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‘THE BUSINESS OF BISHOPING – A BOTTOM UP THEOLOGY’
Presidential Address, Portsmouth Diocesan Synod, June 20th, 2009.
Note: this is an expanded, revised and reworked version of a talk given to a Conference held in Portsmouth on March 24th, 2009, under the auspices of the Foundation for Christian Leadership.
When I went to my first meeting of the House of Bishops as a member in October 1995, I sat at the back (like a good Anglican) and watched them all as they dealt with the matters in hand. This provoked me into playing two games. The first game, an easy one, was to identify who were the prefects and who were the rogues, and I soon came to the conclusion that the system – the Church – produced too many of the former, and not enough of the latter! It is inevitably a bit of a boys’ club, which (there are some who say) would be immeasurably improved if ladies were admitted. The second game was to spot the defining job that someone held before he became a bishop, and how this impacted on the way he was approaching the discussion. Some bishops are obviously former parish priests; others were theological teachers; some have been involved in lay training; others have worked a great deal with ordinands; some ran Cathedrals, which could give them a strong liturgical sense, or a convincing civic awareness; while others again were archdeacons, who seemed to know the ropes rather better than many of the others.
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The more I looked back on that meeting, the more I became convinced that when people are made bishops, they need to be aware of those shaping ministries. This can help them to get into their new role, and not remain what they were, otherwise they will interfere with colleagues and others in an unhelpful way. Bishops need to take the breadth of their priestly and diaconal ministries into their episcopate, and that leads me to my first text: ‘I have made you a sentinel for the House of Israel’ (Ezekiel 3 : 17). It was a favourite passage in antiquity at the consecration of bishops, and it is easy to see why. A bishop is a watchman – a sentinel – who both watches over the flock, as the diocese’s liturgical president of initiation, ordination, and eucharist, and looks out into the world, to see the movements of the Spirit there, and its dangers and confusions. Being a sentinel – a watchman – can therefore be a challenging responsibility. And into that ministry, I suspect, bishops take four aspects of their previous work as leading presbyters, which may be summarised as Prime Minister, monarch, Speaker, and scapegoat.
A bishop is a Prime Minister – because he is there to initiate and articulate policy, and to respond to what is going on; and that means listening carefully to colleagues and others, as he tries to engender an atmosphere of trust where creative things can happen, as well as challenge the system – and people – when necessary. A bishop, too, is a Monarch – someone who has to handle the symbolism and the language of public liturgy and occasion, a sign and embodiment of catholicity, and therefore at times a little distant from the particularities of the Church. Then, a bishop has to act as Speaker – this is about ensuring fair play, like the other roles, not always easy or straightforward, especially in a culture where some are rather more ready than others to cast themselves in the role of oppressed minorities! And a bishop also has to be a scapegoat – someone who is the butt of frustration and sometimes aggression, and who gets blamed when things go wrong, sometimes with every justification. I knew all these roles as a parish priest, and I took them with me when I became a bishop, all too aware that one never gets them right. One way of holding them together is through prayer, and time with God; in a busy and bossy Church, by being as well as doing.
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But a bishop is more than a presbyter. That comes across strongly when the archbishop hands over a shepherd’s crook, a pastoral staff, at the consecration service. Oh yes, the historians will tell you that prayer with the laying on of hands is central, and the most biblical and primitive part of the ordination rite. But no one else walks around with that emblem of office, except the shepherds that I remember as a boy in the Lammermuir hills. Echoing another favourite passage for bishops, Jesus’ command to ‘feed my sheep’ (John 21:15ff.), it is primarily a symbol of care. And that brings me to my second text, from the Rule of St. Benedict: ‘The abbot must so arrange everything that the strong have something to yearn for, and the weak nothing to run from’ (R.B. 64.19). The Rule is read all over the Benedictine world in short sections in every community over four months each year. Like other aficionados, I follow the same practice, and I always look forward to the twenty-first days of April, August and December, because those words are a constant source of inspiration, and also reproach. The pastoral staff sets the bearer over a particular community. And because it is so public, it brings home one of the differences between a bishop’s work and a priest’s work. A priest’s work is private and it is public, whereas a bishop’s work is very private, and very public. I had to learn that distinction, and am still learning it now. But bishops can’t always act the bishop, because there are going to be occasions when the pastoral staff has to be firmly left behind. Bishops can, moreover, be enticed into ‘playing the role’ all the time, for which there is sometimes a huge price to pay, including when over-subsuming personal convictions in order to hold a common line they really believe to be untenable.
