Calling Who?

To be fair, the Diocese is aware that there is something of an imbalance in the sorts of people who are training locally for the Divine Ministry. Actually there is a whole set of imbalances, but the one that most concerns us here is the great preponderance of candidates from evangelical backgrounds of different sorts. Too monochromatic a flavour to the CofE is deemed to be undesirable, so the ministry department has been gathering together incumbents from various churches they inadequately but comprehensibly describe as ‘central-plus’ to talk about the matter. I offered to host the first meeting, mainly because I knew the bishop would be there and I was keen for him to have an idea what Swanvale Halt parish was like. Il Rettore was there, all the way from Lamford. In fact there aren’t that many outright ‘catholic’ parishes in communion with His Grace of Guildford; probably about half a dozen, so, as I say, ‘central-plus’ isn’t that bad a denominator to delineate a miscellaneous collection of catholic, ‘floral-and-choral’, ‘high’, and not-quite-evangelical churches.

We chatted through a couple of meetings about what might be wrong. My thinking is that, at the moment, catholic congregations tend to be small and find it hard to develop the sense of excitement, involvement and wellbeing that bubbles over the top of the pot in the form of people seeking to explore a sense of vocation. It happens, of course, but not that often. Smaller churches are likely to be finding it harder to keep the show on the road (not a very Christian concept anyway), and so, on the whole, it feels less fun being a Christian in them than in a big church throbbing with souls. I suggested that if the diocese really wants to increase the number of catholic-minded ordinands it needs to pick a couple of likely parishes and work on them in the long term, put resources into them, send them curates even when they don’t qualify under the existing rules and subsidise youth-and-families workers even when they don’t have the money to pay for them, that sort of thing, and not expect to see much return for ten years or more. Of course they won’t do that, because it’s too complicated. The powers-that-be from the department talked instead about publicity and vocations events, the stuff they know they can do without shaking things up too much. It’s not just institutional inertia: they’re as overworked as everyone else.

At our second meeting the incumbent of one of the more prestigious churches in the diocese boldly told them they’d got all this the wrong way round (he’s long since given up any thoughts of being a bishop so can say what he likes). ‘We keep talking in terms of individual people’s vocations to this and that’, he said, ‘when I’ve becoming increasingly aware of the common nature of the enterprise. We discover our priesthood, if that’s what we’re talking about, as the Body of Christ together, not as individuals on our own.’ He’s got together a group of people who he’s identified as likely characters, not to fill any particular roles, but to think about how the parish might assist its people in realising their own vocation as members of the Body, meeting together regularly over the course of six months or so running up to Easter. The group (‘I wrote to 14 people but we’ve ended up with 12, coincidentally’) hasn’t got much of an agenda as such, and isn’t aiming at identifying people to send up into the diocesan system of vocations-discernment (though that might happen), but about affecting the way the congregation thinks.

It all sounds a bit vague, but I rather like it. It isn’t actually linked to any particular kind of church identity at all, but sounds like the sort of low-key, discursive and open-ended venture that could work well for the sort of people who find themselves in smaller, non-evangelical churches, and at least has more roots in the life of the Church than roadshows and mailshots. We have other fish to fry at Swanvale Halt at the moment – many, many others – but it will be worth remembering.

(And anything will be an improvement on the truly shuddersome images you can discover, mainly emanating from our Roman brethren, by merely asking Dr Google to search the word 'vocations' for you.)