How to balance a hierarchy

I WAS catching up with a clergy colleague who, like me, was looking back on a few years of parish ministry. We had each been ordained when our youngsters were still in primary school, and I had added another (first incumbent within the diocese to be pregnant in post). We were discussing our experiences, and, more particularly, those of our youngsters.

Of my 4, one was blithely indifferent to their status as “vicarage child” and all that this involved. Two accepted the advantages and the disadvantages with a shrug of their early years, and a period of teenage rise up as they fought against the label and its attached assumptions, striving to point out that they were just as “normal” as the following young person. One of them was, I’m afraid, permanently scarred.

There are advantages to vicarage life, after all — my children learned to combine with a big selection of individuals, to treat death as a part of life, and to make mulled wine in large quantities — however the jury remains to be out on whether the benefits outweigh the challenges.

“So,” my colleague commented, “Church, Family, God. Which order did you set them in? And was it the best order?” These three words took me instantly straight back to ordination training, and a few very earnest discussions about what got here where, as we looked innocently ahead to our imagined lives as parish priests.

At the time, the prevailing feeling appeared to be that God, obviously, was at the highest of the pile. Church got here next, and, at the underside, Family. It was felt amongst many who this last needs to be handled by the clergy spouse: the natural order of things in line with male ordinands — reasonably daring and possibly not quite possible for the females.

ORDINATIONS happened, posts were applied for and accepted, and the comfortable cushioning of curacies misled me and plenty of of my cohort into pondering that, yes, it was perfectly possible to be all things to all people; no sacrifice needed; all the things fitting very comfortably into the space and time allotted.

I eased in gently to incumbency, in a rare and precious half-time post that, I reasoned, would depart me loads of time for taking care of three, then 4, children under 11. Even with an exquisite pair of churchwardens, an enthusiastic and committed congregation, and a generally supportive wider community, the pressure began to extend. “I’m only part-time,” I said at a gathering with my churchwardens, “and I can’t do all of it. What would you want me to drop?”

After just a few days of serious about this, they got here back to me with the response that they didn’t really see how I could drop anything.

AS THE children grew, so did resentments over the constraints of vicarage life. Rural ministry offers fewer opportunities for the anonymity that considered one of my children craved; and the usage of the family home as a gathering place was intrusive and disruptive, especially when the meeting was strife-ridden, as happened incessantly in considered one of my parishes. In any group of young people, the vicar’s child will all the time be the recognisable one and, in times of trouble, the primary one identified, even when — as was often the case — they weren’t actually there on the time.

I struggled during this time, trying to keep up family life, run several churches, and honour my faith commitments. The hierarchy I had absorbed of God, Church, Family, led to the family making sacrifices which, in hindsight, they shouldn’t have needed to do.

Even then, the occasional, and intensely mild, misbehaviour of a member of the family would result in emails quoting 1 Timothy 3.4,5: “He must manage his circle of relatives well and see that his children obey him, and he must achieve this in a fashion worthy of full[ respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?).” If ever there were a Bible passage to beat someone over the head with, surely this is it! Perhaps most dangerously of all, Church threatened to overwhelm both God and Family, becoming a stern, unbending taskmaster demanding endless work and personal sacrifice.

AT A clergy conference, one woman put forward the daring idea that it should be God, Family, Church. But how do you structure family time, when its demands surge and recede like the tide on a beach? What do you do about “pinch points”, when Church and Family both have their needs?

Christmas is especially challenging, as we juggle the nativity plays of our children and grandchildren with those of the local school, or rush through Christmas-morning stocking-opening in order to fit in both peeling the potatoes and taking the eight-o’clock. Mothering Sunday has always rankled, particularly in the early years, as I celebrated the day by cramming in extra services and trying to include mothers/non-mothers/those with unsatisfactory mothers/those with no mothers/those who weren’t mothers, while at the same time being around for my own young family.

Whose idea was a hierarchy anyway? Where did God, Church, Family, or God, Family, Church, come from? Are they not a throwback to times past, when life was more leisured, wives and servants were plentifully available, and boarding school was the best solution? Are we not committing a serious sin, boxing in our all-powerful, creative, imaginative, and ever-loving God, by simply making him the top building block of an unstable, humanly created tower?

I DON’T know when I threw out the terrible trio. I suspect it was when I stopped pretending I could ever be Superpriest and settled for being Goodenoughpriest. Instead of worshipping the idol of Doing It All, I found a different model, based on Rublev’s Trinity icon. The three calm figures in tranquil shades of green and blue sit in an open circle, inviting the observer to stop a while and join the holy group, becoming part of the unity and sharing in the peace that they offer.

Our lives are not to be sliced into chunks, brutally dividing us into separate identities. Just as we are loved wholly and completely, so we offer our whole selves in love and service as a response to the One who gave us life. Times and seasons ask different things of us, but those we have been given to love and to cherish are just as much a part of our lives as Christians and priests as those in the wider Church and community, and are just as important. We are not asked to crucify ourselves and our loved ones, but to model holistic, Christ-centred living as an example and invitation to others to live a fuller, richer life, which in turn enriches others.

“Come now, little person, fly for a moment from your affairs, escape for a little while from the tumult of your thoughts. Put aside now your weighty cares and leave your wearisome toils. Abandon yourself for a little to God and rest for a little in him. . . Speak now, my whole heart, speak now to God: ‘I seek your countenance, O Lord, your countenance I seek.’

“Come then, Lord my God, teach my heart where and how to seek you, where and how to find you” (St Anselm, the opening lines of Proslogion, 1077).

The Revd Dr Sally Welch is Vicar of the Kington Group, in the diocese of Hereford.