{"id":303,"date":"2012-07-03T12:57:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-03T12:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=303"},"modified":"2019-11-22T16:40:16","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T16:40:16","slug":"is-it-time-to-abandon-ship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=303","title":{"rendered":"Is it time to abandon ship?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some good conversation around the topic of ministry happening here <\/a>and here<\/a>. This is by way of a brief aside, following on from a good chat with a clergy friend last week. <\/p>\n

My question is: is it too late to save the good ship CofE? I ask this because it seems that if it was going to be possible to reform the system to make it viable, it would have happened by now. The analysis of the problems that we are facing are not new (indeed, I recently discovered that the root problem was diagnosed over EIGHTY YEARS AGO!<\/a>). For someone who considers themselves profoundly Anglican – as I do – the naturally desirable course of action is to stay and try and change things for the better. Yet I cannot escape Leonard Cohen’s mordant commentary, “they sentenced me to twenty years of boredom… for trying to change the system from within”. It occurs to me that if it was possible to change the system from within – through incremental shifts – then it would have been done already. The generation of priests ordained in the sixties and seventies were, I suspect, not given any more or less grace than the present generation – and there were many more of them – so why the tacit assumption that ‘one more heave’ might make any difference? In other words, I think that the rot has gone much deeper than any possible structural reform can address. We no longer have the capacity to make the right decisions, because our spiritual strength has been exhausted – and it is that spiritual strength which is my principal concern. <\/p>\n

Which leads to the second, supplementary question – is it possible to be a priest in the CofE any more? The generating and nurturing of spiritual strength is, after all, the core role of the priest. At least I think it is – the idea that the main task of the priest is the cure of souls; that this is a distinct and important (most important!) task; that this is what priests are called to and paid for and enabled to carry out; that this is, in fact, something into which someone can be formed – all this seems to be structurally forgotten, and only referenced in rhetoric at ordinations. In actual practice, what a priest is for is to keep the wheels of the institution turning – and the worst sin is not a failure of spiritual cure but to bring the institution into disrepute<\/a>. As I have said elsewhere, incumbency drives out priesthood – and the future that we are staring it is the exaltation of incumbency. <\/p>\n

It seems to me that if there is to be any future for the Church of England it will involve ‘giving up’ – giving up an illusion of centralised control, that if only we get in the right leaders doing the right programs then all shall be well (and in saying that, I’m conscious of taking the precisely opposite conclusion to David Keen<\/a>). It will involve setting parishes free, and it will involve setting priests free – free to actually be priests, and not establishment functionaries. What I’m pondering is a way of handing over all ‘incumbency’ rights and responsibilities to local laity – to revive lay incumbencies no less (which is not the same as lay presidency!) – and to only have ‘mission priests’ – people whose responsibility it was to feed the faithful by word and sacrament and nothing else<\/i>. The institutions keep loading on other options onto the creaking shoulders of the clergy and they are almost all distractions from the core task. It is because we no longer know what a priest is for that we have devised an institution that makes it impossible to actually be a priest within it. <\/p>\n

Which is what I mean by abandoning ship. I want to deploy my favourite quotation from MacIntyre in this context too: “\u201cA crucial turning point in history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead \u2014 often not recognizing fully what they were doing \u2014 was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness\u2026 This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.\u201d <\/p>\n

Is it time for priests of good will to turn aside from shoring up the CofE and start constructing new forms of Anglican community?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some good conversation around the topic of ministry happening here and here. This is by way of a brief aside, following on from a good chat with a clergy friend last week. My question is: is it too late to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[25,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiography","category-ministry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3npsc-4T","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6268,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/6268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}