Death by a thousand additions?

Is the increasing workload of clergy, and the shift of responsibilities onto congregations and lay people, helping to kill off family life? The Revd Jeremy Trigg, Rector of Wolverton, near Milton Keynes, looks at the effects of clergy cutbacks on modern life.

You’ve probably heard of the old Chinese practice of ‘Death by a thousand cuts’ but I bet you’ve never considered that death is just as likely to come by a thousand additions.
For many people who are in work the truth is that they are working under very great pressure. In the Private Sector the profit motive demands getting as much work as possible out of as few people as possible. In the Public Sector the finite budget is required to meet the needs for more regulation as well as work that increases in volume and standard.

At the same time another source of security in people’s lives is fast disappearing. The Notion of a ‘Job for life’ is fast being consigned to the annals of history. Instead we have short term contracts, which mean little if any job security. The perfect climate in which employers may ‘add on’ responsibility after responsibility to people who are already under pressure, but who can’t say no because their job security is limited.

Clergy ‘add-ons’

The Church of England is of course no exception. In the twenty five years since I left theological college. I’ve lost count of the number of ‘Add ons’ I’ve been given, and it started in my curacy! I guess that many of my colleagues can echo that. In the current climate of cash starvation and the need to cut clergy posts in many deaneries the easiest solution is to ‘Add on’ to those who are left. Area Deans hope to goodness that those in freehold posts will move on or retire to give more flexibility to the Deanery Plan because only the freeholders are in a position to decline the add on.

Coupled with adding responsibility to clergy we also say that we need to develop local ministry teams so that the ministry of the local church can go on whilst clergy spread themselves over greater areas and become little more than ‘Mass Priests’ and Marriage Celebrants.

Now I’m not necessarily knocking this because I do believe that where lay people have obvious gifts and feel the call to use them we should be saying ‘Alleluia, get on with it’ and providing all the support and supervision necessary for their ministry to flourish. There is however a risk in this approach. People with busy and successful careers have gifts and skills that are easily recognised. That is why they are successful and why the church can be tempted to press gang them into action in local ministry. It may be that we are doing them no favours, and paradoxically are not practising what we preach – namely the importance of family life.

What we all know is that the quality of our family life is as good as the time we invest in it. We must be careful to ensure that in asking people to contribute more by way of time we do not encourage a diminution of the importance of family life. It’s not that we intend to do that. It’s just a consequence of the demands of ministry as most people in any form of ministry can testify.

My point is that by adding to responsibilities and workloads we may be at risk of killing off some things that are at the heart of our profession, like marriage and the family, the nurturing of children through the investment of time, and the time consuming demands of pastoral care.

Role models within the Christian community will become fewer in number and slowly but surely the integrity of the local church will ebb away. The local church will become a place of stress and ‘the peace of God which passes all understanding’ may seem to be a distant thing.

Changing ministry models

Can we avoid it? I believe we can. Although there may be fewer clergy the far more important fact to recognize is that the population is growing. The population growth predicted for this country changes everything. It may be unwise to try to preserve a model of ministry born in the days of a vastly smaller population and attempt to adapt it to fit a very different scene. What follows are three ideas that could lead to a more hopeful future for the church.
The focus of our thinking needs to shift from stemming decline to doing mission amidst a rapidly increasing population. Is the parish as we know it an institution of the past made obsolete by the car? Might the concept of ‘the Minster Church’ have much to commend it?

Our understanding of the spiritual quest of those who are outside any mainstream religion is crucial. How are we to interpret the gospel anew for our generation if we do not understand the spiritual journey people make? This is not rocket science but it may be true that a further consequence of the thousand additions is that the local church (and clergy?) have little time to listen.

Finally no venture into the mission field will yield fruit if we are not resourcing Christian people to live their lives in a way that grows ever closer to the way of our Lord. When Jesus calls and commissions his Apostles in Matthew 9 & 10 he has a simple, almost naïve mission strategy to share with them. Be committed. Live committed lives. Everything will follow from that. Supporting and encouraging people’s attempts to live in commitment to God is not new but is it one of the things that suffers most.

I argued earlier that we will not find the answers to the challenges of today and tomorrow in the structures of yesterday. There are always exceptions and George Herbert’s ‘Country Parson’ is one. It was the quietness of his life that led to his faithfulness in prayer and study that fed a very effective ministry. We ignore that lesson at our peril. It may just save us from the death of a thousand additions.