Posted by Hugh 27 October 2019
 
I’ve just written to various friends about my decision to quit formal, licensed ministry as a non-stipendiary (i.e. unpaid) priest in the Church of England. In that letter/email I gave a link to this page for those interested in finding out a little more about this ‘minister in secular employment’/worker-priest thing. It’s a minority interest, but it has been – and is – important to me, and it should be of greater importance to the church at large.
 
The reason for quitting licensed ministry attached to a parish now, in this 30th year of my ordination, is because I expect to cease paid work (the retirement word is so misleading) within the next two to three years. I concluded a long time ago that because my vocation arose within the context of my paid work (I have tried to follow the model of the worker-priest), then once I stop that, it will be the time to quit as an active priest licensed to a parish. To my mind there is a logic to this, and far more importantly, a faithfulness to my vocation as I have understood it all these years. I'm not renouncing my orders or ceasing to be a priest.

The reason for this step now, and ahead of my anticipated post-work liberation (that ‘R’ word again), is that to finish both full time paid work and my active work as a priest in a parish at the same time would be more of a major change than I want, or need, to experience. Both spheres have been important ones to me, and, crucially, they have been spheres in dialogue with one another. Quitting each will, I’m fairly certain, involve some sense of loss (as well as, I hope, opening up new possibilities I can’t yet glimpse).
 
Here, then, for those who are interested, is as concise a description of the case for priests with a focus on secular jobs beyond the institution of the church as I can manage (and a link to further material):

• Most people think that the only model for clergy is to be paid by the church and based all the time in a church. That was not the early church model. St Paul, for example, supported himself as a tent maker.
• The Church of England had talked about ordaining ‘working men’ (sic) at various stages in the 19th and 20th centuries, though that was mainly as a way of dealing with a shortage of clergy. Nothing came of it.
• The origin of the idea of the worker-priest is generally dated to the 1940s.  It was then that the Roman Catholic Church in France permitted an experiment in which some priests took ‘ordinary’ jobs in order to share the lived experience of working people.  At the time there was much ecclesiastical concern with losing working people from the church. The worker-priest was "freed from parochial work by his bishop, lived only by full-time labour in a factory or other place of work, and was indistinguishable in appearance from an ordinary worker".
• The Church of England does not officially recognise or use the worker-priest title, but does make some reference to MSEs: ministers in secular employment. It think it is fair to say vocations to this are not actively encouraged, or understood, or greatly supported. As a result, they (we) are fairly few in number and largely left to fend for ourselves.
• Clergy like me have believed that their vocation is to operate as an employee in the world of ordinary work. It does not mean turning up to work in a clerical collar or running prayer meetings. It means something like this: taking the office of priest into some of the ordinary working situations of our day, in a way that parish-based clergy (and even chaplains to organisations) simply cannot; being (and this may well be cited as a criticism and a weakness by critics) ‘invisible’, involving the practice of a disguised dimension of prayer and effort and presence and purpose; and it is a kind of identification (one could say solidarity), by which I mean something connected with helping the God of the Church-as-institution escape the confines of that institution and be witnessed to in (some of) the myriad circumstances of ordinary lived life. And it has meant using the varied material unearthed by the role and drawing on it in pastoral and preaching aspects of church-based ministry.

I maintain a website for clergy who understand their vocation to be focused on ordinary work and paid jobs, and for those considering it, or simply interested in it: see it here

Hugh

Related pages
The Christian person and (paid) work