The Pattern of Our Calling

Ministry Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

David Hoyle

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780334054726
• eBook ISBN: 9780334054740
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

David Hoyle explores the changing theologies of ministry during the Church's history with the aim of challenging the lack of theological reflection in some of today's understanding of ministry.

1. Beginning Badly

There are, I know, plenty of other stories just like this one. This particular story is neither unusual, nor startling. It is, though, my story. It is where I make my beginning.

It was a June night, 30 years ago, and some of the details are a bit hazy now. I cannot even remember after all this time precisely what it was that he said. Perhaps that does not matter very much because the story is, after all, so familiar. In fact, I don’t suppose he said a great deal. He was a shy and scholarly man; words were chosen carefully; they never came in a rush. There were always half hesitations and little silences in his company. In fact, it was precisely because he was so reticent that the gesture he made was so remarkable and made such a difference. It was a very little thing that he did, but that night it steered me through a little crisis, and I am still grateful all these years later.

I was in charge of books and candles and so on. I don’t suppose anyone had actually asked me to do that. I had a bustling, chipper enthusiasm and was always inventing jobs that may, or may not, have needed doing. So, because I had to see to the candles and the lights, I was on my feet as the service ended and I was first out of the chapel. First out of the chapel, behind the bishop, and so he could not fail to see that all my absurd enthusiasm and busy confidence had suddenly quite drained away.

It was the last night of the ordination retreat. With the others, who were still sitting over their prayers in the chapel, I was due in the cathedral the following morning, to be ordained deacon. Like so very many men and women, before and since, I was suddenly swept with great tides of doubt and fear. Ordination retreats usually close with a bishop’s ‘charge’. For several days, a retreat conductor leads those to be ordained through a period of quiet preparation. At the end of the retreat, there is a change of gear and the bishop, who will soon ordain in the name of Christ and his Church, speaks words of encouragement, instruction or challenge. Gathering for the bishop’s charge everyone knows they have come to a threshold and everyone feels the significance of the moment. Most of our bishops, sensibly, do not tug on the heartstrings. Well aware that they are speaking to men and women who are on a roller coaster of anxiety and excitement, they speak calmly of important truths.

Earlier generations did things differently. In Durham, in the 1880s, J. B. Lightfoot could not resist ramming the point home. This was a defining moment, a time for decisions:

A great change in your lives, a tremendous pledge given, a tremendous responsibility incurred, a magnificent blessing claimed, a glorious potentiality of good bestowed – how else shall I describe the crisis which to-morrow’s sun will bring, or at least may bring to all of you …

A great and momentous change – momentous beyond all human conception for good and evil, to yourselves, to your flock, to every one who comes in contact with you. For good or for evil. It must be so. This is the universal law in things spiritual. The same Christ, Who is for the rising of many, is for the falling of many likewise. The same gospel, which is to some the savour of life unto life, is to others the savour of death unto death. A potentiality of glory must likewise be a potentiality of shame.1

Earlier generations, notice, knew the risk, knew the possibilities of failure and success.

In Ely in 1986, we did not get anything like that from the bishop. I would have bolted if I had heard anything like that. I was all in a mood for bolting. The retreat had already provided more than enough in the way of defining moments. It had been led by W. H. Vanstone, a man who had digested his own experience of an acutely uncomfortable parish ministry and brilliantly laid it bare in the book Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense. Vanstone had been a taciturn, intense presence throughout the retreat. Self-contained and understated, he was nonetheless a man of passionate conviction and it all got distilled into a series of addresses about ordained ministry lived and worked ‘out on the boundaries’. Vanstone had learnt, at great personal cost, what kind of work a priest can do with people who are struggling to negotiate something at the very borders of their experience: in sickness, bereavement or anxiety. A priest who is going to be any use in conversations like that, he told us, has to be out on those same boundaries too and know just how uncomfortable that can feel. Priests are called to the boundaries, he said, and to the knowledge that there our capacity and resources would be stretched to the limit. I took the point, but there was a cold fear in me. So, by the final night of the retreat, I was seriously thinking of bolting.

