Sheep Need Shepherds, not Managers
An essay by The Rev’d Canon Angela Tilby, Member of the Save The Parish Steering Committee
Two years the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich suggested that the job of parish priest was becoming simply impossible. Many agree. Priests face an ever-increasing burden of paperwork. Parish mergers make for more travel, more headaches and less time. It is increasingly difficult to recruit volunteers. It is hard to find a churchwarden or a treasurer. The careless jibe that parish clergy, with their expensive training, have become ‘key limiting factors’ in the mission of the Church has not been forgotten.
While dioceses blithely dream up new structures for ministry from the comfort of their diocesan offices, the mental health of clergy on the ground is becoming more fragile. When proposals for minster schemes and hubs (such as those now operative in Truro and Leicester) are put forward everyone now knows that this means cuts and mergers, the selling off of clergy houses and the loss of services of Holy Communion. Lay ministry helps, but too often training is superficial or absent and turns out enthusiasts who have no idea of how to conduct traditional worship, and no desire to do so. I heard of one lay minister who justified his tub thumping extempore sermons by saying he was only passing on to the congregation, ‘What God told me to say to you this morning’.
Meanwhile diocesan money, raised from the parishes, is spent on settlements as clergy are pushed out of their homes and job with a year’s pay and a promise of a good reference so that the Bishop can appoint his or her own ‘team’, often increasing the number of diocesan staff in the process. All those ‘mission-enablers’ and ‘transition-managers’ who are not visiting the sick or caring for the needy.
It will be hard to reverse the trend, but it might help if our oh-so-busy bishops were to spend some time reading and studying the Ordinal. The focus on John 10 in the Prayer Book ordination service makes it clear that the priest’s role is to imitate the Good Shepherd who knows his flock by name. Sheep will not listen to the voice of strangers – yet it is strangers who are now taking over.
It depresses me that some of those whom I prepared for ministry in my ten years at Westcott House have left, sometimes retraining as counsellors or therapists. These are thoughtful, prayerful, pastorally astute men and women, but they have concluded that these gifts are no longer wanted by the Church of England.
