Half of Forward-in-Faith clergy will have retired within ten years.
Category Archives: church
TBTM20100408
“I left the church in order to enter the ministry.”
I can really understand what this means; at the same time, it isn’t the right path for me.
Industrial disease for clergy
He wrote me a prescription. He said “you are depressed,
But I’m glad you came to see me to get this off your chest.
Come back and see me later – next patient please!
Send in another victim of Industrial Disease.”
One of the insights that I have found helpful whilst pursuing psychotherapy is the realisation that I was struggling with something that, at least potentially, has a label. At the moment my therapist and I are calling it “depression”, although I’m digging down into it more deeply at the moment, as I think there is more to be discerned, and I think ‘burn out’ may be more accurate. (For what it’s worth, my therapist agrees that whatever it is, I’m not depressed at the moment – thank God, my CME adviser and my Bishop for my sabbatical.) That is, as discussed on this blog before, I think I was/am burnt out by the pressures of ministry in this place.
From “Time to Heal”:
Burn-out in carers
This is a syndrome of physical, spiritual and emotional exhaustion that is particularly likely where there is an experience of discrepancy between expectation and reality.
Three stages of burn-out have been described:
– In the first stage there is an imbalance between the demands of work and personal resources, which results in hurried meals, longer working hours, spending little time with the family, frequent lingering colds and sleep problems. This is the time to take stock, seek God and the advice of those around us.
– The second stage involves a short-term response to stress with angry outbursts, irritability, feeling tired all the time and anxiety about physical health. This stage highlights a real need to get away from it all.
– Terminal burn-out, stage three, creeps up insidiously. The carer cannot re-establish the balance between demands and personal resources. He or she goes into overdrive, works mechanically, by the book, lacking the fresh inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They tend to be late for appointments and to refer to those they are caring for in a derogatory manner, using superficial, stereotyped, authoritarian methods of communication.
On an emotional level, the carer becomes exhausted, incapable of empathy and overwhelmed by everyday problems. Emotional detachment becomes a form of rejection, which can develop into irritability and even aggression towards those nearby. Persons in this situation put themselves down, feel discouraged and wonder how they ever achieved in the past. Problems pile up and paralyse the mind. Disorganisation results in more precious energy being expended to make up for lost efficiency. Fatigue deepens and thought processes slow. Physically, an inner tension, an aching across the chest, weakness, headaches, indigestion and a lack of sleep are often experienced.
The caretaker was crucified for sleeping at his post
They’re refusing to be pacified it’s him they blame the most
In retrospect I can see various symptoms quite clearly, not least, for readers here: fewer blogposts, dropping off my beach photos, stopping the Learning Church programme and, frankly, growing my hair (= not paying attention to taking care of myself). I think there were specific tensions causing a problem – some of which I have taken action to address, and I’m optimistic for the future there – but the fundamental one is one of workload.
The maximum size of congregation:priest
On ITV and BBC they talk about the curse –
Philosophy is useless, theology is worse.
History boils over, there’s an economics freeze,
Sociologists invent words that mean ‘Industrial Disease’
I read in many places that 150 people is the practical top limit for a congregation to be manageable for a single stipendiary priest. Bob Jackson calls this the ‘pastoral church’ and the minister is thereby the key to how far the congregation grows or flourishes, for better or for worse. It ties in with sociological and anthropological research suggesting that 150 people is a universal human limit.
One aspect of this is that, unless steps are taken to directly address this problem, congregation size is independent of surrounding population. Beyond a certain point, increasing the population will not affect the size of the congregation as the glass ceiling will remain in place. This, I think, is the primary driver for my burnout:
Trouble is, whenever I raise this topic in formal meetings like the Deanery Standing Committee, people’s eyes tend to glaze over with a ‘here goes Sam again’ expression. It’s true that there are some mitigating factors, not least a significant number of retired clergy, but to my mind that doesn’t address the point. To my mind it is more about a different model of ministry being employed – one aspect of Herbertism which we could call ‘establishment’.
This is not a novel insight. Bob Jackson has discussed it in great depth in his books and given what I think is quite a compelling analysis. If we accept the establishment model then local population becomes the most significant factor – and the clergy are then deployed ever more thinly. Given the glass ceiling of 150 as a maximum size of congregation per pastor this approach guarantees further decline. The alternative model would be to reinforce patterns of growth – but that involves a profound culture shift away from the establishment pattern. This raises the shade of ‘congregationalism’, but that seems bizarre to me. After all, TEC is still episcopal isn’t it??
“Part of the trouble is that the Church of England’s ‘managers’ have in many cases committed themselves to a model of ministry which denies that the clergyperson is ‘chaplain to the congregation’. Ministry is conceived as being to the ‘whole parish’, and since need is seen in material terms, a large parish in a deprived urban area is defined as more ‘needy’ than a small parish in a well-off rural area.” (I wrote about a related aspect here)
The trouble is that what has happened to me is in the process of happening to all the other clergy too, as we start to wrestle with the impact of ‘downsizing’, ie industrial disease. The overwhelming majority (95%+) of clergy that I know are already overworked. I think it is a truism that the potential work for a priest is infinite, and as priests tend to be conscientious, there is an inbuilt tendency towards overworking and exhaustion. This is reinforced by masochistic minister syndrome, by which, unless a priest is suffering, they don’t feel that they’re doing their job properly. And, of course, George Herbert has something to do with it.
What this also means is that, in a context where virtually every priest complains (legitimately) about overwork, there are no commonly agreed criteria on what constitutes an excessive workload. How do you compare and contrast a job with several PCCs to a job with several CofE schools? Inherent in any discussion is the question of what model of ministry is being favoured and, therefore, questions of churchmanship are not very far away and liable to erupt (invariably unhealthily IMHO).