In his charge, the Bishop of Ely talked a little about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and about the poet Geoffrey Hill. Arrested by the Nazis in 1943, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent his first Christmas in captivity watching the flares falling from allied bombers over Berlin. Geoffrey Hill’s poem Christmas Trees places Bonhoeffer between two types of violence, between the Nazi state that imprisoned him, and the violence of flares and bombs falling from the sky. In Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer wrestled with the problem of what theology and the Church should say in times as bad as that. He favoured restraint over passion: ‘Qualified silence might perhaps be more appropriate for the Church today than very unqualified speech.’2 So, Geoffrey Hill describes the measured discipline of Bonhoeffer gently insisting we must hear sounds nearly drowned out by horror. He has him speak words that ‘are quiet but not too quiet’.3

‘His words are quiet, but not too quiet.’ My bishop might have been sparing with words, and gentle in manner, but it was not because he had nothing to say. There was nothing uncertain or confused about him. He was a man rich in learning, full of reference, and even the silences had a kind of authority; he was, himself, precisely ‘quiet, but not too quiet’. He pointed us towards a ministry that would first hear the truth and then speak it.

I did not for a moment disagree, but I was by now mentally packing my bags and planning my great escape. These were demands I could not meet. And so he saw me, as I left the chapel, frightened of running away and frightened of staying. That seriously shy man put his arm round my shoulders and propelled me into the garden where we walked up and down in near darkness for 15 minutes. Initially, of course, he just had hold of me and I wasn’t going anywhere, except where he was going. Later, I knew I had to stay. I had to stay because I was suddenly in company; I walked in that garden, at night, with someone else. Ministry was not and never would be something I did alone. I had, at last, also been reminded that ordination really was not simply a test of my talents and my convictions. I was being ordained, by a bishop, into the Church of God. Properly understood, ordination might indeed set me apart and despatch me to those boundaries I feared, but it would also always remind me that I would be included in something, swept up in the great purposes of God. The work that worried me so much would never really be mine.

Ministry belongs to the Church. At ordination we are told that ‘The Church is the Body of Christ, the people of God and the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.’ Ministry is modelled by Christ then shared in that community. Ministry is never a possession; it is always an inheritance. The fundamental character of ministry is its relatedness to the ministry of the whole people of God. Richard Baxter, a Nonconformist minister writing in the seventeenth century made the point that so many others have made:

By your work you are related to Christ, as well as to the flock. You are stewards of his mysteries, and rulers of his household; and he that entrusted you, will maintain you in his work … Be true to him and never doubt that he will be true to you.4

Lightfoot made a similar point; he talked about ordinands who make two errors. First, they get anxious about whether or not the work is going well, instead of just doing the work because it is important and serves God. Then they get self-conscious and wonder if they can do it at all. Like Jeremiah, they find themselves saying, ‘I cannot speak: for I am a child.’

As well dash my head against a fortress of stone, as attempt so hopeless a task. What can I do to heal this wounded spirit, to melt this hardened conscience, to soothe these dying agonies? Who am I, that I should act as Christ’s ambassador, should bear God’s message to these? I am tongue-tied. I can only stammer, can only lisp out half-formed words like a child?

And the reproof comes to you as it came to Jeremiah of old, ‘Say not, I am a child. Be not afraid of their faces.’ And the promise is vouchsafed to you now, as it was vouchsafed to him then, ‘I am with thee to deliver thee.’ ‘Behold I have put My words in thy mouth.’5

Ministry is not something we own, it comes from Christ. It is his work before it is ours.

