IT WAS my East Sussex C of E primary school that first offered a spiritual perspective on life. Daily assemblies with Gospel readings from the Authorised Version, hymns from Percy Dearmer’s Songs of Praise to resonant piano accompaniment — these evoked a dimension beyond. But it was after I moved to the outskirts of north London and have become involved within the lifetime of an Evangelical parish church — heavily influenced by the Billy Graham crusades — that my religious experience became shaped and structured.
Here, it was sin, repentance, and conversion, and St Paul’s epistles and the Old Testament quite than the Gospels; and there was a general assumption that any young man who could rise up and speak could be called to “the ministry”. So, a partial sense of calling was there from my mid-teens. But university called in the meanwhile, and I went to read English at Bristol, where the Shakespearean critic L. C. KnIghts was professor. When I asked him — warily — whether I should really be reading theology, he responded disarmingly: “There is something to be said for the world of the imagination.”
So, the imaginative world of literature won out over the literal world of the narrowly Evangelical version of church, although “theology” crept in under the guise of a two-year, part-time university course in biblical studies and church history. Later, while undertaking the PGCE and beginning to teach English, I explored life’s greater questions with inquiring sixth-formers through literature. Participating by now as a family in a more inclusive form of parish church, we felt at home, and I used to be licensed as a Reader.
SHORTLY after this, a teaching-career move to rural north Oxfordshire took us to a village where the parish priest — formerly an RAF chaplain — had also just arrived. Together with a villager who was a retired theologian, we formed a ministry partnership, supporting worship and church life in our benefice of 4 rural villages. As a Reader, I loved leading worship in our ancient churches; and, in our parish priest, I saw for the very first time a model of ministry that was about personal concern for, and repair to, others quite than telling them about sin and salvation.
Could I be called to this sort of ministry? As a teacher, I had little doubt concerning the value of my work at school, and sensed no must abandon it. But I felt a transparent sense of calling to further, ordained ministry. Thankfully, the Oxford diocese was at the moment running a non-stipendiary ministerial training course under the direction of Canon Wilfrid Browning: a three-year, part-time course, rooted within the Oxford Faculty of Theology, and within the setting of Oxford’s theological colleges, chiefly St Stephen’s House. These were vibrant, demanding years.
ORDINATION, when it got here, was unequivocal: I used to be called to serve each in my school workplace and in our parish. Whether that involved teaching sixth-form students or directing school dramas, or leading evensong in a draughty church for a dozen people, it was all of a bit. And, when one other teaching profession move took us to north Yorkshire for a deputy headship in a big Church of England comprehensive, I used to be similarly placed in a parish setting. Teaching at school, leading a college eucharist, and presiding and preaching in one in all our three parish churches — all were involved.
On moving south, after some years, to a headship, I used to be licensed at the varsity as each head and chaplain. Even so, before long I discovered myself asked to support parish ministry — sometimes out of the blue, as on one occasion when a parish priest absconded with a churchwarden’s wife and a celebrant was needed. . . So, like many retired vicars, I, too, have been called on to fill gaps, cover vacancies, and customarily keep the institution going. And that’s nice.
IT’S nice, nevertheless it’s probably not. Forty years of ministry — NSM, or SSM, or whatever term you should use (more of that later) — has shown me just how shaky the parish structure of the Church of England is. It’s so depending on the aptitude of the person parish priest, and on personal qualities. And, when there is no such thing as a priest, every part devolves on the shoulders of the churchwardens and PCC — because it has done in my former parish within the Ashdown Forest, which still has no official ministerial cover after my retirement as Priest-in-Charge three years ago.
There are still, almost unbelievably, huge differences in understanding about what knowledgeable approach to ministry is. As an education skilled, I all the time knew what was expected of me: the principles and expectations were clear, and in recent times have grow to be clearer still. But what constitutes good priestly behaviour? To my intense regret — and bewilderment — I even have come across more “unprofessional” behaviour amongst parish clergy than I ever encountered on the earth of education.
MY FIVE “retirement” years as a parish priest — I had not planned to be one, but our archdeacon asked me to tackle the Forest parish — also showed me how dysfunctional our institution could be. Its complex systems of permission for changes to parish churches, its bureaucracy, its apparent reluctance to offer pastoral care or oversight for those in ministry — all surpass by far the frustrations of educational leadership. I feel I can count two, possibly three, telephone calls from a bishop during all my years of ministry.
And as for names: I’m simply a priest of the Church of England, Catholic and Reformed. I occur to not be paid by the institution. My ministerial years have been fulfilling, and, I hope, invaluable to others and to the Church. But the Church’s clericalism, its moribundity, its failure to have any really clear, strategic view of how the unpaid priesthood might enable the institution’s survival in a future of economic and human resource shortfalls — these are desperately worrying.
ONE former NSM trainee colleague used to say we were “free priests”. The opportunity offered by “free” priests to the lifetime of the broader Church must be further explored, more valued, more effectively used. As “secular” clergy, now we have a perhaps unique probability to assist people to sense a dimension beyond — even, to some extent, to embody that dimension inside the on a regular basis world.
But lurking somewhere should be a suspicion that “free” priests should not proper, and don’t actually matter. I once asked the pinnacle of a theological college whether he trained men (because it was then) for unpaid ministry. He replied, “No, all our students have a real vocation.” That a vocation each to secular work and to ministry could also be real, real; that a priest, whether paid or not, is a priest; that ministry is a calling, an invite, to share within the work of Christ; that it has more to do with listening than telling; that the realms of religion and of imagination are intimately related — these are convictions I’m left with. It has been a remarkable journey.
The Revd Dr John Caperon is a former head of the Bennett Memorial Diocesan School, Kent; a former director of the Bloxham Project; and a former parish priest within the Ashdown Forest. He is writer of A Vital Ministry: Chaplaincy in schools within the post-Christian era (SCM Press) and co-editor of A Christian Theology of Chaplaincy (Jessica Kingsley).
