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:

Purely Secular Society — Historical (Norman) Wisdom

There was a slightly whining piece in yesterday's London Times by Carol Sarler, wishing everyone would just shut up about religion. The op-ed comments, which pretty much conformed to John P. Murdoch's Law, included a suggestion from Mr Chris Thomas from Oxford that "there never has been such a thing as a purely secular society." Not so, Chris. There have been various purely secular societies, embracing atheism as a public truth.

So for the historically challenged, here's a brief cut out 'n keep guide to those purely secular societies you may have missed during the twentieth century:

Soviet Russia — Most enduring (1917-1989): Atheists sometimes imply Stalin was some kind of closet Christian because he trained for the priesthood, but forget to add that he dropped out and embraced views on God that sound eerily identical to Professor Dawkins'. Anyway the whole thing was far bigger than Stalin. Estimates of deaths vary from 37 million to the high 70's, depending on whether you restrict the body count to those the régime killed directly during its various purges, or include famine and war victims. Produced Good Hatchet-faced Heavies and lousy submarines.

Honecker's East Germany — High culture in a dreary climate. Grey was the new Black, and the trains ran on time. Highly efficient secret police (Stasi) with pretty much everyone spying on everyone else, and the Trabant Car — proof that environmental disasters do come in small packages. Bred the world's finest androgynous female athletes, for those with Benny Hill/ Professor Peach sexual proclivities.

Chairman Mao's China — a great inspiration to secular idealists all over the world a few years ago. The literature is just being written that chronicles the concomitant violence, and there's no reliable body count yet, but we are talking millions. Gone soft on its atheist principles of late, but Tiananmen Square showed there was still some life in the old dog in 1989, even without the Great Helmsman.


Emver Hoxha's Albania — Balkan atheist societies made up in quality for what they lacked in quantity. Bible bashing Pastor Wurmbrand in Roumania was locked in a hole for four years. Albania was the most efficient, with very few movements in and out for forty years, and a seemingly endless supply of Norman Wisdom movies to fill the gap left by organised religion.

I wonder which of these purely secular societies Chris would like us all to live in?

Can anyone think of a society that espouses/ espoused atheism as public truth they would care to live in?