Velcro and Teflon in Pastoral Care

Teams offer the best pastoral care, not primadonnas. One particular reason has struck me recently — the complexity and depth of damage in some people’s lives in a consumer society can exhibit in a tendency to shop around. “I've tried 11 vicars — none of them was any good, so now I'm trying you, bishop.” Dangerously, this can hook into our own need to be needed, flatter our own sense of drama and, when the velcro attaches, we’re stuck — and so are they.

Ministry, and especially deliverance ministry, is one sphere of life where it really doesn’t pay to shop around. Every time a priest introduces boundaries to the conversation you bail out and find another, until, presumably, you can find one who mirrors your dis-ease perfectly = can reinforce your problem precisely. The only hope of healing usually lies in picking a small selection, if not one, taking the blindest bit of notice of any of them, and then sticking with the pastoral relationship for long enough for something good to happen. From the point of view of clergy, we can best offer help by communicating together and integrating care, not flying solo.

When people ask for deliverance ministry, it’s best to offer an organic integrated package where specific spiritual needs emerge as a strand within a holistic and relational approach, not zap-u-up pyrotechnics, silly voices, and cliché storylines from the Hammer House of Horrors. The whole key is not to make a drama out of a crisis. We centre carefully on the health, personal, relational, and spiritual realities involved, and go gently. Whereupon, I find, healing comes swifter and sooner than anyone usually expects.

Vicarage Allsorts: Clergy Quality

The most important person in a business is always, in a way, the person on the front desk. The wellbeing of clergy is, in that obvious sense among others, vital to the wellbeing of the Church. Since Chaucer’s time there’s been public anxiety about this subject. 200 years ago Sidney Smith lamented the decline in the quality of clergy since the enforcement of residence was preventing gentlemen from desiring ordination. In the roaring 20’s, Hensley Henson bemoaned the decline in the quality of ordinands since the first world war. The document quoted in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, however, is barking up a very different tree. A more accurate headline than “poor quality of vicars alarms church leaders” would probably be “desperation to dramatize drab HR questionnaire twits journalist.”

Faced with a round robin inquiry from the training department no bishop, if you think about it, is going to say that everything’s 100% tickety boo and there’s no need to bother; mainly because neither of those statements could possibly be true. But quantifying exactly what is less than tickety-boo, and by how much, is a finger-in-the-air mug’s game. So, in a way, the figures in this document are inconsequential. Take them too literally and they imply most bishops are unhappy about ordaining large proportions of the people they do in fact ordain. If that really were the case, the remedy would lie in their lordships’ own hands — keep your mitts to yourselves! But that’s obviously rubbish, and a complete travesty of what this straw poll was about. It probably only took straw poll form so as to enable MinDiv more easily to prioritse the results, which are pretty much obvious, into strategic proposals.

How stands the quality of clergy? Well, the role is more complex and demanding than hitherto, and the social infrastructure to affirm and support clergy weaker than ever. Anyone who thinks this job is easy ought to have a go at doing it. The roles we perform in a thousand different contexts are damn difficult and impossible to win at half the time. English clergy have to straddle the fears, fantasies and expectations of people who go to church and people who don’t, multitasking with spindly resources from a home where the phone never stops ringing. It’s a tall order and, frankly, I'm amazed at how well the vast majority of colleagues habitually cope.

This is all the more amazing because the freedom of not being directly supervised in the workplace can easily turn into a vacuum, an unnerving feeling of being lost in space. All this and lousy pay, too. But, before you get the violins out, there are great satisfactions and joys to be had, too.
Could all of us clergy raise our games? No doubt, in a thousand ways, especially bishops and archdeacons, perhaps. Does that mean we’re all useless? Well, of course, yes, I suppose every one of us is a bit useless some of the time. Bishops, priests and deacons are all wounded healers, and do well to remember the wisdom of Chesterton’s Hymn for the Church Militant:

Great God, that bowest sky and star,
Bow down our towering thoughts to thee
And grant us in a faltering war
The firm feet of humility.