Trouble is, if the various Diocesan authorities don’t take a step back and resolve to make some very fundamental decisions then to all practical purposes mission and ministry will collapse in the CofE. I would distinguish this from “keeping the show on the road”, and keeping services going. I don’t see any need for those to stop, as that doesn’t require full-time ministers to maintain – and I wouldn’t want to underrate how important that is – but if your vision of church is seven days a week then you cannot be happy with that. In other words, are we simply about ‘managing the decline’ – thereby doing many things wrongly in my view, not least destroying a great many stipendiary clergy – or can things be done differently?
The further problem of bigness
Two men say they’re Jesus – one of them must be wrong
If we carry on the way that we are going, then all full-time ministries will look like Mersea. There are consequences to this. The first, rehearsed ad nauseam in George Herbert discussions is that the priest is no longer a pastor but a manager. Yes, managerial work is still pastoral – and if the management is not conducted in a pastoral manner then all sorts of havoc follows – but I can’t help feeling that there is a gap between what is envisaged at ordination and what actually follows on in practice.
This is not necessarily wrong, and it may well be of God. The Church seems to be more or less consciously adopting a model whereby priests are placed on to one of two tracks: a full-time stipendiary track, with associated full-time training, with the eventual destination of exercising ministerial oversight over parishes; a second, part-time, associate priest track, emphasising the pastoral (dare I say Herbertian) model of priesthood. I don’t have much of a problem with that – I can see that it makes all sorts of sense and I can see that this may be what God is calling us to pursue – I just can’t escape a sense of mourning. This is an ongoing issue for me – of actually wanting to be part of a congregation where I know, not just everybody’s name, but have some sense of where they are with God at the moment. Life would be much easier if I didn’t care so much.
Some more John Richardson: “The fact is that if the clergy of the future are to be team leaders, they must also be allowed to be team managers, and this means being allowed independence to exercise local initiative, authority to commission local leadership and financial control to fund what they propose doing.”
In one sense, the answer that the church is being called to affirm is that of the priesthood of all believers, understood not in the ‘fighting a 16th century ghost’ sense of advocating lay-presidency, but in the sense that all the baptised have a common vocation to ministry. The trouble is that in large agglomerations there is much more room for people to be passengers.
“Once anonymity is possible, the church ceases to be a community of followers of Jesus.”
Subsidising our own decline
Meanwhile the first Jesus says ‘I’d cure it soon:
Abolish Monday mornings and Friday afternoons!’
The other one’s out on hunger strike he’s dying by degrees.
How come Jesus gets Industrial Disease?
Related to this are all the questions about parish share. I don’t have any disagreement in principle with the transfer of monies between different Christian churches, it’s just that the present system seems to take away all discretion from the parishes themselves. Do the central authorities believe that, without a parish share system, Christians would not wish to fund missionary work? The real trouble is that – as Bob Jackson (him again) has identified – the existing system is a socialist system. Not (chance would be a fine thing) socialist in an Acts of the Apostles sense, but socialist in a Stalin-knows-best sense.
What this means, in practice, is that those parishes which are able to grow and develop are deprived of the resources with which to sustain that growth, and end up falling back. Whereas, those parishes which have found a comfortable spot (eg the 120 members mark) will continue to be subsidised and supported no matter what happens in terms of mission.
If I sound a little bitter it’s because I think that’s a good description of what has happened to the Mersea benefice.
Surely at some point the powers-that-be will wake up and discern that the present situation isn’t simply unsustainable but that it is unChristian too. We are pouring all of our resources into maintenance, aka genteel decline, when in fact we need to be engaged in a much more bracing embrace of mission.
Bob Jackson, in his book ‘Road to Growth’, spends several chapters describing the problems associated with the parish share system. He summarises them in these bullet points:
“In conclusion, the whole chaos of quota, parish share, or common fund systems is simply not serving the church well.
1 It is inconceivable that every diocese, with its own unique system changing every few years, has currently found the best possible one, or even a good one;
2 Systems risk provoking conflict and dishonesty. They can lead to more serious division;
3 They do not provide a secure and stable framework in which churches can do long-term planning;
4 They fail to provide the fairness their architects desire;
5 They absorb the best energy, time and expertise of diocesan leaders and officials. They divert people at every level from concentrating on the real ministry and mission of Christian churches;
6 They asset-strip the large churches and tax away the growth of growing churches. They encourage the declining and sleepy in their ways;
7 They encourage false judgements to be made of clergy and endanger the future provision of dynamic senior leadership;
8 They cannot cater for fresh expressions of church;
9 They fail even to maintain the current levels of parochial staffing, let alone to produce the resources for growing the new sorts of expression without which the Church may wither away.”Jackson recommends a solution incorporating the following elements:
1. Churches pay the costs of their own ministers
2. Fee income stays with the local church
3. Diocesan costs are shared by local churches
4. The total bill (1&3) is presented to each church each year, and published in the church accounts.
Essentially what Jackson proposes is a way of a) localising the process; b) making the system completely transparent (and therefore much more defensible); and c) restoring the relationship between those who give and those who receive. I can’t see the powers that be choosing to shift to this system, but it will come – not least because the Transition process will dictate it.
Still pursuing my own vocation
There are times when I get gloomy about the present situation. I find this quotation useful: “Francis Dewar identifies three vocations which, he maintains, can often become confused. Our primary vocation is to know God, it is the call to basic Christian discipleship. Our second vocation is to become the person we have been created to be; celebrating, developing and using that combination of gifts and experience that is uniquely ours and growing into maturity of personhood in Christ. The third vocation is to particular, recognised and authorised ministries in the Church or the world; this includes, of course, the vocation to ordained ministry. The great danger for all who have experienced the third call is that it can begin to undermine the first two. And the relentlessness of parish ministry, the fact that there is always more to do and never enough time in which to do it, can be one of the biggest contributory factors.”
