Why ordination? Why today?

I was overjoyed to ordain three stipendiary Petertide priests for Buckinghamshire at St Mary’s Aylesbury on Sunday evening. In an age where everything seems consumer driven, functional and changing, Western churches can easily lose the script about the meaning of ordination. I gave the candidates some words from the Evangelical theologian and translator Eugene H. Peterson:

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shop-keepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shop-keepers’ concerns — how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shop-keeping; religious shop-keeping, to be sure, but shop-keeping all the same... “A walloping great congregation is fine, and fun,” says Martin Thornton, “but what most communities really need is a couple of saints. The tragedy is that they may well be there in embryo, waiting to be discovered, waiting for sound training, waiting to be emancipated from the cult of the mediocre.”

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God.

That last sentence is the great clue to ordination. Peterson goes on to explain exactly what it is people need from ordained priests in our kind of society, and why:

We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don’t trust ourselves — our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know that we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and that there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to help us: be our pastor, a minister of word and sacrament, in the middle of this world’s life.

Minister with word and sacrament to us in all the different parts and strands of our lives — in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle. This isn’t the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is yours: word and sacrament. One more thing: we are going to ordain you to this ministry and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community.

We know that you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know that your emotions are as fickle as ours, and that your mind can play the same tricks on you as ours. That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you.

We know that there are going to be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like we are believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you. And we know that there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it. It doesn’t matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it.

There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise, right now, that you won’t give in to what we demand of you then. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of word and sacrament so that you will be unable to respond to the siren voices.

There are a lot of other things to be done in this wrecked world and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the basic terms with which we are working, the foundational realities with which we are dealing — God, kingdom, gospel — we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives.

Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, I have to record one magical moment — the sort of thing that makes this job such complete joy at times. As we came out of the Church, just the new priests, Rosie the chaplain and I, a photographer came round. “That man,” said David Cloake with his local knowledge, “was the first on the scene of the Great Train Robbery.” “Really?” said Paul Collins, former Police Officer. “I always thought that was Ronnie Biggs.”

Ministry Reality Checkpoint

A very busy weekend, mainly because of five presentations in 48 hours! Great pleasure, but it does restrict time a bit. Today brings a leavers session at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. Putting it together, I remembered these words from an ordination address delivered by Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, in 1936. Some of the ways of putting things may have dated, but I think the main point is worth considering, even today:

Nearly fifty years have passed since I was myself ordained in Cuddesdon Parish Church on a lovely summer morning in 1887.

How well I remember the tumult of conflicting thoughts which raged in my mind, and perhaps hindered me from entering as fully as I would have entered into the solemn yet exalting service! How little I guessed what lay before me! 
The immense failures 
which would overtake my too-ardent beginnings; 
the disappointments which would shadow 
my later course; the growing sense of inadequacy 
which would become a settled resident in my mind...

The happiest years of my ministry were those in which, as the vicar of a great industrial parish, 
I was nearest to the people. Faces look out at me from the past — toil-worn faces radiant with love and confidence. Nothing of what men foolishly call success is worth comparison 
with the experiences which those faces recall...

I say to you then — love God and love your people. Count nothing excessive that you can do for them. Serve them in your office for the love of Christ, 
and they will surely give you back more 
than you can ever give them.

Wycombe Michaelmas Ordinations

A glorious Sunday evening in High Wycombe — 10 new priests ordained to serve in Buckinghamshire. With another 6 from Petertide, 2008 has been a bumper year for ordinations. This was Caroline Windley’s first ordination as Director of Ordinands, chief cook & bottle washer.

The place was heaving. Hazel the Verger and All Saints regulars looked after us brilliantly; thanks to David Picken and colleagues. We knew we could rely on you, but it must be a pig of a job keeping everything on track with a complicated service and everyone on a bit of a high.

This evening articulated very clearly the simple facts you won’t read in the papers. Nobody else will tell this truth if we don’t from within the Church, but it’s a fundamental fact about our life — that within the royal priesthood of all his people, God does call, equip and send priests to proclaim his gospel, minister his sacraments, and build up his body. The more open and obedient we are about this process, the richer our life as a Church.

