Called to be Lay

I remember well a gathering of Ecumenical Officers in which the bishop chairing the event announced that not only was it his birthday, but also the anniversary of his ordination as a bishop. He went on to say that it was not the most significant anniversary for him, for that was the anniversary of his baptism. It was obvious that, for some of those present, the thought that his baptism had a greater significance than his ordination seemed distinctly odd. However I appreciated his statement. It brought to mind a conversation I had had some fifteen years before. I was talking to Sir Tom Lees and I said how much I had appreciated reading about his speech, at a recent meeting of General Synod, in which he had said that we must remember that the clergy are part of the laity too. I said I thought the theology behind that sentiment was excellent. Sir Tom replied that Synod had laughed at him; none of them believe it.

In 2016 we had a Diocesan Clergy Day at which the speaker was Bishop Graham Tomlin, whose topic was priesthood. He urged us to rediscover what it means to be a priest. In the group I was in, later in the day, we had to say what term best described us in our ministry. I was the only one who chose the word ‘priest’. If someone asks me what I do, I am likely to reply that I am a priest. That term defines my sense of vocation and who I am. And yet, if we had been allowed to choose a second word, I would have said that I am a lay person. That does not mean I feel uncomfortable in my priesthood, or somehow lacking in confidence. Rather, it means I have an even deeper sense of vocation of being part of the layos, by which I mean the assembly of God’s people. Priesthood is certainly a calling I have to serve that assembly in a certain way, but I have no sense of priesthood that can somehow be lifted out of the context of a pilgrim people, defined by Jesus our High Priest, into which we have been incorporated by baptism.

Last summer I retired. Under the rules of our diocese I have had to wait six months before receiving Permission to Officiate. I have embraced the freedom of retirement, but the last six months have also been a period of bereavement. Letting go of so many things I did for over three decades has been important. It has been a very creative time and one of waiting in openness and prayer was to where God is leading me next. That has not been without a great sense of loss. Yet it has also been a time to reconnect with what it means to be a lay person - someone who has been enticed into the assembly of God’s people and into a ministry that belongs to all of God’s people. 

Back in the days when I was an ecumenical officer the great point of celebration was the signing of the Porvoo agreement. Here, at last, we were finally going to formally move into communion with Christians of another denomination, in this case some of the Lutherans of Scandinavia. It would not only mean a mutual recognition of each other’s ministry, but also the possibility of a full interchange of ministry. Yet such an ecumenical achievement did not come without a long process of prayerful discussion. One sticking point had been our concern about the significance of an unbroken stream of Apostolic succession. We had seem this in terms of the unbroken line of bishops ordaining their successors down the ages. Yet not all of our potential partners could claim such an unbroken line. The answer, when it came, was a beautiful piece of theological thinking. Baptism is the primary rite, not ordination, and (we agreed) the passing on of faith down an unbroken line of succession from the Apostolic age is something that happens through the community of the baptised - the layos - whilst the line of the laying on of hands in the creation of bishops is an important symbol of that succession. A break in the succession of bishops does not necessarily invalidate the ongoing succession of a faith and a ministry that has been held and passed on by the People of God.

It seems to me that there is here a proper affirmation of the place of the layos as the very core of the Church. The ordained priest is not so much called out from the layos, as if somehow she is set apart as in some way separate from the community of the baptized. Rather, she is called into the centre of the layos so as to exercise a ministry of service that empowers the layos to be the very face of Christ for a broken world.  It seems to me that there is a huge power here, which should be the power of Christ made real in a Church broken in service for the world. Clericalism is the abuse of such power. It is the appropriation of power that sets a clergy class above and over the Church and in the process denigrates those who hold no such status into a subsidiary role as laity. Both sides can be complicit in such a situation. It is also a root to the kind of tribalism that seems to be rife in the Church, as groups find their sense of self identity in any issue other than what it means to be the Spirit-filled layos in which the presence of the risen Christ is made real in the communities that we serve.