At such times I peruse the Church Times jobs pages, and see things like this and wonder whether it would be the right thing to pursue. Such thoughts tend not to last for very long though. Whilst there is a sense of being in the middle of a car-crash when I think about the Church of England, I do think I am where God wants me to be. I’m not supposed to run away into the abstract. I’ve got to stick at it, partly for Bonhoefferian reasons of ‘sharing in the shame and the sacrifice’, although that is melodramatic and vainglorious. Reality is more prosaic. I think this is more to the point:
The apostolic role within established churches and denominations requires the reinterpreting of the denomination’s foundational values in the light of the demands of its mission today. The ultimate goal of these apostolic leaders is to call the denomination away from maintenance, back to mission. The apostolic denominational leader needs to be a visionary, who can outlast significant opposition from within the denominational structures and can build alliances with those who desire change. Furthermore, the strategy of the apostolic leader could involve casting vision and winning approval for a shift from maintenance to mission. In addition, the leader has to encourage signs of life within the existing structures and raise up a new generation of leaders and churches from the old. The apostolic denominational leader needs to ensure the new generation is not “frozen out” by those who resist change. Finally, such a leader must restructure the denomination’s institutions so that they serve mission purposes.
I think that’s what I’m called to do here on Mersea. Don’t expect support from the wider institutions, or approval from all sectors of the congregation(!) – just stop whingeing, and get on with the job.
Enjoying the choir
I realise that I never posted this last May, but as it has had quite a wide circulation in Mersea I don’t think there’s an issue with putting it up (despite what subsequently happened).
It’s long, so click ‘full post’ for text.
For the meeting on May 10 at 3pm in the Church Hall
To: members of Worship Committee and Choir
CC: other members of PCC and ministry team who are welcome to attend
Dear friends,
Enjoying the choir
“Praise the LORD! For it is good to sing praises to our God; for he is gracious, and a song of praise is seemly.” (Ps 147)
I have been praying and reflecting much about the choir in recent weeks, partly as a result of the on-going conversations about Evensong in the Worship Committee, but also in the light of our worship through this last Holy Week and Easter Sunday. I would like with this paper to set out some of my thoughts as preparation for a wide discussion on May 10. Although ____ is unable to be with us on May 10 he and I have scheduled a separate meeting between us a few days before.
Why sing in worship?
I want to begin by going back to the fundamentals, partly because it is good to do so every so often, to remind ourselves of why we are doing things, but also because it will clarify what we agree on and what we disagree on. In other words, the question to begin with is: why have a choir at all? It seems to me that there are several important reasons why it is good to have a choir:
1. As I believe I may have mentioned before, the Church Fathers believed that to sing a prayer was to pray twice. This was simply because singing involves the whole body; it isn’t purely a mental act. It is therefore appropriate to sing in Christian worship because we worship the Word made flesh – we are called to worship with our bodies. Singing a prayer is therefore a more fully Christian form of worship than simply saying.
2. A choir can function in a way that enables the wider congregation to sing themselves, either by supporting the wider congregation in what they are singing or by expressing something on their behalf.
3. Some elements of worship are best sung by specialists – this has always been the case, as can be seen by the practice of Temple worship in Old Testament times, and by looking at the Psalms.
4. The corollary of this is that some people have the vocation from God to be such specialists – God has called them to offer up their particular talents in this form, and without the possibility of that expression they are prevented from being fully human. (I spoke about this in my sermon on Maundy Thursday.)
5. Ultimately, the point about singing in worship is that this is what the angels do, and the purpose of our singing in worship is to share with the singing of the angels. I believe that sometimes we achieve that.
In other words, if we accept that the chief end of humanity is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, singing is an essential part of this.
The musical mountain
So what are my concerns? They can be summed up by the word joy. I don’t believe that we are enjoying the choir in the way that we are called to, either choristers or congregation. More specifically I am concerned about i) the workload being placed upon the choir; ii) the choice of music; and iii) the relationship between the choir and the wider congregation. These are the principal themes that I would like to discuss on May 10 and what I would most like to glean from the choir is a sense of whether I am perceiving the situation accurately.
I must confess to being heartbroken by the Good Friday liturgy this year (not an inappropriate experience for the day, admittedly). With the benefit of hindsight I can see that it was a mistake to include the Tallis litany in the service. This is not because of any inherent fault in the Tallis, it is because it a) destroyed any sense of musical unity in the service; b) was far too long and dislocated the liturgy; but especially c) meant that the Fauré was not rehearsed to the extent that it needed to be. I tried to explain my reaction to [my wife], and the best analogy that I could come up with was an artistic one: imagine that someone had taken Seurat’s ‘Grand Jatte’ and blended in a portrait of a man on one side of the canvas – except that the man was painted in the style of Rembrandt.
If we think of our musical offerings as being like a mountain, what I am wanting to pursue is a mountain that is both broader at its base and which reaches higher in its attainment of excellence. I would like the mountain to be one that is visible from a long way away, and which draws pilgrims to it as a place of worship, where people of all diverse sorts can find a spiritual home and come closer to God.
The height of the mountain
So the first aspect I would like to raise for discussion is about the workload on the choir. My worry is that one possible best is becoming the enemy of the good; in other words, I feel that the choir needs to concentrate on doing fewer pieces at a higher level of excellence. I have raised these concerns before but they have become more acute over time, and, indeed, they have become not just concerns about the effect upon our worship but also, to some extent, a pastoral and spiritual concern about the choristers. If it is true (as I would insist IS true) that some people have a vocation to sing in worship, that does not mean that there are no limits to that vocation; the singing needs to be pursued in balance with the wider needs of worship, and I believe it would give greater joy to choir and congregation if there were fewer choral pieces but that those pieces came closer to sharing in the heavenly chorus. Essentially, in order for the singing to be properly worship, rather than simply a performance, the piece needs to be known well enough by each choir member, and the choir as a whole needs to be comfortable enough with each other and with the piece, to be able to sing it so confidently that the whole congregation – including the choir! – are able to worship through it.
