Читать книгу Kingdom Calling - The Faith and Order Commission - Страница 7

The idea that the renewal of the church for mission in the context of modernity hinges on enabling the fuller participation of the laity became widespread in the decades following the Second World War, although its roots could be traced back further. It was an integral part of a number of movements that reached the peak of their influence during that time. It formed one of the guiding principles of the Liturgical Movement, for instance. During the same period, the Ecumenical Movement grew increasingly prominent as a movement of renewal for mission that gave considerable scope for lay leadership and involvement, while also providing a forum for the exchange of ideas on lay participation; seminal publications on this subject from the 1950s were widely read across the denominations.9 The Second Vatican Council produced documents that drew positively on both of these movements as agents for ecclesial renewal, affirming the central role of the laity in the church’s mission in the world.10 Its texts were eagerly read by many non-Roman Catholic Christians around the world as convergent with their deepest hopes and prayers.11

While the Council was meeting in the 1960s, two widely influential books by academic theologians on the role of the laity were published. Kathleen Bliss’s We the People situated its vision of the laity in the post-war global ecumenical movement.12 At the same time, it also emphasized that articulate, confident lay people were vital for the church’s mission in a rapidly secularizing social context. Bliss argued that there was too much focus on lay people carrying out supportive work within worshipping communities at the expense of their role in wider society. She queried whether church leadership was equipping lay people sufficiently to understand their faith and to explain it to others, arguing that – thus equipped – laity could help to bridge the widening gap between the church and a secularizing culture. Similar points were made in Gibb and Morton’s seminal volume, God’s Frozen People.13 Published in the same year, it argued that the laity were best equipped to reinvigorate evangelism in Western society, at a point where the clergy appeared to have largely lost the necessary skills and understanding.

A similar perspective had informed a major report from the Church of England written almost two decades earlier. Towards the Conversion of England, published just after the Second World War, focused on the need for lay people to be motivated and ready for the challenges of evangelization in a secularizing society.14 A major theme was ‘The Apostolate of the Whole Church’, and the report also made it clear that there needed to be appropriate training and support for lay people as they engaged in evangelism and witness day by day. There is clear continuity between this work and the Lambeth Essays on Ministry published as one of three volumes of preparatory studies for the bishops attending the 1968 Lambeth Conference, alongside collections of essays on ‘Faith’ and on ‘Unity’. The writers built on statements made at the 1958 Lambeth Conference that affirmed the primary calling of the laity as ‘serving [God] in their daily work and witness’. While allowing that this might involve callings to serve in the ‘mission fields’ overseas, the essays sought to emphasize the need to recognize secularizing Western societies such as England as locations of essentially the same kind, with clergy needing to be focused on supporting the laity in their challenging task of witness within this context.15

One initiative that emerged in the early 1960s in the Church of England that was evidently driven by this current of thinking was the founding of the Southwark Ordination Course. Inspired by the Worker Priest movement in post-war Roman Catholicism in Continental Europe, it sought to enable men to remain grounded in the culture of their work place and associated community while preparing for and then exercising ordained ministry, so that they would be able to minister in new ways to those who would be ‘serving [God] in their daily work and witness’ from within that same culture and community.16 There was a specific awareness of the need to address the distance that was perceived to have grown between the prevailing clerical culture, sustained by the traditional theological colleges, and the culture of working-class estates in south London.

Within ten years, a national network had emerged of similar institutions and a formal recognition of ‘non-stipendiary ministry’ within the Church of England. Yet the focus had also shifted too, away from forming ministers who would share in the social circumstances, including the daily work, of those they were serving, to finding a new source of voluntary help in maintaining existing patterns of public worship and associated activities. The vision of a new pattern of ordained ministry whose priority would be supporting lay witness and discipleship from a place of social solidarity had been largely lost.17 One of the motivations for the subsequent introduction of ‘Ordained Local Ministry’ was to recapture that vision, but it has continued to prove difficult to sustain. The continuing question that first comes into sharp focus in the nineteenth-century of the relationship between ordained ministry and the general social category of ‘professionals’, with its associated expectations about training, forms part of the background here.18

Two decades later, it was evident to some that the enthusiastic consensus of the 1960s had failed to change the underlying situation in the Church of England regarding the participation of the laity in ministry and mission. All Are Called, published in 1985, argued that lay people were still seen primarily as ‘non-ordained’ and their roles and ministries subordinate to those of the clergy.19 It criticized the church for being preoccupied with its own ecclesiastical structures rather than attending to its fundamental task of transforming the world. Having set out a categorization of different kinds of lay ministry, including ‘churchly ministries’, ‘ministries with family, friends and neighbours’, ‘Monday morning ministries’ and ‘Saturday night’ ministries, it called for the Church of England to acknowledge and value their worth alongside the ministries of the ordained, and not as inferior to them.