Getting pictures afterwards was a bit like playing killer in the dark, but I see they are beginning to go up on Facebook. Tim the Vicar’s blog got there first with the story. This is a great, big hearted and multi-talented group — just for the record, from Left to Right:
Janet Binns — Slough St Paul — makes things happen, trains, inspires and nurtures — has recently done the London marathon, as well as having a physically, spiritually and emotionally enriching experience in Slough.
Ruth Boughton — Little Chalfont, Chenies & Latimer — musician and teller of stories for children of all ages; inspiring, kind, thoughtful and loyal.
Liz Baker — Milton Keynes — grower of community at the Well Community (SSM), and in the Watling Valley; serving all the churches. responsible for packing her ordination itself out with monks.
Tim Yates — Emmanuel, Chesham — Understands buildings, spiritual and physical; grower of groups, colleague and teacher in a flourishing and faithful church.
Graham Hartnell — Christ Church Flackwell Heath — singing songs of the kingdom in new ways now, growing the Church by growing disciples
Me — Laying on hands and barbecues, trying to keep up with the files and emails, rejoicing in fabulous colleagues.
Alan Crawley — formerly self-supporting Great Marlow, now stipendiary St Michael Amersham — fresh expresser of faith, new job, new challenge. Looking for ways to help people search fruitfully for God.
Lesley Fellows — Bernwode — used to be an Engineering don, but it was all a front for faith, hope, and laughter. Now grows faith whilst perching on five bar gates not far from...
Jenny Edmans — Bernwode — whose background was nursing and farming, family and community. Now grows things by doing pastoral care, children's work and, from today, the breaking of bread.
Jonathan Hawkins — Good Shepherd Southcourt, Aylesbury — surveyor of people’s lives and work and houses, supported and encourager of others; urban curate and New Wine steward and pastor.
Dave Bell — New Bradwell, Milton Keynes — teacher, encourager and all round good sport. Now engaged in growing the kingdom with energy and humour in a former railway community as well as a day job teaching.

6 New Presbyters and 1 Old Priest

I ordained 6 priests yesterday at St Michael’s Waddesdon. Many thanks to Liz Welters, Team vicar and David Meakin, Team Rector for looking after such a large crowd so beautifully. Will Adam, rector of Girton (near Cambridge) preached a really thought provoking sermon, drawing attention to the things that change and the bigger calling that doesn’t. Pictures to follow.

Meanwhile, amazing brasses in the Chancel tell their own tale of English parish clergy on the eve of the Reformation. Medieval Waddesdon was a prebendary (stall) of Lincoln Minster, a parish large enough to be divided into three rectories. In 1520 there were three rectors, each with a “portion” — Sir Richard Huntingdon of the third, Sir Nicholas Manuaring of the second, and plain Mr Hugh Bristowe of the first. Guess which one did all the work? Huntingdon and Manuaring were both censured for allowing their houses to become ruinous, so you can pretty much guess how much time they spent in the place. They have their own conventional brasses, clothed in magnificent vestments, holding chalice and paten.

Bristowe’s brass of 1548 tells a very different tale. It shows him as a corpse in a winding sheet, as became very fashionable among later Anglican clergy (such as John Donne’s grave in St Paul’s). Hugh’s grave carries a plain inscription in crude English verse (Right)

On whose soul, God have mercy according to his beseeching! and inspire all of us who are ordained to follow him truthfully and humbly in the way that leads us home; and bless his servants Tim Bustin, Mark Griffiths, Paul Mansell, Kay Peck, Robert Tobin and Rachel Weir, ordained priests yesterday a few feet away from Hugh Bristowe’s grave, almost 460 years after his death.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball

In both this year's priests’ ordination charges, I quoted this book, and promised to put a reference on the blog and didn’t — until now.

Gordon McKenzie was a creative at Hallmark Cards — a creative corporation (oxymoron?). Like “the Hewlett-Packard way”, every institution develops routines, traditions, assumptions and party lines that keep everything on the rails but can stifle creativity. Governments create schools that actually kill off Childrens’ capacity to imagine and create. Churches begin as revolutionary lifestyle movements and develop their own institutional “Giant Hairballs” that steal the show in the end.

One solution is just to blast off and start again, but that lonely path jettisons a lot of reality and connectedness. Alternatively, you can be trapped by the giant hairball, and surrender to its inevitability. There is another way — to orbit the giant hairball, valuing its core strength, yet refusing to allow it to kill of your imagination.

Here's another picture of organisations from Chapter 18:
Now,

1. newly ordained priests trying to survive with grace in the establishment,
2. Anglican Bishops trying to work out a viable globalized ecclesiology,
3. Emergent Church planters & growers, seeking new ways of being Church,
4. Traditionalists, trying to secure the faith once delivered to the saints,

Which is the Church supposed to be? the possibly surprising answer is BOTH. It isn’t an Either/or, but a both/and. Jesus talked of building towers, and growing trees secretly. Gordon McKenzie has an image of the plum tree growing out of the side of the pyramid.

What matters is to use pyramid methods on the pyramid so that it doesn't prevent the tree growing, and tree methods on the tree, so it grows without destroying the pyramid. Both at once. As appropriate. With Grace!