The breadth of the mountain
The Fauré is a good example of the standard of music that I would want to deploy in our worship, and I have no doubt that, given sufficient rehearsal time, we have the capacity to do such pieces justice. However, I am not persuaded that every choral occasion needs to aim so high and, for two reasons, I think that the choir needs to add more ‘lollipops’ to the repertoire (to use _____’s felicitous phrasing). By ‘lollipops’ I mean material which is more accessible for both choir and congregation, and this includes material which is more contemporary and vernacular. This does not at all equate to ‘dumbing down’, which for me is rather a red herring. The point is that there are different forms and styles of music and worshipful excellence can be sought and attained in each of them. Whilst I am sure the heavenly choir is most often to be found singing some of Mozart’s compositions I would also like to believe that they sing gospel choruses and even – on rare occasions! – rock anthems like U2’s ‘Magnificent’.
More than this, however, is the point that seeking a higher musical standard is, in the end, only one part of the purpose of the choir. Most important, for me, is that there is joy – joy in the singing and joy in the hearing. This joy is something that can be heard by the congregation and it is contagious, and so the first reason for wanting to include more lollipops is simply because they are in themselves enjoyable. In addition to this, the second reason for having more lollipops is that it will enable the choir to renew itself over time. If someone is experiencing a sense of vocation towards singing, we have a duty to ensure that such a vocation is nurtured and encouraged. If there is a varied repertoire, both thematically and in terms of the difficulty of the music, such a person is more likely to be able to find their feet, and be encouraged, and be allowed to discover the joy that comes with singing in worship.
Choir and congregation
Whilst it is true, as I said above, that the choir can serve to support a congregation in their singing there are times when the opposite can happen, and a choir can in fact undermine congregational participation in the worship. I believe that this has happened, particularly in our normal 11am Sung Eucharists. I see this principally as a physical phenomenon – there is a great distance between the choir and congregation, and this is having consequences for our worship. Whilst this has been exacerbated by the re-ordering of the sanctuary area I don’t believe that this is the fundamental cause as the issue was present even before there was any re-ordering. To address this I would like to experiment with relocating the choir to the back of the church for normal 11am services (not for the major feasts like Easter, and exactly where to we need to discuss). As well as physically uniting the choir with the congregation, which I believe will help the congregation themselves to sing, this will also emphasise the table as the central element in the service, which I think will help us to keep a proper spiritual focus.
What to do with the evening pattern?
“The theology of Anglican Evensong is not that everyone is expected to do it but that, particularly in cathedrals, a practiced song will be offered to God because God is worth the time and the effort and the money for this practiced song to be given.” (John Bell)
Which brings me to the question of our Sunday evening pattern. This has been a vexed question for some time, and in the Worship Committee we have been discussing it explicitly for at least eighteen months – which was when I first circulated a discussion paper setting out the options. Option one I called the ‘variety pack’ approach, which involved a different style of service on each Sunday of the month; option two was a ‘twin track’ approach, which envisaged a 5pm BCP Evensong every week, and a 6.30pm Common Worship service of different sorts. After that initial discussion we agreed to run with the variety pack approach, not least because it was emphasised to me that the choir did not wish to come out for an earlier service on Sunday afternoons. I have been encouraged by what has happened with the Sunday evening services since we have made the changes, and the Songs of Praise and Learning Suppers appear to have been successful in attracting a wider congregation and offering an enjoyable form of worship. However, the question has now been raised as to whether we could revert to a ‘twin track’ approach, and have a BCP Evensong every Sunday night at 5pm.
I think that there are arguments on both sides here. In favour of having a 5pm Evensong every week are that it would be consistent; worshippers would know what was going on reliably; it would preserve that particular form of worship; it might function to plant a ‘new congregation’ which I see as desirable in principle. On the other hand it will involve a greater strain on the resources of the church community (ministers, readers, welcomers etc); it would mean that the contribution of the choir to the 6.30pm slot is minimised if not rendered entirely absent; and, most of all, it runs the risk of collapsing, thereby meaning that this form of worship ceases in Mersea.
The more I have reflected on this question, the more I have come to believe that the initial decision of the worship committee and PCC was the right one, and that we should stick to the ‘variety pack’ approach for Sunday Evening worship. More than this, in the light of what I have said above, I believe that the BCP Evensong slot should be restricted to the first Sunday of the month, and be ‘cathedral’ style, ie the choir alone sing introit, psalm, mag, nunc and anthem. At least one advantage of restricting this to one Sunday a month is that it will give sufficient time to rehearse each item. It may seem paradoxical, but I believe that restricting choral Evensong to one Sunday a month is more likely to preserve that pattern of worship as a living entity for the long term.
For the other Sundays I see week 2 as being Songs of Praise for the foreseeable future and week 4 as being a Learning Supper. This leaves week 3, and the occasional week 5, plus any occasions when there is no Learning Supper or Songs of Praise, to be determined. I would see this slot as in itself more variable. In the normal course of events I think we have room for it to be a communion service. It has been on my mind for some time that regular Sunday Evening worshippers don’t presently have access to the Eucharist, and this needs to change, and so I would see this slot as normally being a Common Worship service (along the lines of the 11am) but it could occasionally be a BCP communion. In addition I think we need to revisit the question of a Common Worship Evensong. This has been tried, but the balance didn’t work, and so we need to look again at the reasons for that failure and see if we can do better. Finally I see this slot as occasionally being used for special one-off services, eg a formal healing service.
This means that the Sunday Evening pattern would become: Week 1 Full Choral Evensong; Week 2 Songs of Praise; Week 3 Sung Holy Communion; Week 4 Learning Supper – with variations over time.
The style of the choir
One thing that I would wish to emphasise is that restricting the BCP Evensong to one Sunday a month does NOT mean that the choir is only deployed once a month. There is no reason why there should not be a choral contribution to every Sunday evening service, and I would expect that, in order to achieve what needs to be achieved in the monthly choral Evensong, the choir will need to rehearse that material for each of the several Sundays prior to the service. However, for the choir to be involved directly in the new services, it would necessitate the choir itself becoming more than the formal/ robed/ processional institution that we have at the moment. The essential thing about the choir is what I began with, that it shares in the joy of singing praise to God; in contrast to Victorian children, the perfect choir is heard but not seen. This can be done in various different ways, and one theme that I would like to discuss further with the choir on May 10 is how to explore different styles of being a choir, so that the church body as a whole can enjoy the choir more widely. To make this specific I would like to invite the choir to join in with the Learning Supper at the end of July by singing, as an anthem, Swiggum’s ‘How can I keep from singing’.
