A Tale of Parish Ministry
The context for my experiences in parish ministry is interesting. The village which I live, Minsterley in Shropshire, part of the Diocese of Hereford, was previously the largest of 4 parishes pulled together as a benefice some time ago. I say “largest”, however it is a small village of some 1,700 souls and the surrounding parishes are quite remote and scattered in terms of population. The year before I was ordained it was decided to merge this benefice with the next door, much larger parish which up until that point had been stand-alone (the last stand-alone parish in the Diocese as I understand it.) The new Rector had only been installed at the time of the merge and so was himself getting to grips with everything that was going on as I joined him to serve my title post.
Minsterley is an interesting place, set in extraordinarily beautiful countryside and yet has few of the accoutrements that one might expect from the setting. The Post Office is gone, the pub had closed, there was quite a lot of new social housing, the church had, during its period of vacancy, spent a lot of effort and money in making improvements to the building – some necessary and some not so much (in my view) and had spent a lot of its social credit in asking for money from the village. Just by walking around the place I sensed very quickly that somehow the village had lost a bit of its soul, it seemed divided and a bit lost. Within the church setting there was a slight “them and us” approach to its new parish neighbour, which was perceived as being richer, slightly superior and as a result the worry was that this parish was going to suck resources and focus onto itself and away from its new siblings.
There was no specific instruction for me from my incumbent in relation to a splitting of focus; we shared services across the Benefice and yet living in the parish makes one acutely aware of the challenges and problems and so it is very hard not to get involved! A passage of scripture that had always stayed with me throughout my time exploring my calling to the priesthood was Isaiah 58 and it seemed to me that verse 12 was particularly relevant for Minsterley.
“And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in.”
I had the strong sense that God wanted breaches and divides to be fixed; between the church and its community, as well as within the community itself. Another helpful piece of thinking was reading Sam Wells theology of being “for” a place, and so I set to work.
The pub had reopened with a new landlord and so I spent time in there, chatting with the landlord and the punters. I walked the village regularly and was made sure I was seen with dog collar and occasionally my cassock, I joined the local Facebook groups and watched the chatter, I visited the local (non-CofE) primary school and asked if I could take assemblies, I walked my daughter to and from that school every day and hung around at the gates and made time to chat to the parents and guardians. While Sundays were spent across the Benefice, during the week I acted as if my village was my parish, and it took about 75% of my time and attention.
I worked out that the church was almost entirely separate from its community and so we spent time creating a rebrand whereby everything the church was doing (which was actually quite a lot but was almost wholly attended by the church members alone) was heavily advertised across the community. There was a small Messy Church that had started up with a Diocesan Intergenerational Missioner, at our first session we had a couple of families but we plugged this very hard, and I decided to adapt the format so that on some days we just provided a place for families to hang out and eat – we made pizzas, we made mega burgers, we did games with a BBQ in the summer – all entirely free and very light touch in terms of evangelisation. I wanted to do things that the village could join in on, so we held plant sales in the spring, I joined the PTA and helped restart that from its slumbers, we held a duck race down the brook in the summer with a BBQ and cash prizes, we opened up the (huge and untidy) compost heap in the churchyard for people to come and tidy up but to be given as much compost as they wanted as a thank you, we opened the church up for a gardening group to meet, we asked for help from people to tidy the churchyard in the Spring and the Autumn, we established a (benefice wide) foodbank, we restarted a large Christmas fete after several years of nothing. In my first Christmas we ran a carol service at the pub, this is proving increasingly popular, and we had about 20 attendees at my first church carol service 3 Christmas’s ago, however this past Christmas the church was packed to overflowing with standing room only.
It all created a small buzz of interest and people began to come and be involved. All of this, I want to emphasise, was done with the blessing and oversight of my incumbent!
Numbers on a Sunday began to improve and we now have a consistent 30 or so attendees on a Sunday morning, requests for baptisms have begun to increase, the Messy Church now regularly attracts upwards of 25 children plus their parents. We hope to launch an Alpha (or something similar) course in the Spring of this year.
What seems exceptionally clear from all of this is that a parish priest with a degree of energy, a smidgen of awareness, a willingness to roll their sleeves up and a desire to see their church grow can do great things if given time and focus on a single parish. God is given space to move, the priest can listen, the church is encouraged and feels wanted and loved, the community will respond, and the foundations are set to start to focus on the deeper work of growing disciples. Life is undoubtedly there in the parish and like all good gardens just needs someone to take the time to remove the weeds, cut the grass, prune the plants and clear out the waste. I don’t think that I am exceptional in anyway, but being given the time to focus on a particular place allows God to move in ways that simply won’t happen when someone is spread too thinly across multiple parishes. Being a curate obviously helps because there is a TI to help cover you from a incumbency responsibilities, But it does make you wonder that if a curate can do that because the incumbent is providing cover, what could happen if the incumbent is given cover by his or her Diocese and allowed to operate within the freedom of a single parish?
I need to start preparing for my own move into incumbency soon and the prayer is that what has been begun will not only remain but will continue to grow and develop.
Photograph Credit: Dave Croker / Holy Trinity Church / CC BY-SA 2.0
