A Professional Christian

Here is a talk I gave tonight to a home group on the above theme:

Vocation
‘A professional Christian’: I must have used that expression
in a phone conversation with Jan when she invited me to speak to you. It’s a
title I use facetiously of myself at times as a minister. But there’s a hint of
irony behind it: the fact that I am paid to propagate the Christian faith can
make people suspicious of me. If he’s paid to say this, is he sincere? Isn’t he
just for hire? It’s all part of the suspicion of authority and power in our
world, and I’ll come on to that later.

But for now let me just use that to touch at the beginning
on an important question for all of us, and that is the matter of Christian
vocation. A dear Catholic friend of mine refers to my work as a minister as ‘my
vocation’, and that’s understandable in his tradition. But I want to suggest
that we all have a vocation. Traditionally Protestant and Free Church
Christians have seen professions such as medicine, nursing and education – work
that in some way is analogous to the ministry of Jesus – as also worthy of the
name ‘vocation’. But we haven’t included bank managers, secretaries,
hairdressers, waiters or factory workers. Yet Martin Luther did. He went to the
point of saying that if (in his day) there were a vacancy for the post of
village hangman, the dutiful Christian should apply. Now notwithstanding my
personal reservations about capital punishment, his point was that every job
that did not constitutionally promote sin was a potential vocation. All forms
of work are capable of being places where we express the kingdom of God
– and not just in a sense of being the person who doesn’t steal the office
paper clips.

Yet I would want to go further than that. Our vocation is
not simply about what we do, it is about who we are. One of my favourite Bible
stories is the baptism of Jesus. I love the fact that the voice from heaven
calls him ‘My Son, the belovèd’. He hasn’t begun his public ministry – his
‘vocation’, if you will. Yet the Father is already pleased with him. And in the
words of my Ethics tutor from my undergraduate days, ‘The Christian’s first
vocation is not to do but to be – to be a child of God’. So I invite you to see
your vocation that way. And if I talk this evening about my calling to be a
Methodist minister, it needs to be seen alongside two things: one, that it is
an outworking of my calling to be a child of God, and two, that we all share in
that calling. Certainly my calling is an honourable one – what Paul in 1
Timothy 3:1 calls ‘a noble task’ – but it is not a superior one. I share with
all the family of God the calling to be a child of God, and we each have
particular ways in which that is expressed.

My Calling
That may be very well, but how did I end up in the ministry? I still ask that question on some days!

I had become a Christian at the age of sixteen, when the
liturgy of the 1975 Methodist Confirmation Service made it clear to me that
Christianity wasn’t about trying to be good enough; it was about faith in Jesus
Christ and serving him as an act of gratitude for his forgiveness. I went into
Sixth Form to study Maths, Physics and Chemistry and gained university offers
to read either Computer Science or Maths. But a problem with severe neck pain prevented
me from sitting my A-Levels and although I tried to repeat my Upper Sixth year
I wasn’t going to do myself justice. So I left school and got a clerical job in
the Civil Service based on my O-Levels.

In the meantime I became less interested in Maths and more
interested in Theology. I joined a youth preaching team in my home circuit
(under the guidance of a Local Preacher) and later became a Local Preacher
myself.

But neither my job nor Local Preaching satisfied me. I felt
wasted in my job and wasn’t getting anywhere. Local Preaching felt like ‘hit
and run’ ministry: preach in one church and then not see them for six months.
It lacked continuity. Combined with some Bible passages that suddenly took on
new meaning for me I felt an urge towards something else, probably involving
theological study. Of one thing I was sure: it wasn’t the ordained ministry. I
had been on an ‘Is the ordained ministry for you?’ day and come away feeling,
‘Not in a million years’. I also felt my personality was unsuitable: I’m very
introverted and I felt I was so hyper-sensitive that I’d never cope with
people’s problems.

However, my minister encouraged me to explore things. When I
told him I wanted to go to theological college he said, ‘Dave, I’ve always
thought you were in the wrong job.’ I remember thinking, ‘Michael, you’ve been
my minister for six years and you only say that now!’

So I explored colleges. Methodist colleges were out: mostly
they trained accepted candidates for the ministry. Others, like Cliff College, only offered one year
evangelism courses at the time, and something like that also wasn’t right for
me. I looked elsewhere. And to cut a long story short, I ended up at Trinity College, Bristol, an Anglican
theological college that didn’t just train Anglican ordinands. What made the
difference was my interview with the college Principal, George Carey. He told
me I could come to the college and work out my future.

So I accepted a place there and there is a separate lengthy
but remarkable story about how God provided the money for me to go there, given
that my Local Education Authority turned me down for a student grant (this was
in the days before student loans). While I was there, a lot of my fears about
pastoral ministry were answered, especially through a course in pastoral
counselling.

