Time to take a break from my focus on HTB churches and plants. Time to turn to theology in preparation for writing a blog about the LLF debacle. Time to prepare myself to write about Towards the Conversion of the Church of England by the rest of England. Time to record in this blog some of the wisdom and theology I’ve found while reading books by Kenneth Leech in the Priory library. Ken’s ministry was rooted in the East End of London from the 1970s to the noughties.
I’ve been motivated to write and post this blog having read an advert on the Basingstoke Church website for a new Associate Minister. Here are some extracts about the person they are looking for:
This is a role for someone with a passion for seeing others flourish, who loves capitalizing on new opportunities and is looking to make an impact. It is however not a role for someone who wants to be the primary leader as you will be working to the vision and strategy set out by the Rector.
You will be part of our senior leadership team led by the Rector, working alongside our other Associate Minister and our Chief Operating Officer. This group works together to lead the church day-to-day, manage the staff team, and supports the Rector in making key decisions in the life of the church. Within that you will also have line management responsibilities for members of the team, both paid and voluntary.
This post is probably not for you if you are: • Wanting to reshape a whole-church vision. • A leader who is looking to have the final say in all decisions – this is a leadership role with substantial autonomy within its specified areas, but the role will only work if that leadership is exercised in harmony with the rest of the team.
The Basingstoke model of ministry and congregational life is the antithesis of what Ken was advocating and practising in Hackney and Aldgate and elsewhere in the East End alongside many other people, named in his introductions, some personal friends of mine, others known to me: Savi Hensman, Nic Holtam, the Revd Professor Leslie Houlden, Malcolm Johnson, Nerissa Jones, Brian Lee, Sara Maitland, Colin Midlane, David Randall and Peter Selby. Reading Ken’s books remind me of what I’m missing in today’s church as I’ve visited congregations, worshipped in a variety of different contexts and engaged many people in conversation, strangers and friends.
For me, the vital theological elements represented by Ken and those working with him in the last century are almost entirely missing today. The people are missing, the theological thinking and conversations are missing, the life of the church that he describes, all are missing. Here are a few excerpts from which I hope you will be able to judge for yourself whether I am misguided or accurate in what I observe.
First, a brief excerpt from chapter 7, The Capture and Liberation of Theology
I have come to the following conclusions for contextual theological work:
It is vital to understand the immediate local, as well as the wider, context in which we are working, and not to see it as a neutral backcloth to ‘the real work’. We need to be asking: What is going on? Where are we? What are the forces that shape us and threaten us? Where are the points of leverage and areas of hope?
We need to reflect on the content of our experience. Theology is about feelings and hopes as well as thoughts.
We need to go to the resources of Scripture and tradition and let them challenge the present.
We need to scrutinise the tradition in the light of our past and current experience.
We need to recognised that nothing is fixed and final, and that all is in movement.
This is all done best in groups of people working together, supporting, criticising, challenging one another, within a framework of common discipleship and common struggle.
Secondly, excerpts from chapter 9, God on the edge: theology and ‘social inclusion’
We are faced now with a serious structural threat to innovative ministry in the form of the increasing dominance of the centralised executive church model. Professor Richard Roberts expressed the fear that all marginal ministry will be disallowed in favour of ministry that is in conformity with the centrally dictated “vision” statements and subject to de-skilling managerial enforcement . . . there will be no place for non-conforming figures in a rationally managed church driven from the centre by executive power.
Today the Church of England is run by an Archbishops’ Council. This came about as a result of the Turnbull Report which claimed that it was using ‘radical ideas’ and was ‘willing to be very radical’. What has happened is a centralisation of power, and the increasing tendency to identify the central bureaucracy with the Church itself.
In 1975, Peter Selby, later Bishop of Worcester but then the Director of Lay Training in the Diocese of Southwark, gave a paper on ‘lay training as a point of growth’ in which he raised the question of what churches were for, and what they were doing, and the conflict which often arose between the two. He commented:
The truth is . . . that it is the privilege of the congregation to exist only for the purpose of supporting and enabling the divine purpose for the salvation of humanity. If a congregation fails to exist for this purpose, it might be important to prevent it from extending its membership and so absorbing the energies of ore and more people in activities that are not only useless but have the added disadvantage of claiming to be immensely important.
His words are even more relevant in the world of the McDonaldisation, packaging and marketing of the Church.
There is now a growing criticism of the ‘professional model’ which has become increasingly dominant both in Christian ministry and elsewhere in society.
I am not even against ‘boundaries’ though I believe that the deliberate transgression of them is often central to Christian ministry, as it certainly was to the earthly ministry of Jesus. My concern is rather with power, control, the culture of management, and that theology has been co-opted by certain forces within late capitalism.
The dominance of the professional model is more serious than many realise, for it is not only a question of political ideology. That would be serious enough, for ideological assumptions shape practice to a high degree. But what is involved here is the whole understanding of what it is to be human, to be a person. Moreover, it is, like most such forms of oppression, largely unconscious and therefore unexamined.
Work on the margins can only flourish if there are people involved who do not conform, who transgress boundaries, who are unreasonable and innovative. The truth is that for many decades the Church of England has, for some decades, been losing many of its most creative people. It simply does not know what to do with them for they do not fit into the new tidy systems.
It goes without saying that once these trends have become dominant, the prophetic dimension in marginal work disappears. If the role of a prophet is to be a destabilising presence and offer an alternative reality to the dominant one, then clearly such a tradition will always be marginal. I worry today that some of the prophetic figures of the past are not simply marginal but extinct.
There are elements in the theology of priesthood which are equally essential to spiritual health as well as to understanding the nature of the church and its ministry, elements which we neglect at our peril. Urban Holmes and William Countryman disagreed with Durkheim’s view of the priest as a symbolic force for stability and the status quo, and of priesthood as the enemy of chaos, arguing that priesthood is rooted in the receptive mode of being, that its roots ‘life firmly within the wilderness of the antistructure.
The contemporary, pastoral ways of looking at ministry are very one-dimensional, functionalist and focused more on doing than being. Yet much of the symbolism of priesthood is about being, identity, brokenness and sacrifice.
Conclusion
To sum up what has had a significant impact on me as characterising or missing from the contemporary Church of England:
Today there is increasing dominance of the centralised executive church model.
There is no place for non-conforming figures in today’s rationally managed church driven from the centre by executive power.
Today the Church of England is run by an Archbishops’ Council. There is a centralisation of power and an increasing tendency to identify the central bureaucracy with the Church itself.
Theology has been co-opted by certain forces within late capitalism.
Work on the margins can only flourish if there are people involved who do not conform, who transgress boundaries, who are unreasonable and innovative.
For some decades the Church of England has been losing many of its most creative people because it simply does not know what to do with them.
Some of the prophetic figures of the past are not simply marginal but extinct.
The contemporary, pastoral ways of looking at ministry are very one-dimensional, functionalist and focused more on doing than being.