Ordination Charge - Petertide 2005
Three Contemporary Pressure-Points – Petertide Ordination Charge
Putting together an Ordination Charge is a bit like being faced with a regular column in the parish magazine. When you start as a bishop, you wonder what on earth you are going to say. Then every year something springs to mind from observation, thought, reading, as well as conversations round the diocese and elsewhere. As you will know all too well (and if you don’t, you’ll jolly well soon know) the diocese is in the thick of the KAIROS process. This is about seizing God’s moment for growth, as the strapline puts it. A great deal of work has been put into the exercise, both in the preparation and the execution. Some have been sceptical, many have been relieved, most have benefited greatly from it. And underneath all the prayer, planning and activity, it is the clergy who have taken much of the initiative, or else who have got others to take it upon themselves. In some places, there has been a need to get the clergy out of the room to let the laity have a voice of their own, unconditioned by local historic rivalries; in other places, it is some of the laity who’ve had to be challenged in order to let others have a say. Such is life in the funny old C of E! As I ponder what has been going on, I keep looking for the pressure points on ordained ministry, how they can become pitfalls, and how they might somehow be ‘redeemed’. I want to look at three of them with you tonight. I hope they ring bells with you. If they don’t, just put it down to pre-ordination nerves, or else the ramblings of a bishop who hasn’t a clue about what is really going on around him!
The first is principles. Yes, we like those; and I expect that in filling in some form or other over the years, each one of you has tried to put down on paper what you like to think you stand for. That Ministry Division paperwork which tries to get you to summarise your Christian pilgrimage is likely to be read by all sorts and conditions of folk – so you try to watch what you say, but not too much! I am reminded of some words towards the end of an Easter-tide sermon to the newly-baptized preached by Augustine in May 418: ‘make sure that your life is singing the same tune as your tongue.’ At ordination, just as at baptism, but more specifically expressed, there is a question about being an example to the People of God which is easy to skim over. But it can come back and haunt me later on: to what extent do I really live by the principles that I preach so much about?
One answer, the easiest one of all, is to retreat into a world of fundamentalism. That’s a much-used word, coined in the 1920’s by American Protestants who wanted to challenge the prevailing liberal optimism of the time, and it was about a conservative, biblically-based faith. Since then, fundamentalism has been applied as a term to many other groups, including Sikhs and Muslims, even though they have been far away from the Post-Enlightenment West. Christian fundamentalism, however, cannot be understood in isolation from the religion-sceptical world that we know all too well. In a world of change, in which relativism seems the key-goal of all serious discussion, to be some kind of fundamentalist is a convenient escape.
But it won’t really do, because the Christian faith cannot be reduced to that easy a level. Every time I read Ps 119, which I used to use regularly, in sections only (!), as a preparation for communion, I get a sense of ‘God’s Law’ not as a series of proposition, tightly-defined, but as a way of relating that grows and adapts to different surroundings, different experiences. On that basis, ‘principles’ remain, as basic sticking-points beyond which I am not prepared to go, and I try to ensure that I don’t lose step with the wider Church in that regard, what is enshrined in ‘the Catholic Creeds’. But the ‘principles’ that I try to take around with me I like to think also challenge me, and ask me how faithful I am being as a disciple of Christ. This is especially the case when I am faced with real dilemmas, where I am not going to be immediately understood, and can’t provide an immediate press-statement, because the issues are private, personal, and difficult.
Then there is accountability. Yes, we do like using it these days – so often, in fact, that I sometimes wonder what it really means. Accountability for the ordained ministry is about being in relationship with others in a specific context. Thus, after tomorrow, you are accountable no longer just to yourself as an individual, but to your local communities, and also to me; just as I am to the diocese, and to the Archbishop. In the past, clergy (and bishops) have been too unaccountable, which has led to the isolation of the role; and if you can’t cope with isolation, then forget about the diaconal, presbyteral (and especially episcopal) task!