Festivals
Finally, I would like to say something about our festivals, not least because we have just reached the summit of the Christian year. I see the most important opportunities for the choir – ie those occasions when the choir has to most actively seek the angelic heights – as being the great feasts, especially the Midnight Mass and the Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter morning). In particular, the most important service of the year is the Easter dawn service – and this service is crying out for a choral contribution. If the choir is to be itself in offering up enjoyable praise to God then it has to make this service a priority. To that end two requests: at next year’s Good Friday service, please could we have the Allegri Miserere (which is at the top of my own personal musical mountain), and for the dawn service, please could we have John Tavener’s ‘Alleluia (As one who has slept)’.
I look forward to our discussion on Sunday.
Enjoying the choir
I realise that I never posted this last May, but as it has had quite a wide circulation in Mersea I don’t think there’s an issue with putting it up (despite what subsequently happened).
It’s long, so click ‘full post’ for text.
For the meeting on May 10 at 3pm in the Church Hall
To: members of Worship Committee and Choir
CC: other members of PCC and ministry team who are welcome to attend
Dear friends,
Enjoying the choir
“Praise the LORD! For it is good to sing praises to our God; for he is gracious, and a song of praise is seemly.” (Ps 147)
I have been praying and reflecting much about the choir in recent weeks, partly as a result of the on-going conversations about Evensong in the Worship Committee, but also in the light of our worship through this last Holy Week and Easter Sunday. I would like with this paper to set out some of my thoughts as preparation for a wide discussion on May 10. Although ____ is unable to be with us on May 10 he and I have scheduled a separate meeting between us a few days before.
Why sing in worship?
I want to begin by going back to the fundamentals, partly because it is good to do so every so often, to remind ourselves of why we are doing things, but also because it will clarify what we agree on and what we disagree on. In other words, the question to begin with is: why have a choir at all? It seems to me that there are several important reasons why it is good to have a choir:
1. As I believe I may have mentioned before, the Church Fathers believed that to sing a prayer was to pray twice. This was simply because singing involves the whole body; it isn’t purely a mental act. It is therefore appropriate to sing in Christian worship because we worship the Word made flesh – we are called to worship with our bodies. Singing a prayer is therefore a more fully Christian form of worship than simply saying.
2. A choir can function in a way that enables the wider congregation to sing themselves, either by supporting the wider congregation in what they are singing or by expressing something on their behalf.
3. Some elements of worship are best sung by specialists – this has always been the case, as can be seen by the practice of Temple worship in Old Testament times, and by looking at the Psalms.
4. The corollary of this is that some people have the vocation from God to be such specialists – God has called them to offer up their particular talents in this form, and without the possibility of that expression they are prevented from being fully human. (I spoke about this in my sermon on Maundy Thursday.)
5. Ultimately, the point about singing in worship is that this is what the angels do, and the purpose of our singing in worship is to share with the singing of the angels. I believe that sometimes we achieve that.
In other words, if we accept that the chief end of humanity is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, singing is an essential part of this.
The musical mountain
So what are my concerns? They can be summed up by the word joy. I don’t believe that we are enjoying the choir in the way that we are called to, either choristers or congregation. More specifically I am concerned about i) the workload being placed upon the choir; ii) the choice of music; and iii) the relationship between the choir and the wider congregation. These are the principal themes that I would like to discuss on May 10 and what I would most like to glean from the choir is a sense of whether I am perceiving the situation accurately.
I must confess to being heartbroken by the Good Friday liturgy this year (not an inappropriate experience for the day, admittedly). With the benefit of hindsight I can see that it was a mistake to include the Tallis litany in the service. This is not because of any inherent fault in the Tallis, it is because it a) destroyed any sense of musical unity in the service; b) was far too long and dislocated the liturgy; but especially c) meant that the Fauré was not rehearsed to the extent that it needed to be. I tried to explain my reaction to [my wife], and the best analogy that I could come up with was an artistic one: imagine that someone had taken Seurat’s ‘Grand Jatte’ and blended in a portrait of a man on one side of the canvas – except that the man was painted in the style of Rembrandt.
If we think of our musical offerings as being like a mountain, what I am wanting to pursue is a mountain that is both broader at its base and which reaches higher in its attainment of excellence. I would like the mountain to be one that is visible from a long way away, and which draws pilgrims to it as a place of worship, where people of all diverse sorts can find a spiritual home and come closer to God.
The height of the mountain
So the first aspect I would like to raise for discussion is about the workload on the choir. My worry is that one possible best is becoming the enemy of the good; in other words, I feel that the choir needs to concentrate on doing fewer pieces at a higher level of excellence. I have raised these concerns before but they have become more acute over time, and, indeed, they have become not just concerns about the effect upon our worship but also, to some extent, a pastoral and spiritual concern about the choristers. If it is true (as I would insist IS true) that some people have a vocation to sing in worship, that does not mean that there are no limits to that vocation; the singing needs to be pursued in balance with the wider needs of worship, and I believe it would give greater joy to choir and congregation if there were fewer choral pieces but that those pieces came closer to sharing in the heavenly chorus. Essentially, in order for the singing to be properly worship, rather than simply a performance, the piece needs to be known well enough by each choir member, and the choir as a whole needs to be comfortable enough with each other and with the piece, to be able to sing it so confidently that the whole congregation – including the choir! – are able to worship through it.