Lord, we that snatch the swords of flame,
Lord, we that cry about Thy ear,
We too are weak with pride and shame,
We too are as our foemen are.

Yea, we are mad as they are mad,
Yea, we are blind as they are blind,
Yea, we are very sick and sad
Who bring good news to all mankind.

The dreadful joy Thy Son has sent
Is heavier than any care;
We find, as Cain his punishment,
Our pardon more than we can bear.

Lord, when we cry Thee far and near
And thunder through all lands unknown
The gospel into every ear,
Lord, let us not forget our own.

Cleanse us from ire of creed or class,
The anger of the idle kings;
Sow in our souls, like living grass,
The laughter of all lowly things.

The fact is, however, that all over the country God still blesses people richly, left right and centre, through the prayers and hard work of most ministers, most of the time, and often in ways they will never know. Things break down incredibly rarely, given the sensitivity of the work clergy do, and their vulnerability. But go wrong they sometimes do.

Most failures are about human interaction, not theology or even ethics. Many are driven by misunderstanding, desperation or exhaustion. If there’s any way people can go over the top with better weapons and body armour, I’m all for trying it. Who wouldn’t be?

It’s interesting to note the suggestions bishops made: Clergy need to focus on the realities of the Church they represent. They need support in missional thinking, doing and living. The Church needs to get its act together about consistency of training and deployment. Anyone disagree? presumably not. But How to do it? There’s the rub...

Contemplating this question, we could take a moment out to celebrate earlier, kinder times, when absolutely everybody really could cope faultlessly with their jobs and associated expectations, and nobody needed to push the boat out on training for this kind of public role:

Bully pulpit — On baiting of the Clergy

Much interest in the media about clergy being bullied, stimulated by Rachael Maskell of the trade union Unite. Do vicars get bullied? Undoubtedly Yes.

I have been lucky — very blessed, on the whole — about the people I served during 24 years as an urban and suburban parish priest. They trusted me and supported me, way beyond my deserving or the call of duty; coped with my immaturity and uncertainty, my blundering attempts to understand what the job was about, my occasional depressions, fits and starts. These were the people who comforted me when my father died, and left meals on the doorstep when our children were born. But among them were, I reckon, three Prize Bullies. I felt it was somehow my fault that they were so overbearing. I felt trapped by my role in a place where I could do little or nothing about them.

I don’t buy “Pure Church” fantasy, and I believe that Rachael is drawing attention to a serious issue. Every area of human endeavour can become a toxic working environment, including this one, which has its own particular risk factors.

1. Pretty much all other professionals live far away from their work these days. Not vicars. Everybody knows where to find them.
2. Most Vicars are at heart altruistic, caring people, and this brings its own vulnerabilities. People have a tremendous longing to believe all is well in Church, sometimes in the face of what they know to be the truth. There are even people who behave in Church much worse than they would in daily work, where some of their antics would simply not be tolerated. Vicars, who often believe sincerely in going the second mile go to tremendous lengths to believe the best of people, some of whom may not have their best interests at heart. Vicars sometimes feel that if everybody is not happy it’s their fault.
3. For many vicars, their life is their work. Drawing boundaries between the two doesn’t always come easily to them, and in many instances wouldn't be appropriate. Anyway their job is also tied to their home. If they have to be off work, they can’t get away from it in the way that they could from a conventional workplace.
   
4. Being a Vicar means radical availability to all comers, and can involve unanticipated bouts of harrowing work — children’s funerals, personal disputes and tragedies. When our Occupational health physicians ask if someone can be given light duties in the post room, as it were, the honest answer is probably not, because there isn't really a vicar job that can be guaranteed not to involve unexpected painful encounter with people in need.
5. At one time Casualty departments and underground stations didn’t need to be festooned with notices warning the punters off punching the staff. In earlier and kinder times people were more deferential, and this relieved some strain on clergy to establish themselves as leaders. Large numbers of able and articulate people enrich the life of the church, but when things go wrong can make clergy feel desperately anxious and exposed, not always intentionally.

