(it's a ruler, cos we're gonna talk about a Rule of Life)
We have covered a lot of ground, yet so much is left undiscussed. We started with Christ the great High Priest, whose sacrifice of His own blood and continual intercession to God makes Him the primal, supreme priest of our faith. He completed and replaced the Old Testament priesthood with His Melchizedekian order, and is also the Chief Shepherd set over us and guiding us.
We next explored the priesthood of all believers, the ‘living stones’ packed around Christ in the building, called collectively to show holiness to the world, and to grow in individual, yet corporately complementary, ministries.
Third, we discussed human ministers as priests; how the traditional categories of “word and sacrament” and “absolution, blessing, consecration” are not sufficient to capture all that priests actually do, but that these ideas can be unpacked “into the whole of life”, in Interviewee D’s memorable phrase; how human priests, then, act as midwives to bring forth the qualities of the priesthood of all believers, bringing this blessing to the church, which can then bring blessing to the world; and how this blessing could be defined as an offering back to God in praise. There were some elements that did not neatly fit this schema; defending the tradition, maintaining an ordered ecclesiology and the liturgy of the church; we ended with a warning about the risk of personal Messiah-ism.
I then gathered my own thoughts on qualities key for priestly ministry towards my generation: convening community, making the answers visible, and living openly with pain.
Unsurprisingly, there is no one, tidy way to bind all of these threads together into usable rope. However, it seems clear to me that all of these ideas will be important in the next stage of the Church of England’s collective ministry, through social, climatic, and political changes that no-one can predict. So, I would like to end with one final idea: that of the personal Rule of Life. Lewis-Anthony states that formulating a personal Rule of life as a priest, and sharing it with his family and church, was transformative in setting helpful boundaries, and in communicating who he was, as a priest. He emphasises that this is not about encouraging “creeping managerialism” in the church, but is “more about an attitude, an orientation, than it is about codifying all the different things we ought to be doing”. (These quotes and all the material from Lewis-Anthony that follows is from his excellent book "If you see George Herbert on the road, kill him", recommended to all ordinands and everyone considering Christian ministry).
His Rule is comprised of four sections, loosely based on a Dominican monastic model: Prayer - private, common, the sacrament of confession and a commitment to retreats; Study - of the Scriptures and other reading, not just focused on the next sermon; Community - guarding time with his family and his friends, as well as nurturing the most vulnerable in the parish, all preparing him to say to all on a Sunday morning “The Lord be with you”; Ministry - to “co-operate with God in nurturing this yearning for the wide, boundless love of the Divine.” Lewis-Anthony’s Rule is dependent on dividing the week into 21 sessions (morning, afternoon and evening of each day), committing to work no more than 14 sessions a week, to use at least one session to write the sermon (and all week to think about it), and to have a full day and two separate evenings off each week. He says that he needed this Rule “which allowed, encouraged and fostered both prayer and study” to maintain balance in the long-haul.
This idea is compelling, against a background of surprising growth in New Monastic communities which similarly add discipline, structure and community to the Christian life. I do feel that a personal rule of life is something that priests could model through their calling, and in so doing, could draw and enable the laity to do likewise. A well-chosen Rule would set expectations, and also limits, on what a priest is called to do (without becoming a business contract), and thus making clear what the whole church community is expected/liberated to do. It would be a point of consistency as the church, and the whole of society, weathers unpredictable change; and it would potentially be a message that speaks to a generation (rightly) highly concerned about the climate change emergency; whatever is done in the attempt to limit the damage, “living more narrowly” (thanks to Rev Vanessa Conant at St Mary's Wathamstow for this phrase) will be required of all of us in the prosperous West. I know from personal experience that I can only adopt personal disciplines in my life when they are offered to God and underpinned with prayer; communicating that to others may be an important touchstone of the church in the next generation.
Whatever changes befall us in the next decades, there is no room for the village-parson nostalgia so well parodied in Bernières’ Notwithstanding. By re-discovering truths and structures from the New Testament church, and combining them with the church’s current needs and society’s demographic trends within the disciple of a Rule of life, the priesthood can “bring out of the storeroom new treasures as well as old”, for a church called constantly to renew itself and its presentation of the same gospel.
Bibliography
Confessions, Augustine of Hippo, Oxford World’s Classics 1998
Notwithstanding, Bernière, Louis de
Being a priest today, Cocksworth, Christopher and Brown, Rosalind
Ministry in 3 dimensions: Ordination and leadership in the local church, Croft, Steven
Called or Collared, Dewar, Francis
The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics, Gill, Robin
If you meet George Herbert on the road, kill him, Lewis-Anthony, Justin
Steel Angels, Smith, Magdalen
What do you really want? Ignatian spirituality, Manney, Jim
Seven Storey Mountain, Merton, Thomas
Reaching Out, Nouwen, Henri
The Life and Work of a Priest, Pritchard, John
Spirit of Anglicanism, Ramsey, Michael
Encounter with God in Hebrews, Tetley, Joy
The Widening Circle, Tomlin, Graham
Future of the Parish System, various ed. Croft, Steven
The Orthodox Way, Ware, Timothy (Kallistos)
Comments