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The collapse of the present church It is reprinted with permission of Rev Andrew Prior © Introduction Whilst I hold high our call to service, I am unashamed in my outlook as a minister. The paper is written from 'a minister's experience' and I thank those other ministers who have supported me in this. Layout. I present my basic thinking in an initial outline. Points a) to q) in the outline are expanded in the appendix. Hopefully the initial thrust of the paper can be gained without wading through all the detail, although the detail is important! Traditional structures in our church consist of a congregation, or group of congregations, who employ a full time stipended person. I will refer to that person as 'the minister.' He or she may be a Minister of the Word, or Deacon, or Lay Pastor etc. We have usually specifically trained our ministers for this task. a) Despite our best efforts to match minister and ministry, our model of parish and congregation has been very much influenced by how many people we need to pay for a minister. All of those people paying, who may have very different understandings of who and what a minister is, have expectations of their minister. Our society has changed in its attitude to the church. Many congregations and parishes face a very different social and demographic situation from the time they were established. These changes can mean a minister is settled too much on the basis of money-availability, and not enough on the basis of the common mission and ministry needs of a church. Mission which reaches out in new ways and enables church growth is thus often undermined or prevented. Appendix - a The unintended effects of our traditional structures include b) unnecessary dependence of churches on a group of trained ministers Appendix - b and c) a group of highly trained ministers who have become dependent on the church. Appendix - c I mean here that congregations often expect ministers to do things that they themselves could do, and have now lost the confidence to do. Many ministers, in order to be good ministers, may have become unemployable elsewhere.
Despite these problems, the church has also reaped an enormous harvest from its ministers. Long and faithful service has outweighed our many shortcomings. As we know, however, it is increasingly difficult for churches to employ clergy.
The present situation is that we cannot settle (place) all our ministers. In South Australia we have 22 less settlements than four years ago. In her April letter, the General Secretary says we still have 3 candidates from last year to be placed, and four finishing in June 1999. There are 6 ministers awaiting settlement, 7 ending settlements, and nine currently in settlement who are seeking new settlements. There are only 12 vacant placements. Everyone I speak to expects this situation to become worse. Interstate situations are not far behind us. Moving interstate will soon cease to be a way out, if it has not already. The difficult employment situation for deacons and youth workers is of course made all the worse by this. Retired ministers who were able to supplement their income by taking supply and interim situations are now losing these opportunities because we give preference to the growing number of un-settled ministers. Extra comments on the points above… a) Despite our best efforts to match minister and ministry, our model of parish and congregation has been very much influenced by how many people we need to pay for a minister. All of those people paying, who may have very different understandings of who and what a minister is, have expectations of their minister. Any parish or congregations is formed under a specific set of circumstances. A congregation tends to seek to have its own minister. Where this was not possible, circuits were formed to enable the presence of a minister. My experience of parish work where people are trying to redefine their purpose and direction is that there is a constant overwhelming need felt to employ a minister. Even where there is agreement that the first consideration should be what the mission is or should be, people keep coming back to having a minister as the key or deciding factor in decision making.. This tends to determine models of mission, rather than mission influencing models ministry style. I think 'being church' has become for many people synonymous with 'having a minister.' 'Having a minister' thus becomes an idol. The result of this is that a church may base its decisions not on what the mission needs or opportunities are, but on what it needs to do to preserve its status quo, including a minister. Agreements which may talk about mission can be made to get a minister, when many in the congregation are really on about getting the 'chaplain' we want to look after us. Mission initiatives are unwelcome in such a situation and result in the (overt or otherwise) criticism many of us experience for new the initiatives people said they wanted. back to a b) ...unnecessary dependence of churches on a group of trained ministers The successful past is remembered rosily in a trying present, but I think more is happening. This parish was in a growing suburb 30 and 40 years ago when there was high local social cohesion from lack of private transport, the commonality that comes from being young families in a new and growing suburb, the fact that women mostly stayed at home, and the fact that