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In February 2017, the Church of England’s General Synod approved the recommendations of Setting God’s People Free, a report from the Archbishops’ Council that had been produced by the Lay Leadership Task Group. The report highlighted concerns around the continuing marginalization of lay leadership and discipleship in the life of the Church of England. It identified a need to take action to establish

A culture that communicates the all-encompassing scope of the good news for the whole of life, and pursues the core calling of every church community – and every follower of Jesus – to form whole-life maturing disciples. And a culture that embodies in every structure and way of working the mutuality of our baptismal calling and fruitful complementarity of our roles and vocations.1

This report made it clear that theological work had a critical role in enabling the culture change it called for. Its chapter on ‘Constraining Factors’ began by identifying ‘A Theological Deficit’, explaining that

Without proper theological undergirding, it will be impossible to form and nurture Christians who are capable of proclaiming and living out the gospel in their daily lives, engaging confidently and faithfully with the complex challenges of today, and becoming an effective presence for Christ in their communities.2

Correspondingly, the first of the ‘Levers for Change’ listed in the following chapter was ‘Theologically grounded identity and vision for lay people’, while the second priority in the ‘High Level Implementation Plan’ provided in the first Annex was ‘Enrich the theology’. Faith and Order Commission staff were mentioned as one of the ‘owners’ of this priority and associated actions. Meanwhile, a separate initiative led by the Lay Ministries Working Group had concluded that there was a need for culture change within the Church of England in this area too, proposing that it would require a commitment to deepen ‘corporate and institutional reflection’ on the role of lay ministry in the Church of England and on the most fruitful forms of support for the flourishing of this ministry at parish, diocesan and national levels.3

Since 2017, the Church of England’s Faith and Order Commission has been working in partnership with the Setting God’s People Free team and with the Ministry Council and its staff to address the theological deficit that had been identified in both contexts. That work led to the writing of a theological overview document designed to present in concise and accessible form some ‘theological undergirding’ that could serve both areas of work. The text, published as Calling All God’s People in July 2019 as part of the Setting God’s People Free suite of resources, reflected the collaborative nature of its production in the juxtaposition of the Commission’s words with stories, reflections and questions prepared by the Setting God’s People Free team. It drew together theological insights that the Commission believes to be vital for renewing all God’s people in their calling.4

Also published in 2019 was a document from the Church of England’s Ministry Council, called ‘Ministry for a Christian Presence in Every Community’.5 It was written to contribute to an extensive discussion in the Church of England on how to understand and enable the whole people of God to be active and engaged in God’s mission in God’s world. There was therefore a profound congruence between this text and Calling All God’s People. With different but complementary emphases, ‘Ministry for a Christian Presence in Every Community’ presents a powerful theological exhortation for the whole people of God to share together in the mission of God in the world:

We are called to participate in and be transfigured by the dynamic being of the Triune God. Through God’s work of creation, Jesus’ incarnation and the gift of the Spirit we know God as relating and sending to realise God’s Kingdom. This relating and sending is God’s mission into which the Church is called to be wholeheartedly, as witness and agent. Ministers serve God’s mission by enabling the Church’s participation, through the energising power of the Spirit.6

Throughout this partnership, however, between the Faith and Order Commission, the Setting God’s People Free team and the Ministry Council, there has been a nagging sense that presenting good theology – the aim of the overview text – is not quite enough. As Setting God’s People Free had observed, there has been a notable sequence of Church of England reports since the mid-twentieth century on affirming, supporting and growing the participation of the laity in the mission and ministry of the church, with much good theology outlined within them; and yet the concerns in this area keep recurring.7 While of course there are practical issues that need to be addressed here, e.g. around policy priorities and the allocation of resources, that is not the whole story. The good theology presented in these reports has failed to capture people’s imagination across the church in a way that changes the way they think of themselves in relation to others and give value to different activities, and that failure is bound up with the lack of impact on behaviour and decision-making. To address the question of why this has been so requires a theological response. Providing that is the central purpose of the present report.

Nonetheless, in the specific case of lay ministries that are licensed, authorized, or commissioned, there has been remarkable growth in recent years in terms of both the numbers of people involved and the proliferation of different categories. Research currently being conducted for the Church of England’s Lay Ministry Data Project has gathered over 1,300 different role titles from an initial survey of dioceses, which have then been categorized into 40 distinct groupings.8 The range of people responding to God’s call by offering themselves for ministries of many different kinds is something to be celebrated, as is the evidence of human creativity and the energy of the Holy Spirit in opening up new avenues of service. Nonetheless, this development also raises theological questions, not least about consistency in the way ministry is understood and the relationship between lay and ordained forms of it. Moreover, there has been a recurring concern that the welcome given to lay ministries is not always followed through consistently, with attitudes persisting in which ordained ministry is ultimately at the centre, and everything else secondary and supportive at best, peripheral and distracting at worst.

There is, therefore, a case for a different kind of theological work to complement that which has already been done: work that, to use medical metaphors, can be described as ‘diagnostic’ and ‘healing’. The two are inseparable from one another: only by understanding what is wrong can we find the right path forward. Why has it proved so difficult for changes that all apparently agree to be necessary and important actually to take root in the life of the Church of England – or in the terms of Setting God’s People Free, why has the culture proved so difficult to shift when there is no obvious argument being put forward in favour of the status quo? Accepting our need for healing in how we imagine and understand ourselves as God’s representatives in God’s world and as the one body of Christ’s church is pivotal for addressing this. With confidence in the one who came not for the healthy but for the sick, we need to seek Jesus’ understanding of our malady and then walk with him into the healing he alone can bring, in the renewal of our minds and in the wholeness of our life together as God’s people.

The major goal of this report, then, is to articulate a theological diagnosis of this enduring resistance to embracing the discipleship and ministry of the whole church, and to identify pathways to healing that may help to overcome it. The patterns of theological thinking involved in this diagnosis and healing do not exist on a separate plane from everyday reality but are in continual interaction with social movements and cultural change, as well as moral action and indeed moral failure on the part of both institutions and individuals. The interchange between theology, society and culture is a recurring theme in the three main chapters of the report, which focus in turn on the vocation, ministry and discipleship of all God’s people, asking what may be inhibiting them and what kind of theological thinking and imagining might most help them to flourish. Before turning to that task, however, the next two sections of the Introduction consider in more detail the symptoms that make such a diagnosis necessary, offering an outline of key elements arising from it that will inform the approach of the chapters that follow.