Making God Possible

The task of ordained ministry present and future

Alan Billings

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281062287
• eBook ISBN: 9780281065462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

What are clergy for?

In this lively and provocative volume, Alan Billings argues that they serve the mission and ministry of the Church, which is to make God possible.

In each new era, how to carry out this mission effectively will vary, as the Church seeks to respond to changes in society and culture, but it is likely to involve clergy in a refocusing of their ministry.

Part 1 of Making God Possible looks at recent cultural shifts and the challenges they present to Christianity in the twenty-first century.

Part 2 explores some of the models of ministry which have been found in the Church in the past and which continue to exercise an influence: classical (the parson); evangelical (the minister); catholic (the priest), and utility (the social activist and personal therapist).

The author skilfully draws out those things of lasting importance and value in each model that might contribute towards the renewal of the ordained ministry today.

Part 2

MODELS OF MINISTRY

3

Classical: the parson

When I mention religion I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.

Parson Thwackum in Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749

Origins and evolution

In 1652, a small book was published, some twenty years after the author died, that provided a model for Anglican ordained ministry until well into the twentieth century. It was still warmly commended in the theological college where I trained in the late 1960s, though in more recent years it has often been identified as an unhelpful model in the modern context.¹ George Herbert (1593–1633) had written The Country Parson: His Character and Rule of Holy Life after abandoning an academic and political career for marriage and ordination. He married Jane Danvers in 1629 and a year later became rector of the rural parishes of Fugglestone St Peter and Bemerton St Andrew in the Diocese of Salisbury. But in 1633 he died in his rectory, leaving his manuscript for others to publish. In a few short chapters Herbert set out his understanding of the calling and responsibilities of a clergyman of the Church of England. He wrote to provide himself with a ‘Mark to aim at’.² In the event, both in his own life and through his book, he set a pattern for other clergy to follow, a benchmark against which all subsequent generations of Anglican clergy until comparatively recently would judge their own ministries.³ The book was especially influential because, until the Victorian period, Anglican clergy received no formal training and even as late as 1907 half of those ordained had never spent any time in a theological college. They learnt by observation and what they could glean from manuals of best practice.⁴ (As residential training becomes unaffordable for all, the era of the theological college may turn out to have been quite short and now near its end.)

What Herbert described is the life and work of an ordained minister according to the Book of Common Prayer.⁵ Herbert wrote at what was a defining moment for Anglicanism. The Church was involved in sharp theological controversy between those – we can call them ‘inclusivists’ – who wanted the Church of England to be able to welcome within it a considerable range of theological opinion (for diversity was the reality of post-Reformation Christianity in England), and the Puritans who favoured more tightly drawn theological boundaries – we can call these the ‘exclusivists’. The inclusive thinking that we encounter in Herbert’s book prevailed, though exclusivist arguments have resurfaced from time to time in the national Church, not least in recent years.

As well as the more explicit references to the work of a priest in the ordination service, the Prayer Book makes a number of other assumptions about ordained ministry and the Church. Herbert draws out and explores these in his handbook. The main assumptions and themes are these:

1 The Anglican priest is a minister of a national (established) Church that is charged with the task of making a nominally Christian nation into a Christian commonwealth.

2 The primary responsibility of the priest is to teach and expound the word of God, which is the sole authority in matters of faith.

3 The priest is pastor to all who live within his parish boundaries and this requires him to be sensitive to their needs by residing in the parish; he is a known person, a persona, the parson.

This produced a distinctive Anglican ecclesiology and ethos, what we might call the classical model of the Anglican parson – the men who inhabit so much of English literature in the novels of Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope and George Orwell.⁶ Let us examine each of these assumptions in turn.

The model

A national Church

At the Reformation, the Church in England became the Church of England, established by Parliament. The sovereign, not the Pope, became its Supreme Governor. This proved a mixed blessing for the mission of the Church.