The breadth of the mountain
The Fauré is a good example of the standard of music that I would want to deploy in our worship, and I have no doubt that, given sufficient rehearsal time, we have the capacity to do such pieces justice. However, I am not persuaded that every choral occasion needs to aim so high and, for two reasons, I think that the choir needs to add more ‘lollipops’ to the repertoire (to use _____’s felicitous phrasing). By ‘lollipops’ I mean material which is more accessible for both choir and congregation, and this includes material which is more contemporary and vernacular. This does not at all equate to ‘dumbing down’, which for me is rather a red herring. The point is that there are different forms and styles of music and worshipful excellence can be sought and attained in each of them. Whilst I am sure the heavenly choir is most often to be found singing some of Mozart’s compositions I would also like to believe that they sing gospel choruses and even – on rare occasions! – rock anthems like U2’s ‘Magnificent’.
More than this, however, is the point that seeking a higher musical standard is, in the end, only one part of the purpose of the choir. Most important, for me, is that there is joy – joy in the singing and joy in the hearing. This joy is something that can be heard by the congregation and it is contagious, and so the first reason for wanting to include more lollipops is simply because they are in themselves enjoyable. In addition to this, the second reason for having more lollipops is that it will enable the choir to renew itself over time. If someone is experiencing a sense of vocation towards singing, we have a duty to ensure that such a vocation is nurtured and encouraged. If there is a varied repertoire, both thematically and in terms of the difficulty of the music, such a person is more likely to be able to find their feet, and be encouraged, and be allowed to discover the joy that comes with singing in worship.
Choir and congregation
Whilst it is true, as I said above, that the choir can serve to support a congregation in their singing there are times when the opposite can happen, and a choir can in fact undermine congregational participation in the worship. I believe that this has happened, particularly in our normal 11am Sung Eucharists. I see this principally as a physical phenomenon – there is a great distance between the choir and congregation, and this is having consequences for our worship. Whilst this has been exacerbated by the re-ordering of the sanctuary area I don’t believe that this is the fundamental cause as the issue was present even before there was any re-ordering. To address this I would like to experiment with relocating the choir to the back of the church for normal 11am services (not for the major feasts like Easter, and exactly where to we need to discuss). As well as physically uniting the choir with the congregation, which I believe will help the congregation themselves to sing, this will also emphasise the table as the central element in the service, which I think will help us to keep a proper spiritual focus.
What to do with the evening pattern?
“The theology of Anglican Evensong is not that everyone is expected to do it but that, particularly in cathedrals, a practiced song will be offered to God because God is worth the time and the effort and the money for this practiced song to be given.” (John Bell)
Which brings me to the question of our Sunday evening pattern. This has been a vexed question for some time, and in the Worship Committee we have been discussing it explicitly for at least eighteen months – which was when I first circulated a discussion paper setting out the options. Option one I called the ‘variety pack’ approach, which involved a different style of service on each Sunday of the month; option two was a ‘twin track’ approach, which envisaged a 5pm BCP Evensong every week, and a 6.30pm Common Worship service of different sorts. After that initial discussion we agreed to run with the variety pack approach, not least because it was emphasised to me that the choir did not wish to come out for an earlier service on Sunday afternoons. I have been encouraged by what has happened with the Sunday evening services since we have made the changes, and the Songs of Praise and Learning Suppers appear to have been successful in attracting a wider congregation and offering an enjoyable form of worship. However, the question has now been raised as to whether we could revert to a ‘twin track’ approach, and have a BCP Evensong every Sunday night at 5pm.
I think that there are arguments on both sides here. In favour of having a 5pm Evensong every week are that it would be consistent; worshippers would know what was going on reliably; it would preserve that particular form of worship; it might function to plant a ‘new congregation’ which I see as desirable in principle. On the other hand it will involve a greater strain on the resources of the church community (ministers, readers, welcomers etc); it would mean that the contribution of the choir to the 6.30pm slot is minimised if not rendered entirely absent; and, most of all, it runs the risk of collapsing, thereby meaning that this form of worship ceases in Mersea.
The more I have reflected on this question, the more I have come to believe that the initial decision of the worship committee and PCC was the right one, and that we should stick to the ‘variety pack’ approach for Sunday Evening worship. More than this, in the light of what I have said above, I believe that the BCP Evensong slot should be restricted to the first Sunday of the month, and be ‘cathedral’ style, ie the choir alone sing introit, psalm, mag, nunc and anthem. At least one advantage of restricting this to one Sunday a month is that it will give sufficient time to rehearse each item. It may seem paradoxical, but I believe that restricting choral Evensong to one Sunday a month is more likely to preserve that pattern of worship as a living entity for the long term.
For the other Sundays I see week 2 as being Songs of Praise for the foreseeable future and week 4 as being a Learning Supper. This leaves week 3, and the occasional week 5, plus any occasions when there is no Learning Supper or Songs of Praise, to be determined. I would see this slot as in itself more variable. In the normal course of events I think we have room for it to be a communion service. It has been on my mind for some time that regular Sunday Evening worshippers don’t presently have access to the Eucharist, and this needs to change, and so I would see this slot as normally being a Common Worship service (along the lines of the 11am) but it could occasionally be a BCP communion. In addition I think we need to revisit the question of a Common Worship Evensong. This has been tried, but the balance didn’t work, and so we need to look again at the reasons for that failure and see if we can do better. Finally I see this slot as occasionally being used for special one-off services, eg a formal healing service.
This means that the Sunday Evening pattern would become: Week 1 Full Choral Evensong; Week 2 Songs of Praise; Week 3 Sung Holy Communion; Week 4 Learning Supper – with variations over time.
The style of the choir
One thing that I would wish to emphasise is that restricting the BCP Evensong to one Sunday a month does NOT mean that the choir is only deployed once a month. There is no reason why there should not be a choral contribution to every Sunday evening service, and I would expect that, in order to achieve what needs to be achieved in the monthly choral Evensong, the choir will need to rehearse that material for each of the several Sundays prior to the service. However, for the choir to be involved directly in the new services, it would necessitate the choir itself becoming more than the formal/ robed/ processional institution that we have at the moment. The essential thing about the choir is what I began with, that it shares in the joy of singing praise to God; in contrast to Victorian children, the perfect choir is heard but not seen. This can be done in various different ways, and one theme that I would like to discuss further with the choir on May 10 is how to explore different styles of being a choir, so that the church body as a whole can enjoy the choir more widely. To make this specific I would like to invite the choir to join in with the Learning Supper at the end of July by singing, as an anthem, Swiggum’s ‘How can I keep from singing’.
