to a congregation, but unless one gives oneself wholly to one’s people, one is not a parish priest.

So, dear Bishops and other denominational leaders, please will you bring to an end the ludicrous and generally dishonest practice of appointing clergy to a pastoral role as well as a denominational one? It doesn’t work, nobody’s happy, the clergy are stressed out of their heads and it encourages us to think only about keeping the church from going under, when what we really want to do is to get out there and tell people the good news of the gospel.

Better by far would be to ask a minister to serve in two, half-time denominational or diocesan roles; or perhaps install him/her as an assistant in a large parish or congregation - that would greatly relieve the emotional and workload stress. But it’s still not the real answer to declining amounts of money and declining numbers of ministers.

What we need is more creative and energetic solutions to these challenges. For example, do we really need local clergy at all? Many free churches have demonstrated that lay leadership can do just as good a job (often better!) than a full-time resident minister. Many Anglican provinces have only regional clergy, exercising an oversight over a large number of congregations in which the leadership and the ministry is carried out almost entirely by lay people. It works in Scotland and Northern Michigan, to name but two. In both places, resources were used to train and equip lay people to run their own missionary parishes leaving a small number of clergy to continue to resource those parishes to run themselves. Northern Michigan has 278 congregations spread over an area the size of Wales, staffed by an ordained team of 8 clergy, one of whom is the Bishop. In Scotland, ordained clergy serve as guides to self-sustaining congregations 50 miles or more apart.

That’s one way of answering the question. It probably isn’t the final answer. But anything is better than the current ‘strategy’ of spreading a shrinking workforce ever thinner, and expecting them to run faster and faster. That way lies mass burnout. In fact, looking at the haggard faces of my colleagues (indeed, looking in the mirror this morning!), I wonder if it already happened. In too many eyes, including my own, I saw the unmistakeable signs of the lights being on, but I wasn’t sure there was anyone at home.