On being an Anglo-Catholic: “All in all, the Anglo-Catholic tradition is that which nourishes me, and has since I first converted… It is not the only valid tradition within the Episcopal Church, or within the Christian world, or even within the entire spiritual conglomeration of paths, but it is one valid tradition. And I am grateful for it.”
Category Archives: church
Women in the Episcopate (Learning Supper talk)
This is a recording of my talk to the Learning Supper last week on Women Bishops (I accept that’s probably not grammatically correct, but it is conventional). The audio quality is a bit crackly – that’s because I had to drastically compress the file (one hour long) in order to make it uploadable to gabcast.
I wouldn’t have thought that there is anything new here for people who are familiar with the debate.
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This is why the church is irrelevant to our crisis
“In my experience, there are at least two things essential to any viable community that the vast majority of Americans find completely unacceptable. The first is an accepted principle of authority; the second is a definite boundary between members and nonmembers.”
John Michael Greer on great form.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a very great deal recently – and is likely to form a big part of my talk at the conference next month – and I see it as the legacy of cultural Protestantism, ie the emphasis upon private judgement. There are very great positive aspects to this – nobody should come between the believer and God – but there are also very great downsides. It underlies the ‘ten thousand things’ which is the modern Western church; it is the theology which undergirds world-raping consumerism; it is why the church can teach all it likes about how bad the world has become but will never be able to act as a coherent body and do something about it.
As JMG points out, nothing will change because people don’t want it to change. They don’t want it to change because that is how their value system has been structured – and that value system is one reproduced every week in our western church, reproduced, for example, whenever there are arguments about worship and people ‘getting something’ from it. It is why my teaching about Tesco has been the most controversial (and practically repudiated) thing I’ve ever said in church. It is part of what needs to die – what God will destroy – in order that our hearts of stone might be replaced by flesh.
I keep thinking of Moses in the desert. One aspect of the ten commandments isn’t their specific content, but simply the fact that a community accepted them as their boundary and identity. We have far more equivalents of the 10 commandments than we need – I even came up with my own one here – but what is missing is any sense that a community can be bound over by such a structure. Which is one reason why I’m thinking about getting the church to study the Rule of St Benedict for a while…
/rant
TBTM20100126
See also his follow-on post: “The reality is that the erstwhile ‘vicar’ is increasingly exercising an ‘episcopal’ role. But that being the case, the vicar needs episcopal authority. In short, we need to get back to something nearer what is generally acknowledged by scholars (and was recognized by the English Reformers), namely seeing the local presbyter as also the local bishop.
Indeed, if the need is for more ministers and ministry, why shouldn’t there be more bishops? I would guess that a typical rural dean today probably overseas a population as large as that of some medieval bishops. Why not go the whole way and make them into bishops who can ordain local ministers accordingly?”
I haven’t done a TBTM for quite some time. I think I’ll be getting back into the habit over the coming weeks.
Deprivation and clergy deployment
This is just to articulate something that is bugging me a little.
In our Deanery there is a transfer of funds to support clergy deployment in areas of social deprivation. This might seem innocuous – praiseworthy even – but the more I think about it, the less I think it makes sense as a general rule (I happen to support the present divvying-up in our Deanery but on other grounds).
Consider: the argument is that a poorer area is more in need of support from the church, therefore clergy provision to such an area is subsidised by other parishes.
If this was talking about social and economic matters then I would have no argument. Economic deprivation leads to economic support – yes, like for like, the strong helping the weak and so on.
Yet that is not what is being followed. Instead we have social and economic deprivation being met with the provision of increased spiritual resources. The assumption being (I guess) that areas of social and economic deprivation are also spiritually deprived and in need of more spiritual support.
This is what I don’t believe to be true.
First off, just from my own experience, working in the East End was very much more straightforward spiritually than in supposedly wealthier rural Essex. As I see it, people in harsher contexts have less grounds for illusion; being less under illusion they are more open to the truth of the gospel. It is the educated and relatively wealthy middle class who have the greatest barriers to spiritual growth as they are able to preserve an illusion of independence for longer.
Secondly, and more importantly, I think it goes against what Jesus taught. He said that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom.
It seems to me that the church should be addressing itself to areas of spiritual deprivation when considering the deployment of its spiritual resources. There is just the faintest whiff of this being yet another example where the church has become captured by a secular agenda.