Festivals
Finally, I would like to say something about our festivals, not least because we have just reached the summit of the Christian year. I see the most important opportunities for the choir – ie those occasions when the choir has to most actively seek the angelic heights – as being the great feasts, especially the Midnight Mass and the Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter morning). In particular, the most important service of the year is the Easter dawn service – and this service is crying out for a choral contribution. If the choir is to be itself in offering up enjoyable praise to God then it has to make this service a priority. To that end two requests: at next year’s Good Friday service, please could we have the Allegri Miserere (which is at the top of my own personal musical mountain), and for the dawn service, please could we have John Tavener’s ‘Alleluia (As one who has slept)’.
I look forward to our discussion on Sunday.
Who needs a pastor?
Via ‘The Work of the People’, an interesting blog discovered today via Banksyboy.
Now, milked as a cow and free from the concerns with the world immediately around it, what was left inside of the church? Self-sufficiency and maintenance. As a world in itself, the church became concerned more and more with non-tangible issues, hyper-spirituality, how to teach people to escape to heaven, or how to wait for Jesus at a secure station,
Sunday schooling our people for the sake of the keeping of them as religious consumers, the same who were being schooled during the week for the sake of a society of consumers, singing in choirs and worship teams, fighting over small issues, and splitting, splitting, and more splitting. The most frequent and subsequent temptation after having all that was this: seeking prestige in society more than the humble service that comes as a response to the God who has forgiven us.
In order to manage such a scenario, a professional version of a community leader has to be trained and created through seminaries and courses. The majority of those presenting themselves for the task have felt called to serve people, and in a godly and humble way, they have given their lives to be used by the Lord, even sometimes to the point of being burned out by demands. Demands that are not a consequence of their call, but a outcome of a life committed to programs run by structured institutions.
In a sense, the Christian church in the modern era – mostly the protestant, evangelical and pentecostal churches – have become organizations that emulate those existent [so-called “secular”] organizations in the capitalist society….”
Brilliant stuff, and very timely.
Nazir-Ali channels MacIntyre
“I am conscious that if present trends continue, we need another strategy… [as] in the last Dark Age, when Christian communities preserved the Gospel learning, and a kind of humanism, so that there were lights in the darkness. I think it would be wise for the churches also to build strong moral and spiritual communities that can survive and flourish in the darkness, and indeed attract other people to themselves. That’s the way I have begun to think.”
I happen to agree completely with that. It’s why I’m going to be emphasising St Benedict over the coming year…
Stephen Cottrell to be the new Bishop of Chelmsford
Official announcement is here.
“Almighty and everlasting God, who alone workest great marvels, send down upon our bishops and curates, and all congregations committed to their charge, the healthful spirit of thy grace; and that they may truly please thee, pour upon them the continual dew of thy blessing. Grant this, O Lord, for the honour of our advocate and mediator, Jesus Christ. Amen.”
His wikipedia page has some things of interest.
H/T to Phil Ritchie via Twitter.
Update: Dave Walker has some info from the Oxford website:
“Bishop Stephen said: “I was born and brought up in Essex, and it is still the place I think of as home. Now I have been invited to return to this large, diverse and richly varied diocese to serve as your bishop. It is an immense privilege.
“What sustains me in ministry is the joy and beauty of the Gospel. I want us to be a Church that is gospel-centred, servant-hearted and mission-focused. I am hungry for us to be a Church that connects with every person and every community.
“I am excited by the prospect of getting to know and working alongside the parishes and communities of East London and Essex that make up this great diocese. I look forward to working with new colleagues and making new friends. Building upon the work of those who have gone before us in the faith, together we can do something beautiful for God in the communities we have been called to serve.
“For me coming to Essex and East London feels like coming home. However this is not the end of the journey. We must set our sights on the glory of God and on his son Jesus Christ and on the needs of the world – this is the path we will travel together.”
The Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Revd John Pritchard, said: “Bishop Stephen has had a highly effective ministry as Bishop of Reading. He has been widely loved and admired for his bold evangelism, obvious prayerfulness and inspired communication and will be hugely missed.
“We knew we’d lose him and are very grateful for the time we have had. Chelmsford will find itself led with imagination, courage and sense of fun. We wish Stephen and his family much joy.”
The Bishop of Bradwell, the Rt Revd Dr Laurie Green, added: “We are delighted that Bishop Stephen Cottrell is to become the new Diocesan Bishop of Chelmsford. Bishop Stephen is an exceptional man, whose abiding concern is that we all catch that glimpse of the wonder of God which can change our lives.
“He is man of prayer who has a shrewd eye for the important issues of the day. His books are always challenging and delightful, and he will bring new insights about how we should respond to God’s love and justice amidst the world’s challenges. He is family man of great warmth and charm, and we look forward to learning from him and working with him here in Essex and East London.”
Does the priest have to be pure? (part one)
Given all the fuss about abuse by Roman Catholic clergy (justified fuss, certainly) I thought it would be of interest to describe in some detail an ancient church controversy, which has some relevance. At the beginning of the fourth century AD, under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, there was a severe crackdown upon the Christian church. Some members of the church, including some priests and bishops, handed over copies of the sacred Scriptures to the imperial authorities. These people were called traditores – from the Latin for handing over. From this expression derives our own words traitor and tradition.