the church was initially the main or only provider of many services such as sports clubs, pre school kindergartens, Sunday Schools, gym clubs and so on. In their hey-day, social conditions let many parishes to maintain an unusually high grouping of people who were committed to an cause. The cause was the maintenance of a church (and, by definition, a minister.) Today church and Sunday Schools are much less popular. Private transport, the growth of secular sports clubs, the stronger integration of pre-schools into the education system, families with both parents working, a growing trend to change jobs and thus housing, all tend to decrease local social cohesion. Our lower local social cohesion, the relative unpopularity of church as an institution to belong to (as opposed to using for rites of passage), and our own crises of identity, mean that it is extremely hard to find enough like minded people who are committed enough to new mission objectives to support a minister. So often we are left with the old church groupings which are dying out. More than 15 or 18 units (families or singles) struggle to maintain closeness. When social cohesion is lower, the maintenance of large groups is all the harder. I note that one growing congregation of which I was a member gave great prominence to house groups. What I remember best of all (in fact, mostly) is my house group experience. I suspect that the Epistles we read and try and model our large congregations upon, were actually written for smaller congregations we would now call 'house churches.' My first point them, is that to base a church which is big enough to support a ministerial stipend around mission issues is actually a very difficult thing. We don't have that kind of social cohesion in many places. Indeed most of the areas I have worked in have been 'war zones' with older residents (and church members) resenting, and hanging out against, the newer interlopers who often have a fundamentally different way of seeing the world and the purpose of church. The second point is that my predecessors were not supermen. They were good organisers, and often president etc. in name only, and made key appearances. They were in a growing organisation that had high morale and thought it knew where it was going. Doubtless they were run off their feet. But so are we, very often. It is worth asking this question: Has being a minister become much harder, so that a 100 member parish is a huge workload, or are we being invited (and accepting) work which is un-necessary to bring the Word? I think I have spent a lot of time doing stuff which had little to do with bringing the Word, which wore me out, and interfered with my actually being a Word-bringer, but which parishes were desperate to have me do! This bears on the future shape of ministry. It may be that many churches which struggle to pay a stipend are using a large amount of it to pay for services which are not really about Word bringing, and which are incidentally decreasing the self confidence and ministry of the parishioners. In short we are often paid to do what lay people once did. back to b c) a group of highly trained ministers who have become dependent on the church. There is an unspoken contract between ordained ministers and the church. Bordering on caricature, we could say it goes like this: We will pay you much less than you could get elsewhere. We will dump on you, and even abuse you, whenever we feel like it, but still expect you to love us. We will move you as it pleases us, often to the detriment of your family's life and education. The pay off will be that you will sometimes be privileged to minister powerfully in our lives. We will tolerate you dumping on us, (and we ministers often do). You will always have a job. There will always be a house. And at the end, if you are without anywhere to go, there will be Spicer homes. Of course the situation is much more complicated. Stipends have increased. Change of settlements is much more negotiable. However, the church is now unable to fulfil its side of the contract. We have clergy without settlement not because they are dills, but because the settlements are simply not there. Unfortunately many ministers have become dependent on the church. By plan or default, they are indebted, without housing, without transport, and with few savings. On the basis of continuing employment and housing they have allowed their capacity to exist financially apart from the church to disappear, as a part of their sacrificial service to the church.. Exit students can owe thousands, simply to allow the finishing of a course. Settled clergy may have forgone housing savings to offset parish stress on a family by having children in fee paying schools. I suspect some of us have been subsidising our parishes with computers, photocopiers, and plain monetary offerings, instead of making savings. Under the old contract this was fine. Now the church cannot fulfil the contract, and often clergy, especially the older ones (40+) have very poor reemployment prospects. I have had this poo-hooed- 'everyone knows that employment is not permanent in this day and age.' This is true, but the point is that in this new church of too many ministers, we have an unknown number who have based their lives around the old contract, and have impoverished themselves, at the calling of the church, which now cannot fulfil its contractual promises.
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