John Richardson: What future for the Anglican clergy?

Posted by Kendall Harmon

A short while ago, I had a conversation with a friend who is going through ‘Continuing Ministerial Education’ —what use to be called Post-Ordination Training, or ‘Potty’ by some wit. He had phoned me to express his concern at what seemed to be the message coming from diocesan management about the future of Anglican ministry, which envisaged significant changes in the nature and deployment of clergy.

That conversation has left me musing on what the church might look like in a decade or two, but also on the whole approach of the church’s ‘managers’ —its leaders and policy makers —to issues which affect ministry at the ‘grass roots’.

Behind this current thinking is a recent diocesan report which confronts the declining numbers of stipendiary clergy with proposals for a decreasing deployment of full-time clergy in the parishes. (This, of course, is not being driven by money —it is simply a lack of people coming forward, let the reader understand.)

The clergyperson of the future will thus need to be, above all, a team leader, since he or she will be in no position to do personally the work that used to be presumed of clergy in the past. Only such team players will be affordable as stipendiary clergy. The individual ‘specialists’, apparently, will have to work on a self-supporting basis.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Ministry of the Ordained

6 Comments
Posted January 26, 2010 at 7:15 am [Printer Friendly] [Print w/ comments]



1. Jeremy Bonner wrote:

Of course, some people do have greater gifts than others in such areas, but I am instinctively worried about someone who claims to have these gifts ‘because they are a bishop’. (I would be rather less worried if I could be persuaded that the system made people with such gifts into bishops, but I am not yet convinced.)

Ouch, that one cuts to the nub of the matter!

January 26, 9:37 am | [comment link]
2. New Reformation Advocate wrote:

Right, Jeremy (#1).  A typically incisive observation by the Ugley Vicar, that his ecclesiastical superiors are unfortunately apt to regard as rather…ugly.

It’s always helpful for an American like me who is abyssmally ignorant about what life in the CoE is really like to hear these sorts of practical reports from leaders on the ground.  It’s all too easy to idealize the mother church, or to project our own situation in the outlying provinces onto the blank screen of what we imagine the CoE to be like.

David Handy+

January 26, 11:32 am | [comment link]
3. austin wrote:

Many men have felt the call of a vocation to the sacred priesthood.  I wonder who aspires to be a ‘clergyperson’?  And why?

January 26, 12:48 pm | [comment link]
4. Fr. Dale wrote:

For heaven’s sake! You’re giving people a piece of bread or a sip of wine.

Not quite!
#3. austin,
I think your question has lots of different answers from lots of different men. It is a question we have to address during discernment. I was ordained a Vocational Deacon two years ago but decided on the Priesthood as a retired 64 year old. Perhaps the best answer I can give you is that I could no longer avoid it. The longer I avoided it, the more it became a crushing weight. It is like preaching. I could not, not preach. I’m sure there are much better reasons/answers than mine but that is mine.

January 26, 7:50 pm | [comment link]
5. azusa wrote:

John Richardson is a better thinker and writer than most of
England’s bishops. But he’ll never join their ranks because it’s a closed shop and someone who doesn’t hold to WO can’t be admitted.

January 27, 2:13 am | [comment link]
6. MichaelA wrote:

Perhaps. The closed shop might have to adjust to new realities soon ...!

January 27, 6:44 pm | [comment link]
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