I celebrated Mass at St German's for Fr Roy Doxsey this morning, to enable him to take a proper day off. He's just had his seventieth birthday and retires at the end of June. The church looked magnificent with Spring sun streaming in through its clerestory windows, and making the sanctuary lamps glitter. The Parishes of Splott and St German's will share an incumbent once Fr Roy retires. There are simply not enough full time clergy to cover both separately any longer, and although both are reasonably well attended for urban prioirty area churches, there are only sufficient supporting members between the two communities of Splott and Adamsdown to afford one priest between them.
In times past it was possible to underwrite clergy costs from the wider diocesan budget on the grounds that these communities are mission priority areas. That might still be the case if there were sufficient clergy to deploy, but such is the shrinkage in numbers of trained people, that even if this was regarded as a broader budget priority for the diocese, it could could only be achieved by depriving areas with greater numbers of faithful, equally in need of the ministry of a priest. We're also getting to a stage where the numbers of retired clergy available will grow less because of the reduction in numbers ordained generations ago. I'm not sure how many faithful members yet realise the scale of the problem facing the church.
The Roman Catholic church has been in a similar situation for the past quarter of a century, likewise the Free Churches, so we're not alone in this. We've actually made things more difficult for ourselves too, through the emphasis on the centrality and desirability of regular Eucharistic worship in church teaching, to the extent that services of the Word and the daily offices tend to be neglected; that is to say, services which do not require an ordained priest to conduct them. We've accustomed faithful Anglicans to having Communion in their locality, and several times a week. It's an ideal, a counsel of perfection which makes the church utterly dependent on ordained clergy. And now our own vision is put to shame by the lack of vocations to the very ministry that can guarantee continuity. Where do we go from here?
Can we re-train our parish congregations to sustain regular prayer and ministry of the Word with lay ministers in each church, and gently insist that gatherings for the Eucharist will take place on an area basis where several parishes can conveniently meet, or agree to rotate from place to place, wherever a priest can be invited to lead worship? This will require a massive change in culture and social habits, especially from those with a genuinely valid vision of what local mission through worship should be. It will require not just direction, teaching and leadership, but debate and the rebuilding of a consensus about how God's people can nurture and inspire themselves for service, witness and proclamation in what seem like the worst of circumstances today, where the sea of faith seems to have receded beyond the horizon of anyone's imagination.
Well, not everyone's imagination.
The past decades has seen the emergence of new churches rooted in evangelical tradition which are less reliant on ordained clerics and less dependent on Eucharistic worship to nurture community building that the historic mainstream denominations. It's not been a reaction against the trend to celebrate sacraments more frequently, but born of a desire to give people an experience of faith alive in community, and emerging through a learning programme that speaks to people's everyday personal and social needs, and it's grounded in the desire to make sure people can read and understand the bible, and apply its teaching to their lives. Surely there are lessons to be learned from this in facing up to the challenges which lie ahead of us?
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