Clergy pensions and the dangers of conventional thinking
This is a guest post by Paul Lee, a senior professional in the Pensions industry and active church member. He is writing in a personal capacity.
The Church of England is facing some key and very difficult decisions. Its relatively new pension fund, the CofE Funded Pensions Scheme, which was only set up in 1998 following previous investment problems, has developed a significant deficit — its liabilities to pay pensions in the future (estimated at £813 million) far exceed the assets it has available (£461 million) — and, like many other organisations in this country, the Church is faced with the challenge of trying to fill this deficit and fulfil its obligations to the clergy, its future pensioners.
In significant part, this deficit has arisen through following conventional thinking: after taking advice, the scheme put all of its assets in shares, then conventionally seen as the best place for long-term investments such as these. The turmoil of recent markets — in 2000/01 as much as in the most recent couple of years — has exposed the risks embedded in that conventional thinking. There has also been increasing realisation in recent years of the impact of the increasing life expectancy, which has boosted the assessed liabilities of the scheme.
The Church recently closed its public consultation on changes to clergy pensions to limit the liabilities which the fund and the Church itself faces. The Task Group on Clergy Pensions proposed some limited housekeeping changes which will have a useful impact on the apparent deficit. Increasing the retirement age to 68 and the expected period of service to qualify for a full pension to 43 years, and reducing the inflation protection in the scheme will cause some personal pain to individual clergy but this pain is perhaps outweighed by the overall benefit for the scheme and the financial position of the Church and its parishioners.
There are, however, some much more radical steps which the Task Group considered, in particular moving away from a so-called defined benefit scheme to a defined contribution one, either in whole or in part. Defined benefit (DB) schemes are also often known as final salary schemes and guarantee a portion of (usually the final year’s) salary will be paid as the pension; defined contribution (DC) schemes invest the money collected each year and each individual’s pension pot is determined by the investment performance of this money over their working life. In effect, in DB schemes the pension is guaranteed and is mathematically fixed depending on the salary and the years of service; in DC schemes nothing is guaranteed apart from the contributions. The investment risk is taken by each individual rather than by the scheme and the employer.
This looks like conventional thinking again: many companies have already switched from DB pension schemes to DC ones. They have felt themselves pushed to do so because of new accounting rules which have made clear the scale of their deficits as pension beneficiaries have been living longer, and because of the nervousness of their investors about the scale of those deficits. But the Church should not be prey to these short-term pressures; we as a church do not have the inherent instability built into our structure seen in the corporate construct. We should have confidence that we are sustainable and can afford the burdens we are currently facing; while they currently look severe they should diminish over time (the current projections assume filling the deficit over a period of a few years, not over the lifetime of the scheme).
I personally am clear that a DC structure for clergy pensions would be wholly inappropriate. The Task Group’s consultation contains a key sentence: “A wholesale transfer of risk is inevitably a more sensitive subject in relation to a group of people who, during their working lives, are paid only around £20,000 per annum and are expected to house themselves in retirement after many years of living in tied housing.”
I believe that this understates the case. It is not only more sensitive, it is inappropriate to transfer risk to this group of people. While the Task Group is right to state in defence of DC schemes that ‘there is no general reason why they should provide lower pensions than DB schemes, but they have gained bad media coverage because many employers have also taken the opportunity to cut contributions’, this is not the whole story. A key difference with DC schemes is that they introduce an element of lottery: one cadre of clergy would benefit disproportionately from positive financial market performance over the lifetime of their DC investment, and one cadre would suffer when the market performance over their lifetimes was less favourable. This differential treatment of clergy simply through the luck of when their investing lifetimes fall seems wholly inappropriate to me. It does not reflect the caring and nurturing organisation that the Church is, but rather introduces an unwholesome element of blind chance into the process.
Not least as a contributing parishioner I hope that performance in the scheme improves but I also hope that the Church has the confidence not to be prey to every element of conventional thinking going forwards. The Church is there to nurture the faith among its community; in order to do this it needs to nurture its clergy and care for their long-term well-being. Providing appropriate pension coverage is an important part of this.
Episcopal and congregational
John Richardson has written a series of very interesting posts about ministry, see here, here and here.
This is an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about on my sabbatical (including reflections on the conference at Westcott I attended, and finally getting a chance to read Justin’s book) but I’ve held off from writing anything up as it has felt too much like ‘work’, which is something that I have been religiously avoiding. I’ll write something on those aspects in the New Year.