The only question then was, if I offer for the ministry do I
stay in my native Methodism or go into the Church of England, since I was
seeing such a good advert for it at Trinity? In Methodism I had (and have)
misgivings about the circuit system and the way it destroys pastoral
continuity; in the Church of England I don’t like the idea of an established
church and the fact that my confirmation is not recognised by them.

Ultimately I didn’t trust the advice of any more Methodists
or Anglicans and went to see an old friend who was the pastor of an independent
evangelical church. We sat down in his study one morning and over coffee he said,
‘Dave, I don’t understand the Methodist
Church and I don’t
understand the Church of England. This is the tradition I grew up in and it’s
all I really know. However you understand the doctrine of God’s providence can
you really see your upbringing in Methodism as an accident? You may have good
reasons to leave the Methodist
Church, but are they
overwhelming reasons? And if they are overwhelming reasons, are you saying that
God has given up on Methodism?’

And so it was that I offered for the Methodist ministry. I
was accepted and sent to Hartley
Victoria College in Manchester,
where the fact that I’d done the equivalent of an Anglican ordination course
wasn’t good enough for Methodism. I had to study a further three years, during
which time I completed an MPhil in Theology at Manchester University.

From there I went to serve first of all in what was then
known as the Waltham Abbey and Hertford circuit for five years. Then I went to
the Medway circuit for eight years. Last year, as you know, I came here.

Ministry Versus A
‘Real Job’
Well, let’s kick off with some typical frequent comments
ministers receive:

‘You only work on Sundays’ – just a penny for every time
that’s been said to me I’d be a rich man.

Or – ‘I know Sunday is your busiest day’ – that’s meant to
be more understanding but it generally isn’t true. In my case I’m usually
finished earlier in the evening on a Sunday and as far as possible I try to
protect the afternoon as family time.

Or from church members – ‘What’s the best day of the week
for you?’ Much as I like to be a creature of habit and routine I find that’s an
almost impossible question. Not everything in ministry falls into a rhythm.
Ministry can’t be defined by a set of recurring appointments (and neither can
conventional jobs). And – again, similarly to other work – there are the
interruptions. I used to think they were interruptions to ministry until I read
the words of an American minister who said, ‘The interruptions are the ministry.’ The ministry would be
so much easier without the people!

How about ‘More tea, vicar?’ Gone are the days of obvious
rhythm in the ministry. When I trained for the ministry the tutor who spent two
years teaching us about pastoral matters had a very simple, old-style concept
of the minister’s day. You were at your desk by 9:00 am, with your shoes on as
a physical sign that you were at work. You spent the morning in your study, the
afternoon visiting, and the evening at meetings. But I soon found that shoes
ruined the manse carpet, and that meetings could happen at any time. So, for
example, two of my mornings each week are taken up with meetings: not
committees, but a Bible Study and a coffee morning outreach. That same tutor
also thought you could visit five different people every afternoon, and if
someone were out they didn’t count towards your five. But I don’t know a single
colleague who can manage that. It barely gives people time to get the kettle
on!

People also make comments about the workload. I always have
to remember that I’m not the only person who works long hours. Many people do
in our society. But in terms of ministry it is perhaps best put by a couple of
comments the late Donald English used to make to his students. He said, ‘The
ministry is not about priorities; it is about choosing between priorities.’ He
also told those he trained, ‘Learn to go to bed with a guilty conscience.’

Now try this for size: what is my employment status?
Employee, self-employed, company director, office holder? Any guesses? There
are those who think I am employed by the church. The church pays me – and some
think they can tell me what to do! (I won’t go into a painful experience with
circuit stewards in one previous appointment!) The Superintendent Minister can
instruct me and so can the Methodist Conference, but not the church members or
their representatives. Furthermore, my income tax is mainly dealt with under
PAYE and I pay employee’s National Insurance contributions. But I’m not an
employee in law. I don’t receive a salary; I receive a stipend, which
technically is a living allowance.

What about self-employed? There is a case for that, too.
Because I also receive certain fees and equally have various expenses I can
claim against tax I have to deal with my income tax under the dreaded
self-assessment procedures. Thankfully I have a wonderful accountant! And in
law I can’t bring an unfair dismissal case against the church should I be
sacked, for according to the law I am not employed by the church but by God,
and you can’t take God to an industrial tribunal. Another evidence of
self-employment would be the degree of freedom I have to decide my own diary or
even send a substitute when I cannot fulfil a commitment. Some pastors are
regarded as self-employed in law, usually those who live on sporadic donations
rather than a regular stipend. But I am not self-employed.

Company director? That’s probably the easiest one to
dismiss. I am not the director of a limited company – although I could say some
facetious things here about Church plc!

No, I fall into that most obscure of categories, ‘office
holder’. I suspect it’s just a category for people who don’t fit anywhere else.
While there are probably several professions that do fall under this heading,
the only other one of which I am personally aware is Registrars of Births,
Marriages and Deaths. And I only discovered that when I went to register the
birth of our second child!

