The latest panacea for the problems of Welsh Anglicanism (sharply
falling numbers in many places – interestingly, most acute in some of our urban
or post-industrial areas – and the resulting financial crisis) seems to be the
introduction of the ‘ministry area,’
a looser and larger geographical area served by a combination of far fewer stipendiary
clergy and far more lay ministries of various kinds. In effect, the parish will become a
thing of the past; what seems to be envisaged is that the clergy (after a
period of retraining - or is it re-education?)
will be largely administrative middle
managers, given the unenviable task of being responsible for the coordinating and
supervising of the voluntary efforts of lay ministers with all the disciplinary
problems, ambitions and interpersonal rivalries this kind of quasi-clericalisation
will bring with it, human nature being what it is.
There are all kinds of comments to be made about the proposals now being
trumpeted in the Church in Wales
in the wake of the Harries Report, one of which is that we should be very wary
indeed of the peculiar enthusiasm in ecclesiastical circles in this part of the
Lord’s vineyard for yesterday’s secular
management solutions.
The parishes, of course, represent in practice, if not in theology, the
local church: the difficulties inherent in an ecclesial body which seems
sometimes to espouse as many theologies as it has members have meant that historically the
Anglican diocese has been largely incapable of fulfilling the role Catholic theology
ascribes to it: the advent of the ordination of women and the resulting rupture in apostolic order have simply made the theological fault-lines more apparent. The very survival of Anglicanism’s orthodox Catholic tradition has largely
depended upon the existence of the parish, as often as not opposed to the diocese and its prevailing policies, which is no doubt one of the reasons
our inclusive liberal rulers seem so keen to consign the parochial system to the dustbin.
We are all by now accustomed to being harangued at church meetings by those
who repeat - ad nauseam - the truism that ‘the Church is the people not the
buildings.’ Yet place and belonging to
place are important to the human psyche, ‘place’ in one sense or another is also
vital to the existence of a sacramental religion – another aspect, of course, of Anglicanism's current (and not so current) theological confusion. The ecclesiastical
parish, with the church building at its centre, over the centuries, even in its somewhat etiolated post-reformation life, has been the place where the faith is
enfleshed and rooted in human experience, where the unbloody sacrifice of the
altar has been offered, where the faithful have been fed with word and
sacrament, where the love of God has been made manifest.
The parish in the countryside is a wider and larger entity than the
village at its nucleus; it is a place of belonging whether one ever darkens the doors of the church building or not. Some of the parishes in which I serve here have a
longer and more settled existence than many of the dioceses in Wales – the
first reference to the parish of St Arvans is in 945, when the local bishop was
based not in Llandaff, much less in the modern industrial city of Newport as
now, but in the former Roman town of
Caerwent, then one of the remaining centres of Celtic monasticism.
Moreover, the parish in the countryside especially (but also to an
extent in the towns) has provided a much needed element of stability, presence, and a effective source of
instinctive and traditional religious and civic loyalties, not all of which
have disappeared with the advent of the rural commuter or (rather
patchy) broadband internet service.
Stability and continuity are important, perhaps particularly important
in a society which has largely forgotten their value. The projected destruction
of the parish is another instance of the Church conforming itself to the
deracinated and fragmented nature of modern society. If the Church is to
have a future in the post-Christian West (outside the Catholic monastic orders)
it is surely by offering an alternative to our atomised and alienated contemporary
secular culture.
It seems to me that the advocacy of the ‘ministry area’ is based on at
least two fundamental errors. The first is the assumption that the necessary
numbers will be forthcoming to fill the roles envisaged for the new-style ‘lay
ministers.’ The reality is that most active members of the laity are already committed fully and beyond, to the
point of real sacrifice, in serving in those areas of church life where they can
make good use of the talents and expertise they already possess in their lay vocations.
Not only that, but the difficulties in selecting those suitable (and
rejecting those who are not) for lay ministry in the event that sufficient do
come forward is only equalled by the dangers inherent in a local lay ministry
which would almost certainly lack both the appropriate training and
psychological and professional (‘priestly’) distance necessary in order to
stand above inevitable local animosities and loyalties and preach and teach the
Gospel of Christ, rather than the version of it which people want to hear…
The second point is that there is an unwarranted assumption in the
proposals before us that the essentially gathered community served by the' ministry area' (a term
only relevant and resonant to those ‘doing the ministering’*) will be more
evangelistically successful than the wider, more open-ended, parish system
presided over, albeit collaboratively, and held together by the sacramental ministry of the
traditional parish priest.
I’m aware that the attachment to the parish system with all its structures
and relationships doesn’t answer the question being put to us as a result of
the present financial and membership crisis. My fear is that sweeping it all
away will make matters far worse and be a recipe for the disappearance of the Church in large swathes of the province. If the situation is as grave as we all
suspect it to be, then we should be searching for ways in which all the many
positive and vital aspects of parish life can be preserved into whatever future lies
before us.
* I'm aware - before someone points it out - that in the Church we all minister to one another. But we do so in different ways and, like it or not, the ministry of the priest is different and it comes from the Lord himself.
