Laicising Simon Parke.

In the last couple of weeks a column hs apeared in the Church Times wherein Simon Parke begins to describe the experience of becoming a lay person after being an ordained parson. In it we begin to pick up reasons why he felt he should leave the ordained ministry. The CT policy is that these articles don't become available for a couple of weeks so I expect that the first will appear next week but I didn't want to wait to comment as Simon's action is one which I have a great deal of sympathy with. He says:
"I had to go. I was struggling with the middle-management climate now prevailing in our slimmed-down Church of England, with its passion for audits, accountability, challenges, five-year plans, ministerial goals, and budget projections. But much more telling and worrying than these predictable moans, I was bored of the good and the gracious."

I can understand this, I think. Though the problem, I think, is not so much management as the way it is done. All of the things Simon mentions I can see have a legitimate use; I have found audits can be helpful in knowing what is going on; I would argue that there are areas where not only do I not want to lose accountability but I would want to extend it and so on. No, my difficulty is that these things seem all too often about institutional survival than mission. And my question is whether the real challenge is to evolve ways of being the Church of England that preserve the telling of our story and re-craft it to a vastly changed situation and one in which our institutions did not evolve.

My worry is that all the target-five-year-auditted-SMART-ing is really about simply re-cloning the current churches. This is no good: the global warming of post-modernity is changing our social and cultural climate and we need to grow different church-crops. Better we manage that change than simply carry on and then have a crisis [as if we don't already have one].

I personally have suffered mild depression in the past over trying to match up to inappropriate managerial goals [partly self-imposed but driven by acute awareness of the precariousness of being an unfreeholded priest in a climate of dwindlement and a situation where, realisitically it wasn't going to be otherwise]; we need to start where Mike Ridell challenged us to in "Threshold of the future" -with the frank acknowledgment of the death of the Christendom-church in the Euro west and so get out of our institutional [and personal] denial. Denial takes up a lot of resources and energy which could be better used for the work we are actually called to discover and do.

One of the reasons I went into chaplaincy work and wanted to stay in it was that it delivered me from some of this 'more of the same' bureaucracy. The one thing we are not doing [or haven't been] is trying out new stuff and investing in the margins that could be growing edges. Hence, for example, the post I now occupy is being cut in July -when the stated aim of our bishop is to increase investment in ministry that involves youth, when the number of international students is about to go through the roof and in an area where engagment with Islam is probably most important and easier thn in most other areas. This is because actually the apparently radical plans of the diocese [to devolve power and money] actually seem to mask a policy of keeping the money to do the same old same old with dwindling congregations. Of course some of the difficulty is freehold which allows clergy to stay and resist innovation. On the other hand at least that is a protection from summary dismissal because one makes the wrong kind of waves. Perhaps the extension of employment rights to clergy will help to deal with this?

This is why the possiblility of new diocesan and provincial structures [which I mention in an earlier blog [Sat 17 Jan] which could actually save money and free up possibilities. While smacking of the managerialism that Simon Parke finds distressing, this could actually help when combined with an emphasis on emerging church. I feel a hugely miffed that my post -which I've been saying is about exploring emerging church- has been removed just as some of this engagment with the real issues of emerging church is coming to possible fruition.

I'm finding a lot of clergy struggling with the disappointment of working in a structure that asks of them so much that isn't closely-related to their core vocation. Should we not be building our church with and not against the vocations of the members [including the ordained]?