A few years later, Constantine became the Roman Emperor and, famously, he allowed Christianity to be celebrated publicly. At this point, a quarrel broke out within the church. What should happen to those priests and bishops who were traditores? The majority view was that those people who had collaborated with the authorities should be forgiven, and allowed to continue their ministry. Some one hundred years later, this was the view that St Augustine fought for, and he developed the theology to explain why. In sum, the validity of our sacraments – of baptism and holy communion – do not depend upon the moral state of the priest who is in charge of them. The president at communion is not expected to be an example of moral perfection; he or she is assumed to be a sinner, along with every other baptised member of the church. If the sacraments are celebrated properly, in accordance with the right teaching of the church, then they achieve what Jesus intended them to achieve. In other words the holiness at issue is the holiness of Jesus, not the holiness of the priest.
However, there was a distinct minority view which ended up being called Donatism, named after Donatus, who was consecrated as an alternative Bishop of Carthage. This group did not forgive the traditores for what they had done, and so they established an alternative church which explicitly advocated the holiness of ministers, the need to have a pure church; in other words, if a sinner presided at communion, the communion was not valid – Jesus was not present, no spiritual medicine was distributed. There followed a very unedifying struggle for power, especially in North Africa, between these two groups. It took some two centuries for the Donatist church to die out completely, and St Augustine was heavily involved, not just in establishing the theology, but practically as the legitimate Bishop of Carthage in his own day.
Now the Donatists were condemned as heretics. The word ‘heresy’ simply means choice, that is, the Donatists had chosen a course separate to that accepted by the wider body of the church. Although Donatism is the technical name for the heresy, it is more commonly known as the ‘pure church’ heresy.
In our highly individualist age, the notion of heresy is problematic. What is wrong with a group of people coming to a decision about how they wanted to function together? Why shouldn’t they have their own denomination, and be left to get on with their own business? What this misses is the connection between getting our doctrine right and the state of our souls. 1 Timothy instructs pastors that we are to “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” In other words, in Christianity, there is a link between what we believe and our eventual salvation, and the most important quality for pastors is the ability to teach the truth. That is how a priest exercises their cure of souls; not through being popular and well liked, but by holding fast to the truth of the faith. Right doctrine enables right behaviour; conversely, wrong doctrine leads to spiritual destruction. Let me spell out what this means in the case of the pure church heresy.
At the core of the controversy was a refusal on the part of the Donatists to forgive those traditores who had collaborated with the Empire, and handed over the Scriptures. In other words, the Donatists had embraced a path of judgement, contrary to Jesus’ explicit teaching. This is the spiritual root from which Donatism emerged like a flower. The trouble with this path is that the divide between the sinners and the righteous does not run between different people, or between different groups; rather it runs within people.
This leads to a problem. For if a community is constituted by the notion that only the pure can share in communion, then there is tremendous psychological pressure to preserve oneself in a state of innocence, in order to continue to share the sacrament. This means that all the elements of our own nature that don’t fit neatly into that ideal of innocence become repressed and denied. What this leads to, St John describes eloquently in his first Epistle: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” In practice, the tension generated by this pursuit of innocence and denial of sin is resolved through scapegoating. One person, or one group of people, becomes identified as the source of all pain and bitterness – they are no longer traditores, but traitors, the great betrayers, the ones who have become a scandal and a stumbling block to the wider community. The scapegoats are then persecuted and destroyed, and the pure church community is able to find unity in that process, with reassurance for their own identity.
This is the way of the world, and we don’t have to go very far to find examples of it. The most obvious is what happened in Germany in the 1930s, but it has happened in this country very recently, eg when considering the fate of one of the boys who killed Jamie Bulger. Generally speaking, the tabloid newspapers are driven by this process, of finding scapegoats on whom to place all the burdens of our existence. Remember: this is the realm of Satan. Satan means the accuser, the one who points the finger, the one who apportions blame, the prosecuting counsel in a trial. It is because Satan is the presiding spirit of this process that Jesus calls him the Prince of this world.
In other words, just to make things absolutely clear, the end point spiritually for anyone who embarks upon this path is to be cut off from the living God. It is to be in Hell, now and for eternity. Hell is not a metaphor, it is a state of life filled with finger-pointing and bitterness, where anger is nursed until it becomes the defining feature of the personality. This is why St Paul tells us in his letter to the Ephesians that we are to “get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.” The only possible way out from Satan’s realm is forgiveness – as Jesus taught, and as he lived. As St Paul writes, we are to “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” To live by forgiveness – to give and to receive forgiveness – this is what it means to be a Christian, to pass on forgiveness just as we have received forgiveness. This is lost by the pure church. That is why it is a heresy.
In Part Two – what do we do when the priest isn’t pure?
Church plant daydream
I sometimes daydream about planting a new church here on Mersea.
It would need at least a dozen people to get it going – people who were seriously committed to a path of discipleship and spiritual growth.
It would meet once a week to do the Acts 2.42 stuff, but not necessarily on a Sunday morning.
It would also meet at other times for broader fellowship, worship and teaching – understood as supplementary.
It would be a group of sojourners, tent dwellers, maybe meeting in a home or hall, maybe even meeting in an historic church sometimes.
It would pay a fair proportion (pro rata) of the parish share, but not be committed to the financial upkeep of the historic site.
It would have a cell group structure and mentality. Nurture would be done through small groups (up to half a dozen persons). It would also multiply as a whole when it grew to, say, forty people.
It would have autonomy over its manner of life; its form of worship; its expectations for social service and behaviour.
It would not have autonomy over doctrine and sacramental discipline – in other words, it would remain Anglican. It would operate under the oversight of the Rector of the parish (well I would say that wouldn’t I?) who would join in with the Acts 2.42 part, but not the rest – unless asked. It would accept the Lambeth quadrilateral as a framework for faith. However, it could sit very lightly to the Anglican acquis communautaire. It could be mostly independent of a) the inherited plant, and b) the structure of committees and processes. Although no group can operate without the formalities for long – the static latching is what enables survival over time rather than being dependent upon the passing emotions of the group.
Occasionally it would gather with the other Anglicans – and indeed the other Christians on the island – for broader worship and fellowship.
Worth exploring further?