Sadly, like the question, the answer isn’t always as simple as might appear. Incumbent and Complainants sometimes say mirror image things about each other. The fact each says the other is bullying them doesn’t mean bullying isn't going on, but it’s an indication of the complexity of the problem. Both might be right — Clergy may be bullies as well as bullied. Indeed school experience indicates that people do to others what they feel is being done to them. We have to be very suspicious of simple “bloody fool” explanations and seek the truth all round carefully, steadily and openly.

How could things improve?

1. Anyone who believes a member of the clergy may either be being bullied or, indeed, be bullying, owes it to themselves and everyone else, including the perpetrator, to draw hard evidence to someone’s attention — bishop, archdeacon, area dean. Ditto gender or racial discrimination. Of course they will have at some stage to give evidence for what they are alleging in a form that can be communicated to the other person involved. I once was bombarded (bullied?) by over 100 emails from an angry person who wanted to complain about a vicar but refused to be accountable by providing evidence in writing I could lay before them at the preliminary stage. Clergy have a right to protection from malicious gossip. I did not give in on this point and would not. Measured natural justice all round is the only conceivable way to protect the human beings involved when feelings are running high.
   
2. This is a desperately unfashionable thing to say, but law and due process, sometimes an ass, no doubt, are there to protect everyone from abuse. Ditto working guidelines for clergy. We all, of course, want to live in a low deference informal society. The flip side of this desire is that anger will often out in intimidating and radically disrespectful ways. The advent of emails speeds the process up, discourages reflection, spreads pain and gossip round networks instantaneously, and enables people to say, for good or ill, things they would never dream of saying face to face.
   
3. Irresponsibility about hitting the send button sometimes spills over into letter-writing, and I receive letters that are Anonymous or from “a concerned parishioner.” The best way I can help these people is by giving them the opportunity to write a letter to which they could put their name. That means popping their letters straight into the shredder, where they could themselves have popped them the night before, if only they had had their wits about them. After many years of hearing confessions, the contents of their letters are in one ear and out the other, and I look forward to hearing from them in a less shameful way that shows higher character and accountability.
   
4. One simple fact is that clergy work in a much more open unsupervised environment than pretty much any other occupational group. On a good day, that gives us enormous historic independence, discretion and liberty about how we work, compared to others. On a bad day it can create an isolated, toxic working environment. In most contexts, most of the time, there is a strong community of loyalty and support for working clergy. We need to think through better ways of helping when that community is divided or non-existent. The involvement of a union is usually a good and positive thing if it brings any church based dispute within the ambit of good working practice in other areas of life. The Church of England is moving towards Common Tenure, for which legislation has gone through and should be implemented by 2010. Bishops and senior staff are receiving active HR training to help this happen well. CT will give licensed clergy access to tribunals and better HR support. With it, however, comes more responsibility about capability. Like everyone else, probably, I'd love to preserve the best of the historic freedom of the clergy, whilst attaching to it the best protection and support from more closely supervised working environments. This is going to be quite a difficult thing to achieve, though, especially in a workforce as “flat” as that of the Church of England.
5. Most people are better learners than they think. I am often deeply impressed by their grace and ability to reinvent themselves if they don’t feel trapped where they are, or in other contexts that suit them and their gifts better. The Bloody Fool theory is almost always wrong. We need to invest significantly in training and independent career counseling for clergy. In this diocese we have also developed the Developing Servant Leaders programme for all clergy to help them develop positive skills and attitudes that may help. We also have a network of work consultants, and are experimenting with developments in the role of area dean in places, to have more time to support colleagues. I also take professional HR advice in a variety of situations. All these things are moves in a good direction, but I would say we’ve a way to go yet...