Ordained Local Ministry

My main complaint about this book, subtitled ‘A New Shape for Ministry in the Church of England’ is that it is written entirely by people who are based in the Diocese of Southwark and only rarely concedes that other Dioceses, too, may have OLM training schemes and OLM Priests. To be fair the joint Editors admit this in their ‘Conclusions’, but I was left wondering why they did not consult other Dioceses who have OLM schemes and seek contributions from them so that the result would be truly ‘in the Church of England’.

A second complaint would be that, because the history of OLM in Southwark is almost entirely confined to the experiences of urban parishes, the experience of those Dioceses where there are large deeply rural areas, where OLM is a vital factor in the life of the Church, are largely ignored.

This is particularly apparent in the chapters that describe OLM in Southwark as originally being a response to working class parishes having middle class Incumbents or congregations with a significant ethnic content having white Incumbents. Two chapters are contributed by OLMs, one a Nigerian in the parish of New Cross and the other a retired Head Mistress from Balham. I would have liked there to have been more contributions from those who actually know what it is like to be an OLM and rather less from people who may well be experts in their field but are not OLMs themselves and can never know what it is actually like ‘at the coal face’. It was not until I reached the chapter 8, written by an Incumbent presenting her view and the final chapter (13) ‘Realizing Potential’ that I began to resonate with what I was reading.

The ‘Incumbent's View’ chapter deals with some of the knotty problems such as ‘who presides when, and how often’, but even this betrays the single parish benefice style which is absent in the majority of rural parishes which are usually part of a multi-parish benefice and any priest is a bonus when parishes are asking for regular Eucharistic services. There are some wise words from the Incumbent concerning the problems of an OLM in an interregnum and the OLM as an agent of change or a focus of resistance to changes.

The Revd. David Haylett is an OLM in the Dorchester Team Ministry

Ordained Local Ministry Malcom Torry and Jeffrey Heskins Canterbury Press £14.99