Blog 2 of 7 - Setting out the landscape
We start with a few quotations:
You shall not go outside the entrance of the tent of meeting for seven days, until the day when your period of ordination is completed. For it will take seven days to ordain you; as has been done today, the Lord has commanded to be done to make atonement for you. You shall remain at the entrance of the tent of meeting day and night for seven days, keeping the Lord’s charge so that you do not die; for so I am commanded.”
Leviticus 8:33-35 (NRSV)
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
1 Corinthians 3:16
“The Rector died of an apoplexy brought on by becoming infuriated about politics when drunk on claret”
Notwithstanding, Louis de Bernières, p. 103
When Aaron and his sons were ordained priests for God’s people, a ram of burnt offering and a ram of ordination were sacrificed for them, and the ordinands were daubed in blood. They then spent seven days excluded from the normal life of the community, symbolically standing as interlocutors at the entrance of the tent of meeting. The Church of England has never practised this method of ordination, and if they did, the church cleaners would certainly have something to say about it.
This quotation, and the one from 1 Corinthians (where Paul is writing to “you” plural, the whole people of the church in Corinth), serve as an initial reminder that any discussion of the priesthood/presbyterate (OK I’m going to use these terms interchangeably, even though my preference is very much for presbyter and presbyterate when we're talking about human ministers) must embrace complexity and diversity of context, in the scriptures themselves, and also in the tradition and practice of the Church since. Augustine was famously ordained by force in 391 A.D. in Hippo, at the collective will of the congregation:
It was far from uncommon at this period for ordination to be forced upon the candidate by the coercion of the congregation. Augustine was allowed no escape, and had to submit.
Confessions, Augustine (Oxford World’s Classics 1998) Introduction xi
Such a situation would not be tolerated today, even if it did produce one of the most famous bishops in the West.
This blog series must navigate such a variety of traditions and perspectives, in history as well as in churches, especially the Anglican communion (hence the amusing-yet-hackneyed quotations from Louis De Bernières’ Notwithstanding, a wonderful idyll of English village life now lost). It must also not indulge the fantasy that our current context has “settled” or is in some sort of agreed stasis; nothing could be further from the truth. As The Future of the Parish System states (see the essay therein Many rooms in my Father’s house: The changing identity of the English parish church by Martyn Percy), UK society, perceptions of church, the financial realities of the parish churches and the workings of the parish system itself, are all in flux, and have been continuously since at least the parish churches of Saxon times. Of course, there are particular pressures specific to our times: the Chelmsford Diocesan strategy spells out with numbers the current trajectory of clergy retirements:
...during 2010 the prediction was for a 25% fall in stipendiary numbers by 2020. Current predictions indicate that there will be further reductions as retirements are likely to outnumber new ordinations until at least 2025
From "Reimagining Ministry in the Diocese of Chelmsford". Read the whole document.
The narrative often told is that there is a trend towards secularism, financial unviability of small churches with dwindling, elderly congregations, and disenfranchisement of the old “beating-heart-of-the-village” parish parson. Churches are often complicit in this narrative; as Martyn Percy puts it:
One of the great paradoxes of late modernity is that, almost more than any other group, churches believe in the steady decrease of public faith.
Many rooms in my Father’s house, Martin Percy
But that picture misses some important subtlety: all voluntary organisations in the UK are seeing reduced participation, as people work harder and longer in a culture that values individualism and denigrates duties to community:
If it is true that the churches as institutions have declined markedly in the post-war period, the same process (declines in membership, financial support and so on) can be seen in almost all social activities which require people to ‘gather’ on a regular basis (political parties, trade unions, team sports etc.). Situating the churches within this broader economic and social context is crucial if we are to understand what is happening. It immediately becomes clear, for example, that the reduction in church activity in Western Europe forms part of a profound change in the nature of social life; it is not, in contrast, an unequivocal indicator of religious indifference.
Grace Davie From obligation to consumption: Understanding the patterns of religion in Northern Europe
So as more people grow up with only secular influences (and without the basic outline of the Christian faith), the lie that secular thought is logical and scientific, while religious thought is subjective and purely private, needs even more to be elegantly countered by people with rigorous theological training. The Church of England’s financial and legal models need to be able to respond with agility to the missional needs of our communities, which does not necessarily mean the preservation of the status quo. Any text on the priesthood/presbyterate will be invalid as soon as it is published, if it does not attempt to engage with current change and the future direction of travel.
The journey presented here uses various traditional perspectives of who “the priest” is to give it structure; starting with “Christ the Priest” in the next blog, and a brief overview of how the high priesthood of Christ completes the work of the Levitical priesthood of the Old Testament in the narrative of the scriptures; then “Church the priest”, engaging with the New Testament’s emerging theology of how the whole collected body of Christ has a priestly role to play, and how recalling this truth to mind should influence church strategy today; then, “Minister the priest”, in which the minister’s role as orderer and convenor of the priestly community of Christ’s body is explored, engaging church tradition up to this point; finally, “what is priesthood to me?”, exploring my thoughts on what I have read, and the threads of God’s work in my life that I feel teach me about God’s priesthood.
The next blog will be on: Christ the Priest.
Thanks for your response Matt. I think, above all, I'm really intrigued to see what impact the current pandemic has on people's social behaviours and choices. I imagine a lot of the young professionals you reference fall into the group of working adults in this country who've been WFH lately. Not having a commute and the F2F pressures of the office has offered many a chance to re-evaluate how they allocate their time and, in turn, what they value/believe. Perhaps this slowing down, this drop in the pace of life, will encourage many to root themselves more locally and become part of local groups and institutions. It's also been a chance for many parishes to consider how they reach out…
Thanks Kitty. Yes I find all of Grace Davie's stuff very interesting. Another angle comes from the work of organisations like Citizens UK, which campaign on issues (e.g. they were behind the introduction of London Living Wage). They work by gathering together institutions, having conversations to find issues in common, and then taking action - campaigns, protests, hustings and polite conversations with politicians. Citizens UK would say that institutions are under attack - that the result of the economic and social position we are in, with people working long hours with little spare time, is that individuals have opted out of any community-building institutions and are hence at the mercy of the markets and the state. They would see it…
Matt, thanks for a fascinating post. That quote from Grace Davie illuminates an important trend which I hadn't considered before. That it isn't just participation in church, both worship and community, that's declining but other activities that require membership and regular gathering. I imagine this leads to a difficult question for those in ministry: is it that ministry should change to respond to a changing world, or just that the invitation and welcome need better promotion? Perhaps what is behind the door is good but the message just isn't getting through? The Catholic in me says that our worship and community derive some value from their connectedness with earlier times, that the forms of what we offer, as well as…