The Colour of Austerity

Imagine 25 squares, all coloured blue. They are laid out on a sheet of paper in five rows, each with five squares. The question is asked as to which one of the boxes is a different shade of blue. So you gaze at them, wondering which one it is, but it is not at all obvious. This is a serious test and the point is that in one culture people find it hard to spot the different box, yet in another it is easy to do so. The difference is that in one culture they have a different word for each of the different shades of blue, whilst in the other they do not. The test has been used to prove that our perception is shaped by our language. What we see, and indeed how we perceive it, is limited or expanded by what language we have to understand and describe what we see. All this might seem improbable, but it became very obvious to me when we travelled deep inside the Arctic Circle last year. What was the weather like? It was gloriously sunny and there was ice and snow everywhere. But were you to ask a member of the Sami people the same question, you would get a very different answer. They have 180 different words for ice and snow. The landscape they look at the same as that at which I am looking. Yet most of what they see is beyond my perception. The same issue of perception struck me as I photographed the Northern Lights. Photography brings out much deeper and richer colours that we could see with the naked eye, yet locals can actually see those deep and rich colours. Their eyes are not better, but their culture has the language to describe this incredible display. Language affects perception and shapes the way we process what is going into and through our brains.

‘Austerity’ is a culture that shapes our perception of society. Within that culture there is a sharp logic, against which it is difficult to argue. We cannot spend more than we earn. We cannot live beyond our means. We cannot allow debt to be the legacy we leave for our children. So the supply of money needs to be controlled and budgets sliced to reduce spending. Success will be measured in terms of the balance sheets. Within the bubble of that perception all else ceases to be part of what we see as being the measure of reality. So austerity goes on. Yet from a different perspective the wellbeing of our society looks very different. A recent television program looked at the workings of a head and neck cancer unit in an NHS hospital. Underfunded and understaffed, the whole unit was at the point of collapse and one of the two consultants had announced he was leaving. His wife lived in America where he could earn more, treat fewer patients and treat them to a far higher standard of care. He loved his work, but the pressures of working in the NHS had left him utterly exhausted. It is one story, but the whole of the NHS is a breaking point, which means that a bad winter in eight months’ time may well prove to be the collapsing point. Cutting budgets, services and staff is leaving its toll. People are overworked, receiving wages which no longer keep up with inflation, and find themselves undervalued and demoralized in their work. I was in hospital over Christmas. I spoke to one nurse who, the previous day had started at 7.30am in a twelve hour shift. The first break she had had of any kind had been at 4.30pm. When I asked her how she coped, she said she had gone home and sat in a dark room for an hour before she could face anything else. The same crises can be seen in so many areas of our lives. Last week it was said that the legal system is on the point of collapse and we are reaching a point at which justice will no longer seed to be done. Cases are collapsing when not enough time is available to process evidence properly. In the field of education, it has been suggested that a staggering percentage of teachers want to leave the profession, but are trapped doing a job they no longer want to do. In the police it is now common to find all specialist units scrapped to focus resources on beat officers, yet those officers now have to work without the kind of specialist backup on which they once relied. The list could go on and on. The key narrative is that books must balance, money must be saved and productivity must be increased. Achieve that and the politicians can pat themselves on the back at their stunning success. But such a perception is blinkered. It fails to see the human cost, both in terms of individual lives and the sustainable structure and wellbeing of society as a whole.

Christianity does not provide neat and easy answers to these different bubbles of perception. Yet it does provide a different narrative which results in a radically different perspective. Imagine a world in which it was not the richest or most successful who called the shots, but rather a world in which everything is seen as falling under the sovereignty of the Divine. Imagine a world in which every person becomes the neighbour whose needs we must meet, a world in which a radical inclusion has replaced the naked tribalism that so typifies almost every aspect of existence, including the life of the Church. Imagine a world in which each of us sees, in every person we meet, a person of such value that Christ gave his life for them. This world is our perception. It is what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven and each and every day we pray that this kingdom, already established, may dawn on earth as it is in heaven. The Church’s task is to so live that dream that it becomes a reality in every corner of life. Rather than fighting over matters of doctrine (which is so beloved by the Church and which always ends up in a dysfunctional tribalism), living with the exuberant joy of the kingdom, in a way that celebrates the sublime depths of what it means to be a human being, is how we will both share the richness of our experience and present to the world a different perception of what is reality. We have a narrative which can radically alter the perception of how life is, of how relationships matter and of how transfigured living can be experienced through those relationships. It is a narrative which is not so much to be defended in the arena of public debate as to be lived out with a passion that wells up from ourhearts and finds practical expression in the rich kaleidoscope of renewed lives. It is not an answer to austerity, as if we were engaging in that particular language game, but the living out of a language so different that it utterly shifts the way we look at our world. To live like that is to become the herald of a new age that is already staring us in the face, if only we had the eyes to see it. To live like that, with boldness and conviction, is to become a community that is being shaped into something new, that was always there, but which is coming to birth in our world as something that is pure gift.