All Are Called served as a catalyst for renewed attention on the role of the laity, and in particular on the need for adult Christian education. Ten years after its publication, however, one of its contributors commented:

for a time there was a flurry of activity, and some major work – notably in liturgy… but over recent years the Anglican focus on such issues as the ordination of women distracted energy from the task, and surveying the scene one is tempted to mourn how little headway has been made.20

When another Working Group from the Board of Education, which had been responsible for All Are Called, issued a progress document in 1999 on relevant initiatives, it had to acknowledge that after a flurry of activity in the late 1980s, funding for lay development posts had been cut and the Church of England’s strategic focus had moved towards ordained and Reader ministries. Despite the progress which they agreed had been made, the report’s writers noted that ‘There is a deep and profoundly disturbing gap between intention, strategy and the reality of what is actually happening in many parishes.’21

One might see the same pattern replicated in the reception of what became known as the Hind Report, its original title being Formation for Ministry in a Learning Church.22 Published in 2003, one of its key recommendations was for widely available courses under the umbrella of ‘Education for Discipleship’, designed to enable people who were seeking to grow in discipleship and ministry to benefit from learning in the context of the Church of England’s network of Theological Education Institutions, without requiring any intention of serving as ordained or licensed lay ministers. Such courses were also to be made mandatory for those in the process of discerning a calling to these ministries, thus affirming the common ground of all particular vocations in the shared call of discipleship. The proposal would have required either additional resources or the moving of funding from other budgets to implement it. With rising costs for initial training for ordination, a determination on many sides to protect expenditure in this area and a desire to move suitable candidates into ordained ministry as quickly as possible given the declining numbers of stipendiary ministers, the recommendation of ‘Education for Discipleship’ looked like an unrealistic aspiration. It quietly disappeared from view.

The seeds of Setting God’s People Free, which provided the catalyst for work leading to the current report, were sown in 2011 in a debate at the General Synod, on a report from the Archbishops’ Council and the House of Bishops called ‘Challenges for the New Quinquennium’.23 The report again drew attention to the ‘importance of lay development’, not in connection with ecclesial roles or church planting but for ‘equipping members of the laity for effective discipleship in the world’. Concerns in this area continued to be raised within the House of Laity in particular over the next few years. From 2015 onwards, they were channelled into the Renewal and Reform initiative (originally called Reform and Renewal) launched by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York at the February sessions of the General Synod that year and focused on promoting the growth of the church in mission. In that context, it is not surprising that the sense of urgency about mobilizing the laity for evangelization that had marked Towards the Conversion of England in 1945 now returned to the forefront, as is evident from the opening paragraphs of Setting God’s People Free itself:

A great opportunity lies before us. It is the same opportunity that has presented itself to the Church in every decade for the last 100 years. It is an opportunity that arguably has not been fully grasped since the days of Wesley.

Will we determine to empower, liberate and disciple the 98% of the Church of England who are not ordained and therefore set them free for fruitful, faithful mission and ministry, influence, leadership and, most importantly, vibrant relationship with Jesus in all of life? And will we do so not only in church-based ministry on a Sunday but in work and school, in gym and shop, in field and factory, Monday to Saturday?24

As already noted, the authors of Setting God’s People Free were aware of the cyclical nature of the Church of England’s engagement in this area since the 1940s: well-received reports stimulate new ideas and initiatives, which within a couple of decades – or rather less – have lost momentum as their limited impact becomes apparent. To avoid the same fate, the report rightly focused on the need to have a clear plan for implementation, based on identifying and addressing ‘Constraining Factors’, the title of its third chapter. What the Faith and Order Commission offers in the current text is a deepening of that analysis, outlining the theological and spiritual work that is needed to overcome the forces of inertia that have proved so powerful over the past seventy years.