The Christian priest yesterday
Apart from a persistent fear that I might have been chemically castrated, I think I would have liked the 1950s.
Christie was publishing A Murder is Announced; Britten was premiering The Turn of the Screw at La Fenice; Larkin’s “Church Going” featured in The Less Deceived, his first collection of poetry. Michael Ramsey was at York, and George Pace was restoring war-damaged churches. The Parish Communion movement was finally making the Tractarians respectable — the Lord’s people around the Lord’s table on the Lord’s day was becoming normative. Reservation was being introduced at St Alban’s Cathedral, and Eucharistic vestments at Ripon.
Yes, white and male and Anglo-Catholic (and the fear apart; and provided I got that scholarship), I would have liked the 1950s.
The 50s have been on my mind recently because I think they’re the holy ground for my generation’s Anglo-Catholic priestly sensibility.
The pendulum of taste and formation matters here. For a couple of generations before mine (I was 40 this year), the 1950s were something to move away from or rebel against. Today’s hegemonic Church sensibilities — cassock-albs, Taizé, mission as a catch all term — are the children of those generations’ pendulum shift.
And now, there being no new thing under the sun, it’s my generation’s turn to rebel against its parents, and to “reform the reform.” Fiddle-backs and saturnos are in; Marian priestly societies and Martin Thornton book groups are being formed; somebody’s live-streaming B.C.P. offices in Latin; Trinitarian ontology’s exciting them in Cambridge; the Virgin Birth’s an actual thing again.
The aesthetics and a good deal of the theology appeal to me greatly — though I have doubts about the widespread missional potential of both.
But here’s a rub. In terms of Church resources and the sustainability of parish ministry, we’re not in the 1950s any more, Toto. And we’re not going back there. (Though see the endnote for the glimpse of a yellow-brick road.)
The Diocese of Chelmsford’s recent deliberations about reductions in the number of stipendiary posts have been received a shock. But it’s actually the chill wind of Anglican Christendom’s demise finally and predictably being felt in the balance sheet of a South-East diocese.
The unsustainablity of our parochial structures has been a gathering storm for a good while. It’s been forecast in those Church Times gazette announcements of someone’s preferment “to be Priest-in-Charge of Midsomer Abbas with Midsomer Wyvern and Midsomer Barton, remaining Rector-Designate of the Midsomer-in-the-Marsh Group and Vicar of Midsomer Wellow with Midsomer Parva.” The present realities of revenue, stipendiary and pension costs, capital costs and attendances are finally causing the brittle elastic to snap. The whole edifice is now creaking, and denial won’t do any more.
Other parts of the Church have long since realised that these dynamics demand a different way of working. And, as at other times in its history, movements with a quasi-religious-order dynamic have emerged as agents of reform. H.T.B. and its plants are well on their way to being, for the Church of England, the Benedictines of our age. For abbeys, Monte Cassino, Clairvaux and the lactating Virgin we have resource churches, South Ken, Islington and data projectors. But, in essence, H.T.B.-style plants are places designed and endowed, as Cistercian abbeys were, to be centres of expertise, sustaining a hinterland, and connected more or less hierarchically across diocesan boundaries one to another.
The danger for Anglo-Catholics is that we expect that the hero priest will save things. Our icons are Fr Tooth and the slum priests — independent, hard working, episcopacy-supporting but bishop-baiting parochial dynamos. But the breadth of the challenge and the lack of a steady supply of heroes is such that, no matter how brilliant some Anglo-Catholic clergy are individually, we will not save things one parish at a time. We might do good, but it will likely not be sustainable between one appointment and the next, let alone scaleable across a nation.
An episcopal and Catholic ecclesiology for our days will realise that it needs to be “for the diocese”, so to speak, if it wants to be “for the parish”. The stewardship of buildings and the raising of funds will soon be beyond the ability of a large number of parish churches, no matter their faithfulness. Already these goals alone have become in some places the whole measure and achievement of Christian discipleship and ministry, such are their demands on small congregations. A life-giving, liturgical common life is hard to sustain under such pressures.
The inevitable decisions about what to save, what to set aside, and where to invest gifts of treasure and concentrated priestly talent, need to be made wisely and strategically — and so apostolically, synodically and episcopally. Planning and ordering across the geography and demography of a diocese are essential to ensure that flourishing worshipping communities can be sustained, staffed and resourced in places where the common good, rather than historic endowments or present riches alone, requires them.
Above all, parochial ministry needs colleagueship, collegiality, accountability and oversight — even loyalty and obedience — if it is to flourish; and it needs to subsist in a culture that revels in these things, instead of publicly disparaging them.
This demands a contemporary priestly character that needs to be capable, not so much of conserving or restoring, but of shaping and rebuilding. It needs to be passionate about sending, replicating and enterprising, and not just perfecting and protecting. It needs to be comfortable subsisting in true partnership across churchmanships and hierarchies. And it needs to understand, advocate for and hold in prayer the compromises involved both in making decisions at scale and in leading reform. It probably needs to bitch less about diocesan bishops, too, and be ready to support and share with them in more than what it merely lawful and honest.
The yellow brick road, if all of that feels too alien, is to create an Anglo-Catholic society of apostolic life. Such a society would need to be capable of buying-out struggling churches, thereby securing its own parochial footholds, outwith the structures of the diocese, and without burdening the Diocesan Board of Finance. If there were money for such a venture, which would need to be considerable, and which Anglo-Catholicism doesn’t seem to be able to pool these days, I’d rejoice. I might even fundraise for it, and establish an Anglican Gricigliano yet.
But the Kansas of parochial England will still be there. Larkin in ’54 foresaw it reduced to “grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.” And only the Church of England and its dioceses can reform, save and sustain it.