There are two particular ministries that the pastoral staff expresses, which could be described as nourishment and cautioning. One of the greatest privileges of episcopal office is to encourage people and motivate them, and that can sometimes mean prodding them, with the end of that staff. The crook on the staff, however, is about cautioning, and sometimes exercising discipline over some of the flock, which in an age naturally suspicious of authority can be a difficult exercise. Both these aspects depend on persuasion and example. To revert to the quotation from the Rule of St. Benedict, not everyone is straight forwardly strong or straight forwardly weak. We are all a glorious mixture. There will be times when space needs to be made for those who are strong in order for them to strive further, and for those who are weak or in difficulty to be given sustenance and care. And just as an abbot uses the prior and other senior monks in a large community, so a bishop relies on colleagues – who themselves will require encouragement and (occasionally) being drawn back into line. It is impossible to do the job on one’s own.
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I now want to look at three parameters that every bishop discovers sooner or later, and – perhaps in a rather paradoxical way – show how liberating they can be. That brings me to my third text, from one of the sermons of St Augustine: ‘For you I am the bishop, with you I am a Christian’ (Augustine Sermon 340.1). This is where the bishop has to live most fully in his own humanity, on his own journey of faith, as he goes about the God given tasks presented to him.
The first parameter is rootlessness, However welcome a bishop is in his Cathedral (not all are, but I’m lucky to be one who is), and however bound he may be to his private chapel (and I certainly am), there is still a sense of rootlessness about the job itself. It is not just about being in a different Church every Sunday or festival, though that is true enough. It is more about constantly going to different places, and meeting different people, whether in schools, local councils, colleges, other places of work, as an ambassador of the Gospel. After more than a decade, one is still learning new things. And all those Ordinations, Confirmations and Institution services are set piece occasions which are bound to be attended by people who may be more on the edge of the Christian faith than we realise. So I came to see this rootlessness as a symptom of being a public evangelist for the Church.
The second parameter is isolation. Bishops have to learn to cope with making that final difficult decision, and to learn to live with it, especially when there may be a clamour of opinion to the contrary. This is why support-mechanisms with other bishops are so important. But shortly after I came here, I attended a naval dinner, and found myself sitting opposite an admiral. For some reason the subject of the ‘loneliness of command’ surfaced, and for me it was timely. Rather more people were telling me my job than was really productive. I don’t remember exactly what was said in the conversation, but I went back home aware of somehow having been sorted out. It was a classic case of a new bishop receiving help from right outside the institution – and thank God for that. In a strange sort of way, the sense of isolation can be a real blessing, because it is about being a pastor of the whole Church.
The third parameter is about digestion. A bishop has to spend quite a bit of his time immersed in very focussed Church work, whether it is a concentrated round of big public liturgies, a bulging mailbag of the merely urgent rather than the really important that needs somehow to be dealt with, or one of those prolonged intractable disputes with legal resonances where process seems far more important than justice. There is a memorable saying at Bishopsgrove – ‘Kenneth, you’re all churched out!’ It is usually a signal that all this concentrated effort is becoming rather too much for the system, and diversionary activity is needed. That is why one bishop keeps bees, another was an expert in knitting; and all bishops benefit in one way or another from national and international responsibilities - not unlike many of the clergy. Getting away from such Church-saturation often brings one into contact with total outsiders and strangers, and enables one to return to base refreshed and with a new sense of direction, and perhaps even with an alternative and less narrowly ecclesiastical frame of reality. All that can enable a bishop to be a prophet for the Church.
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In one of John Mortimer’s ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ stories, the Lord Chancellor has a Red Judge in for a good talking to, accusing him of ‘judgeitis’, the symptoms of which are ‘pomposity and self-regard’. These are certainly part of the ‘calling’s snare’ of bishops, though – from my recollections of some of those interminable General Synod speeches about nothing in particular - by no means exclusively so. There is, however, a particular form of episcopal pomposity which Clem Attlee once condemned in leaders as the continual beating of the breast and advertising of agonies in public. A fellow-bishop once described it to me as ‘the high apophatic angst’. Among other things, it can do wonders at Bishops’ Meetings, ensuring that discussions go round and round in circles, for fear of actually reaching a decision!
Well, here are some random thoughts that I have put together as I contemplate vacating episcopal office. Random they certainly are, though it is good to know that there are other bishops, different from me, who do recognise themselves in these musings. I am, too, very aware that they represent ideals that I have not managed to live up to. But at the end of the day, a bishop is always thankful, and I am no exception. There are so many experiences and encounters to look back on with gratitude that have been personally enriching and profoundly challenging. And so I want to end with another text, this time from the Tennyson poem ‘Ulysses’ – ‘I am a part of all that I have met.’
+Kenneth Portsmouth