But just as principles easily lead into one’s favourite fundamentalisms, so accountability can lead into stress, where one feels boxed in by other people’s expectations, and even slightly bullied by what is sometimes called ‘the management brigade’, who are apt to view the Church’s problems exclusively in organizational terms. I have noticed over the years how much more focused clerical life has become, with meetings and encounters that are designed specifically for certain ends. This has meant that a lot of pastoral care takes place within certain boundaries, so that the older pattern of informality, perhaps in the context of leisure, has gone for good. We may lament that (part of me certainly does), but we cannot turn the clock back. It has led some clergy to take the bull by the horns and insist on delineating proper time with their families and loved ones in such a way that the parish knows that they are (usually) unavailable; and it has also led to a further (welcome) growth in making time for study, or apparently diversionary activities that refresh the inner soul - like bee-keeping, or Thai cooking, or learning Dutch, and each one of these I have ensured has appeared as goals for the coming year in some of the ministerial reviews I have done with clergy in the diocese! All of this, if properly talked through and agreed upon, can help produce a rounded person, a richer ministry, that is less ground down by hard routine. I suppose what I am really talking about is the original meaning of that word ‘obedience’ – attending to oneself, as well as others, ‘with the ear of your heart’, as Benedict puts it at the start of the ‘Rule’ for monks, written in the middle of the sixth century.
Then, thirdly, there is freedom. Yes, we all like that, and C of E clergy are notorious individualists, who can (some of them) quote the law at any possible incursion on their terrain, whether it is geographical or theological! But looking at it from my perspective, one priest’s freedom can look like nothing less than ‘doing one’s own thing’ – in other words, licence. Every Easter-tide and All Saints-tide, I gear myself up for a Confirmation tour of the diocese, which takes me into each of the eight deaneries. They are always enjoyable experiences, and I do my best to ‘deliver’ the episcopal ministry. Each one of those services is negotiated in advance; not in detail, because every act of worship I do has at least something of the ‘blind date’ about it. Sometimes, however, a restraining hand has to be exerted, to ensure that what happens bears some resemblance to the rest of the Church: so I won’t use imported Roman material if there is a perfectly good provision in ‘Common Worship’, nor will I over-indulge those who probably make a bit of a thing of ignoring official forms the moment my back is turned.
These are liturgical examples – but they are important, because they are about the public face of the Church of England, at a time when our severest critics say that we are really no more than a DIY organization. Everyone can get most of what they really need by using those forms, which provide an agreed framework, embodying many freedoms; how I wish that Common Worship had been printed in the same way as the Daily Prayer, with a red line margin alongside what is mandatory, thereby clarifying also what is optional! It is these that you have undertaken to use earlier this evening when you made the declaration of assent. Of course they can be stretched, and I would encourage you push at the boundaries when that is appropriate. But don’t ignore them, still less sneer at them; as William Penn puts it in a memorable prayer, ‘O God, help us not to despise or oppose what we do not understand.’ These forms often do need thinning out or adapting, but they are not to be reduced to words that are to be argued with or resented. They have been publicly agreed, after careful debate, because in the Church of England, and the Anglican world as a whole, that is where our doctrine is to be found: not in some central magisterium in a Mediterranean capital, nor embodied on a Confessional basis like the Reformed Churches, still less in your own private ecclesiastical laboratory. ‘Perfect freedom’, as the Prayer Book describes it, is not about me and my world, it is about us and our world, a world made new not by ecclesiastical consumerism, but by a cross.
So have your principles, but make them gospel-based – about God and people, not your own agendas, which can become personal fundamentalisms all too easily. By all means be accountable, and learn about the proper gospel balance between rights and responsibilities, and see that you are inwardly fed, not overspent on others. And hold fast to ‘perfect freedom’, the freedom of the gospel of grace, not a self-indulgent licence that goes wherever it likes, and whose consequences you may well come to regret in the future, as your ministry deepens and matures. Being part of the college of deacons and presbyters with your bishop, and the rest of the People of God, is a corporate way of life, which ordination helps us all to ponder more deeply. So may we all become better equipped to live and work to His praise and glory.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
1/vii/05