On the one hand, the freedom that came with the break from Rome after 1533–4 enabled the Church of England to produce a Prayer Book and a Bible in a language that ordinary people could understand. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s Prayer Book (1549 – which used Miles Coverdale’s translation of Scripture) and the later King James Bible, or Authorized Version, in English (1611) were a great gain for the Christian mission: they became two of the greatest spiritual resources the Christian Church has ever produced in the English-speaking world. Generations of people have had their spiritual lives nourished as they learnt by heart collects from the Prayer Book and passages from the Authorized Version of the Bible; and in learning to say the Catechism (included by Cranmer in the first Prayer Book of 1549) and the Litany, they learnt how to think and behave as Christians in the world.

Establishment, especially under Elizabeth I (the Elizabethan Settlement), also meant that for reasons of state as well as religion, the national Church sought to be a via media between Rome (catholic Christianity) and Geneva (reformed Christianity). This gave the Church of England a certain doctrinal stance: it would retain a respect for the past by not abandoning its catholic inheritance (including episcopacy), but it would reform it. As we have already noted, this attempt to steer a middle course was severely tested in the seventeenth century by the Puritans, who wanted to make the Church more Protestant, but the work and witness of the Caroline (living during the reigns of Kings Charles I and II) divines – Lancelot Andrewes, William Laud, Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Ken – ensured that the catholic inheritance was not lost. The Church of England took a middle path between continental Calvinism and Roman Catholicism. The Church was catholic but reformed, and consciously sought to be a broad Church embracing a range of theological opinions. This has bequeathed to the contemporary Church of England a continuing willingness to tolerate a wide range of views and liturgical styles. The instincts of the Anglican Church and its ordained ministry have historically been towards inclusion.

The close association with the crown and government also gave the Church over the years unique opportunities to influence the direction of national life and government policy as it stood alongside government in ‘critical solidarity’. The task of the Church was not to call men and women out of the secular world but to equip them for service in it. The task of the laity was to make the kingdom of this world more like the kingdom of Christ. Many monarchs and prime ministers – though by no means all – accepted their role as a Christian vocation. Before the democratic reforms of the nineteenth century, the bishops wielded a certain amount of real power through their membership of the House of Lords. That has now disappeared, leaving them with a little influence but no power.

The concept of a national Church has meant above all that from its inception the Church of England accepted that it had a pastoral responsibility towards all the people of England and not just regular attenders, towards every aspect of life and not just church life, and towards all the institutions of the state. Apologists for the establishment of the Church of England would say that this was because at both national and local level the Church was committed to a ‘community’ and not an ‘associational’ understanding of what it is to be the Church. In other words, it did not choose to make too hard and fast a distinction between those who were ‘true believers’ and those who were not. It sought to be as inclusive as possible by being chaplain to the nation. Consequently, the edges of the Anglican Church have never been tightly circumscribed – and most Anglicans saw this as a strength.

On the other hand, the idea of a national Church also resulted in undoubted losses. To some extent, for example, it lost the sense of being part of a universal Church. It is one of the abiding strengths of the Roman Catholic Church that it is to be found in almost every part of the world: it is catholic in the sense of being universally present, and its members have a sense of belonging to a world-wide Church. The Church of England sought to think of itself as part of the universal Church of Christ, but this seemed an insubstantial claim compared with Roman Catholicism, which had such a universal reach. However, the development of the British Empire led to the growth of the world-wide Anglican communion (really from the late eighteenth century), and in more recent times there has been a mutual recognition of the ministries of the Anglican and some mainly North European churches – such as the Evangelical-Lutheran churches of Norway, Sweden and Finland – in the Porvoo communion.⁷ But the reality is that the Anglican Church was and remains primarily a relatively small, mainly English-speaking denomination on the world stage. This becomes increasingly an issue for contemporary practising Anglican lay people as their jobs and vacations take them to other countries and they look for churches in their tradition.

But establishment comes at a price. The Church has to tread a fine and careful line between being supportive of government and being merely subordinate. Governments are happy to have the Church’s prayers but less keen to receive its prophetic word.