If this is what the Kingdom is and how it works, all “Conservatives versus Radicals” custard pie fights, in your parish, in your village in your communion, are, in themselves, as foolish as pretty much everyone knows in their heart of hearts they are, anyway. They're an invitation to grow up and get real. Hallelujah!

Three new priests in Aylesbury

Michaelmas Ordination Day. Congratulations to Paul Willis (Wycombe), Jan Henderson, (Ellesborough & Stoke Mandeville) Claire Wood (Buckingham), ordained priest at St Mary's Aylesbury on Sunday evening. Many thanks to Fr Shane, Canon Andrew Meynell, and everyone who handled the practicalities. Three completely different people on the way out told me about various moments in the liturgy they "filled up" — it was all very moving. I don't know why God fingers people for priesthood, but am immensely grateful that he does call people to this ministry, to be signs of hope and agents of the kingdom.

In her sermon, Beverley Mason focussed our thoughts on what this is really all about — the authority that comes from anointing (Christ's and that of all the baptised, as well as the particular grace of ordination) and the commission of Isaiah 61/ Luke 4 to proclaim and go out and live the calling to Jubilee —

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion--
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the LORD, to display his glory

Beverley also reminded us of the real meaning of it all — the peace and salvation of the world. It made all the in-house churchy politics in the media seem self-indulgent and, frankly, rather silly. Agitators and politicos feel immensely grand and important as they bang off emails to their chums about who's in and who's out, but real authority in the Church cannot ever come from that stuff, and any human "qualifications" are all crap (St Paul's phrase in Philippians 3:8), compared to what this is really all about — Christ's ministry to the world through us.
He is alive and well, working his good purpose in the real world. Are we?

The Three Graces?

Brill Parish Church, with Tina Sterling, parish priest & area dean, welcoming her two newly ordained deacons.

Lesley Fellows (left) and Jenny Edmans (right) were both ordained together in Christ Church yesterday, as part of this year's company of 23 Michaelmas deacons in our diocese. Tina pointed out how this deployment pattern was like London buses — nothing for ages, then (twenty) three in a row!

Both are servng in the same rural Bernwode benefice. Jenny has deep local roots. She's farmed in the village most of her life, and has come through the Ordained Local Ministry Pathway — three years of hard labour! Lesley has followed a more classic track towards ordination on the Oxford Ministry Course, after a strong background in Engineering research and teaching.

As well as welcoming Lesley and Jenny, it was good to celebrate publicly the large local mixed ministry team they are joining. Having newly ordained ministers mustn't in any way de-skill, or hold others back in offering ministry, along with all baptized people.

Footnote: there's a striking locally made Bishop's Chair in All Saints’, with a female kneeling figure (prophetic?) and the text "Still small voice of calm" — one people instinctively associate with bishops, of course...

Herne Bay beer-bibber & sinners' friend

Thanks to the delicious & whimsical Heather's Poor Excuse for some painful ordination weekend viewing. Priests, put those pints back in the closet where they belong, and discover one reason, on Back to Church Sunday, “why UK people don't go to Church”.

According to Vivien's website, which is also pretty much a Matthew 7:1/ I Corinthians 4:5 free zone, she is none too crazy about Buses numbered 666.

Heather has written a kind prayer:
Lord, grant that we may see Vivien’s distress as a by-product of her love for you rather than annoying, hubristic or beyond-the-bounds-of-reason-and-good-taste. And grant your fervent servant, Vivien, the peace of knowing that you, in your infinite wisdom and loving kindness, love her and have got everything under control. (And Lord, please do not smite me for wanting to give Vivien a drink.) Amen.

In selva oscura? Lost in the great forest?

Michaelmas Priests’ pre-ordination retreat at Glenfall House, Cheltenham. It’s a tremendous privilege and always great fun to work with Abbot Stuart Burns, OSB. It's tremendously encouraging to share these days before ordination with ten excellent candidates.

I brought a poem to compline. Everything is de-institutionalising, and all the conventional waymarks are changing. Priests easily lose the script and feel lost. They can react to feeling lost by desperately clinging onto reactionary fantasy, buying a ‘how-to’ book, losing any sense of their own worth as priests or people. The contemporary stress on technique is usually self-defeating. People really need God’s grace and realism, not fantasy and guilt. The only way out begins when we live humbly and graciously within the realities of the context He has given for our priestly ministry. Tomorrow’s priests need to learn how to embrace reality, not to pretend they are not lost. Pretending not to be lost only leads to authoritarianism and hypocrisy, breakdown and guilt. Priesthood is about releasing people from that, not inducting them into it!

This poem is by Seattle poet David Waggoner. What do you do if you’re lost in the great redwood forest? If you don't know where to turn because it all looks the same?

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.