What Ministry Is And
What It Isn’t
My MPhil was a study in the doctrine of the church and I
have some fairly radical ideas about what ministry might be and how we might
shape church. It’s for these reasons that I probably just about survive on the
very fringes of Methodism and there are those with more traditional views than
me who might be horrified at some of my ideas. I’ve occasionally expressed them
on the Internet and I’m still waiting for my heresy trial! However I want to
get back to what I believe are some New Testament principles and connect them
from the world we live in – a world that is radically different in values and
convictions from the one many of us grew up in.

The Methodist
Church ordains
presbyteral ministers such as me to a ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral
care. One of my problems isn’t that any of these things are wrong, but that
there are many other leadership gifts excluded, compromised or marginalised
because these are the gifts we seek in a minister. So in Ephesians 4 Paul talks
about foundational ministries for the building up of the church and he mentions
‘apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers’. The Methodist
definition of ministry gives ample scope to the pastors and teachers but not to
the apostles, prophets and evangelists. Since pastors and teachers tend to care
for the flock it’s easy to end up with an inward-looking approach to church.
Those who are more mission-focussed can get squeezed by the system.

Today, more than ever, we need to see that the Christian
Church in the West is in a missionary situation. Past evangelism worked on the
basis that we were calling people back to a dormant faith – the Church of
England with its parish system and old-style Billy Graham rallies with their
appeal to people who accept what the Bible says – were perhaps appropriate in
such a time. But there is now widespread ignorance of, and even opposition to
the Christian faith. If we do not accept the moral values of the day we are
classified as bigoted. Some of that criticism is justified, some of it not, but
this is how we are perceived. Thanks to a plethora of high-profile scandals
reported in the media, ministers are either out to fleece you of your money or
we are child abusers. This is part of a wider suspicion of authority and power
in our society, and the Church spends much of her time behaving, and with
institutions, as if things were still in the 1950s.

Put it this way: think about our primary ways of
communicating, because the medium of communication isn’t just the message (as
Marshall McLuhan famously said), it’s the actual view of the world.[1] So
in the ancient world it was an oral culture. Communication was by speech. This
meant that truth was known in relationship with others. Jesus said, ‘I am the
way, the truth and the life’: that is truth in relationship. You couldn’t
separate the message from the messenger. This led to worship that was a
mystical and liturgical re-enactment
of sacred and eternal events.

Then came the invention of the printing press and the
consequent print culture. Now truth was not conceived in relationship but
individually as you followed the logical sequence of an argument. So you get
worship as a meeting, where hymns are
written to conform to doctrinal truth (remember that John Wesley checked the
theology of his brother Charles’ hymns) and the sermon, which was rather like a
lecture, was the focal point. Truth is not so much relational as a series of
propositions.

In our day this has been superseded by the broadcast culture
of television. Large churches (the so-called megachurches) and major Christian
festivals have been able to put on dramatic, upbeat, celebration-style worship.
It is worship as event. The ‘worship
leader’ is more significant now, and the preaching of the pastor is less about
a logical argument from Scripture than about connecting with people via stories
and personal experience. Truth is experienced in the present moment – or
‘existential’, to give it its technical name.

But even the broadcast culture is being challenged by the
digital culture fostered by the communications revolution centred upon
computers and the Internet. Worship becomes a gathering. It is interactive (because that’s the way the World Wide
Web is going – away from just static web pages you view), involves a multitude
of senses, and highly engaged. It can even be intimate, despite the way you
might think that sitting at a computer screen detaches people. Rather than have
a worship leader or a pastor you get a ‘spiritual conductor’ who creates an
open-ended experience that uses not only contemporary messages but draws on the
best ritual, preaching and praise of the preceding three eras and converges
them.

Now if that is the way the world is changing – and changing
fast: how many have lived through print, broadcast and now digital cultures? –
then church needs to change shape, especially if you accept my argument that we
are in a missionary situation. We can only remain the same if we just want to
keep the existing declining number of punters happy.

And even language like that betrays the concept of church as
a religious club. The great Swiss theologian Emil Brunner said, ‘The church
exists by mission as fire exists by burning.’ Or as it has also been put, ‘It
is not that the church
of God has a mission in
the world, rather that the God of mission has a church in the world.’

And all this leads us into things that you are considering
such as ‘Mission-Shaped
Church’ and the Fresh
Expressions project, jointly run by the Anglican and Methodist churches.
The Fresh Expressions website lists fourteen different approaches to church,
none of which looks quite like a Methodist five-hymn sandwich. There isn’t time
to go into this now: you’ll have to explore.

But the critical thing is that we have assumed church and
mission work on an idea that people will come to us. That is less and less
credible now. The word is no longer ‘come’: it is ‘go’.

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