Expounding the word of God

The break with Rome was essentially about two things: How was salvation to be secured? Where did authority in matters of doctrine and church order lie? For the reformers, the Bible provided the answer to both questions. Salvation came through faith in Jesus Christ, who is known only through Holy Scripture. Final authority in matters of faith and practice likewise lay with the Bible. The Church of England taught that its own authority derived from the Scriptures and that what it taught and practised was subject to them. But the Scriptures do not interpret themselves, and a careful reading of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion makes it clear that the reformers recognized this; reason has a part to play:

Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.⁸

While reason may not lead us to contradict Scripture (Article XX), it is necessary to interpret and apply – or ‘prove’ – Scripture (Article VI). The centrality of Scripture and the need to expound it became one of the principal differences between the catholic (unreformed) and the reformed Church. The reformed priest had to be a preacher, an expounder of the word of God. Indeed, the term ‘preacher’ came to be used of priests, and until the catholic revival of the nineteenth century the pulpit was often the dominant piece of furniture in Anglican churches.

All of this pointed towards the need for an educated priesthood. The skills required of the priest in the medieval Church were minimal: an ability to break a piece of bread and recite the words of the mass (albeit in a strange tongue – Latin). As a result, most pre-Reformation priests were poor men with little education. But preaching and teaching from the Scriptures necessitated a literate clergy. In this respect the Church of England stood in the Protestant tradition. The Roman Catholic Church could survive with mass priests and the occasional sermon from a member of a preaching order, but Protestants were fed each week by the interpreted word as much as by broken bread. Herbert exhorted the clergy to bless God in prayer after each sermon using these words:

And now Lord, thou hast fed us with the bread of life: so man did eat Angel’s food: Oh, Lord, bless it: Oh Lord make it health and strength unto us; still striving and prospering so long within us, until our obedience reach the measure of thy love, who hast done for us as much as may be.⁹

For this reason Herbert said that the country parson should preach ‘constantly’, only stopping for serious illness. The pulpit was his ‘joy and his throne’.¹⁰

This is not to say that the ideal was always achieved. In the immediate aftermath of the Reformation the clergy had to be provided with a Book of Homilies from which they could read sermons on Sundays because they were unused to writing them, and in the eighteenth century, when clergy brought an hourglass into the pulpit to ensure that the congregation had a full 60 minutes, the preacher might read from a book rather than compose his own. (Books of sermons were printed to look like handwritten manuscripts for this reason – as we can see in a well-known Hogarth cartoon, Sleeping Congregation.) But in general the preparation and delivery of sermons has always been seen as an important part of an Anglican priest’s task. For Anglican evangelicals it was and remains central.

The style of preaching was also important. Herbert objected to the Puritan habit of ‘crumbling’ the text – breaking it down phrase by phrase or even word by word. This was to treat the Scriptures as if they were a ‘dictionary’.¹¹ People needed to become familiar with substantial texts and have whole passages expounded. (‘Crumbling’ is still practised in some contemporary evangelical preaching.)

The emphasis on the word was also an incentive to improve the educational standards of the people. It is often said that when missionaries went to Africa in the nineteenth century, Roman Catholics built clinics while Protestants built schools. Hearing the Scriptures read in the vernacular in church was good, but having a laity who could read the Bible for themselves was better. Even so, the laity would need competent clergy who could act as guides and mentors in the process of becoming familiar with the Scriptures, their meaning and application. (Some would argue that all the Reformation did was replace one type of authoritarian ministry with another; that the new presbyter was but the old priest writ large.¹²)

One important way in which the clergy fulfilled their task of inducting the rising generation into the Christian faith was through the Catechism. This was part of the Prayer Book and consisted of a number of questions and answers on key points of Christian teaching to be committed to memory before confirmation. It included the Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. The children of each parish would be tested on what they had learnt by the parish priest during evening prayer. It was still in use in Anglican parishes as late as the 1950s. It formed the basis of my own preparation for confirmation as a child in 1953. I was particularly grateful for some of its careful explanations of doctrine – such as the definition of a sacrament as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ – and remember them to this day. However, the Catechism was also a means of social control, as the response to the question...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part1 Present realities
• Part2 Models of ministry
• Part3 Future possibilities
• Notes
• Search items