That night, walking round and round the little lawn, I began to understand this better. I knew I had to stay. I did not really understand it then, but I would soon begin to see that a vocation is not a choice you make and certainly not a commitment to excel. I don’t think the bishop believed in my abilities, I doubt if he even believed in the miraculous power of the ordination rite, but he believed in my vocation. He believed I was called by Christ and that if I was true to him, he would be true to me.

So, my ordained ministry began with some serious questions about what on earth I thought I was doing. Strangely, that crisis passed and never returned. I have had dreadful days and, at one stage, months and months when I have wondered what to do next and berated myself for my failure to live up to my calling. There have been real crises because I have been wrong and because I have done things badly. The question about whether I should be doing it at all has, however, never returned. I have been very lucky. Others around me, including at one stage a close colleague, have been dogged again and again by that particular, cruel uncertainty. It takes all sorts of forms. That night in Ely, I faced a question about my own vocation because I had been labouring with the dreadful, cocky conceit that ministry was going to be a test of my abilities and a public performance. That brought me to a crisis of confidence and courage. Now I am (slightly) less fascinated with my own reflection. The temptation to assume this must all be about me has passed. Still, it was there, in that night in the garden of a retreat house that this book, about ministry and priesthood, had its beginning.

Having resisted the dreadful temptation to bolt, I served a (rather short) curacy on a modern housing estate, and then went on to be a college chaplain. For seven years I taught history to undergraduates, took chapel services in term time, and let bursars and clerks of works worry about bills and maintenance. I worked as a pastor in a small community where I knew nearly everyone by name and where I knew and felt all the rhythms of the student year. It was all very exciting, and energetic, and opinionated, and I loved it, but it wasn’t a preparation for parish ministry.

After seven years of college, and claret, and conversation, I was instituted and inducted as a vicar and discovered I had no map for the journey. At first, of course, I simply did not know the place or the people, and struggled with a fairly hefty culture shock. That was hard, but the real problem was something more fundamental and more destructive than that. My difficulty was that I had no real idea of what a priest was supposed to do, or be. I worked hard, but usually felt I was doing the wrong thing or (just as uncomfortable) the right thing badly. The poor parishioners I went to work among needed endless patience as I lurched from anxious inactivity into frantic, misplaced effort. Fortunately, they proved to have patience by the bucket load. So, the question was slowly refined. I was no longer so concerned to know how best to use my gifts as a priest; I was much more concerned to know what a priest was, what a priest did.

When I moved again that question began to loom very large indeed. I became a member of the new legion of diocesan officials, responsible for ministry. I had been a vicar, now I became an ‘officer’ and, a bit later, a ‘director’. The titles bother me a bit. If you need an ‘officer for ministry’ there might be an implication that ministry is official and needs organizing from an office. The business of being a ‘director’ is even more disturbing, partly because of all those pinstripe associations in the boardroom, and partly because of the implication that ministry might need a diocesan official to give it direction. That is a simply ludicrous idea. It is ludicrous because ministry is local and happens in particular places, among particular people, and does not readily lend itself to direction from outside. It is also ludicrous because we are virtually all agreed that ministry is changing fast and being done in all kinds of different ways. There is simply not enough agreement among us for us easily to accept direction from someone with an office and a computer and a few books. There is a variety of practice and opinion that is pulling us apart. Like it or not though (and, in truth, it was a job I loved), I had become a director of ministry and I was supposed to have something to say about what ministry is.

I left that job six years ago and among the boxes and bits and pieces that were carried from my house when we moved was a first draft of this book. Now I am a dean and my experience of ministry has changed again. One of my current jobs is to keep ‘open house’ for the diocese. A cathedral is the theatre for...

Table of contents

• Copyright page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Epigraph
• 1. Beginning Badly
• 2. Through Confusions
• 3. Tasks in Ministry
• 4. Outreaching Speech
• 5. Putting Priests in Their Place
• 6. Ministers of the Kingdom
• 7. Holiness
• 8. Gifts in Ministry
• 9. Keeping Your Balance
• 10. Spiritual Traffic