All I wanted to raise here is that, whenever talk about congregational funding of ministers is mooted – it is something which I feel is both inevitable and right – the spectre of ‘congregationalism’ is raised. We are Anglican, therefore we cannot be congregational!
So far as I can tell, this is a nonsense. To be an Episcopal church is to be governed by Bishops – to have ministers licensed by bishops acting under their authority, where the local priest represents the wider church to the parish and vice versa. The funding arrangements by which that minister is paid are irrelevant to whether a church is Episcopal or not.
Nor is it to say that there shouldn’t be a transfer of wealth from those that can afford it to those that can’t. Yet this does not have to be done on the model of state socialism; after all, we are Christians, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect people to give to worthy causes like spreading the gospel. Frankly, I can’t see any fundamental structural reform of the church being possible for as long as a parish share system is in place.
I also find it theologically dubious to see ‘inner city’ parishes as more demanding of resources than suburban or rural parishes. Having worked in both settings my principal reflection is that those in poorer areas rub much more closely against reality and limits, and this makes for a greater openness to the claims of faith. Those in comfortable, insulated, “rich” areas are a much harder field to plough. As John says, once a particular limit is reached – a limit which I would say is between 120 to 150 people in a congregation – then no further growth of ministry is possible, by a particular priest. (Of course, what this means is that the model of ministry needs to change: George Herbert must be killed.)
One last thing: John did a survey of parishes in his Episcopal area (which is the same as mine) and says “…there was actually a correlation between electoral roll size and parish population — but only until the parish population reached about 4,000. Below this number, a smaller parish population correlated with a smaller electoral roll. Once the electoral roll reached (on average) 110, however, an increase in parish population saw no corresponding increase in the electoral roll. Parishes of 7,000 and parishes of 17,000 still tended to have churches with electoral rolls of around 110.” This applies to Colchester Deanery, where the average ratio of full-time stipendiary to congregation is 1:110, but not to Mersea, where the ratio is 1:320 (total population c.9,000)! I had a long chat with my bishop about this, and we agreed that a) my ministry cannot replicate what has gone before (and it is self-destructive to try), and, b) Mersea is something of a pioneer, in that what is happening here is going to happen everywhere else before long.
Some relevant older posts: on workload, killing George Herbert and specifically on the size of this benefice.
TBTM20091204
Why there are so few men in church:
“There was another baneful consequence springing this time from the newly acquired professional standards of the clergy and their desire to see the ideals they had come to regard as obligatory to their calling practised in their parishes. In their path, to take one of the most dramatic examples, lay the haphazard independence of the gloriously unprofessional, unapologetically male, fiercely proud and deeply culturally entrenched world of church bands so affectionately and movingly described by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. The bands however could not long withstand the more refined, middle-class sensibilities of college-trained clergy. These modern clergy preferred ‘organ-music to any other’. It was cultural imperialism just as insensitive as any imposed by missionaries in ‘darkest Africa’. And with very baneful consequences. For in came organs and in came choirs. And out went men. ‘[F]or the first time in their lives’, Hardy observed of the male musicians in church after their displacement, ‘they all felt awkward, out of place, abashed, and inconvenienced by their hands’. And that tragic cultural displacement was permanent. Men have not returned. The balance shifted for the clergy ‘decisively away from their congregations to themselves. Whatever the wishes of the villagers, Anglican services became more dignified, more feminine and more clerical.’ And, as they did so, they created a special Anglican worship ambience – grand, beautiful and reverent perhaps – but ever more remote from ordinary people, particularly men.”
Found here (pdf) (Original found linked on John Richardson’s blog).
The elevation of conscience….
“the elevation of conscience over a catholic understanding of orders…”
One of many useful insights in Judith Maltby’s paper (re: the Act of Synod allowing women to be ordained).
Kicking women bishops into the long grass
Although it is not quite as baffling as the decision to award Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, the continual backtracking, equivocation and compromise-at-all-costs we can see going on with respect to consecrating women bishops is very nearly as daft. A decision has been made by Synod; now the gnomes are working out how to thwart it. Unity can also become an idol; surely a walking separately is an honourable outcome (and likely to lead to better relations in the long term)? Just how long does this process have to go on for? I fear that ABC is once again so concerned to include the extremes that the mainstream majority is prevented from pursuing its own vocation. Yet another thing that makes me suspect that most of the CofE will be aligned with TEC before too long.
Maggi has an interesting suggestion.