Vocations – time for a change

This coming Sunday is Vocations Sunday in the Church of England. I have a certain problem with the selection of the fourth Sunday of Easter, which seems to have been chosen for its Gospel, which in each of the three lectionary years is part of John 10, and its meditation on Jesus the Good Shepherd. While that metaphor has an honourable place in traditional reflections on ministry, I feel it has been given overmuch weight. It is less suitable for a church that needs to wake up to its missionary situation on a post-Christian culture than it was for one that saw its role as a pastoral one in a Christendom world. I also worry that it is not good for clergy-lay relationships in collaborative ministry to adopt a shepherd-sheep model. So at least part of the change we need is in the encouragement of other models for thinking about ministry. But there are bigger changes we need to look at.

The first change is in the balance of an internally felt vocation, and a communally discerned one. Whether for lay or (most) ordained ministry the main emphasis is still on the personal and interior sense of being called, which the community then has to respond to by discerning whether they too can sense the validity of this call. The exception to that is the ministry of a bishop. Anyone who said they thought God was calling them to an episcopal ministry would be looked on with grave suspicion. For that ministry, the church discerns, and then the individual is expected to respond to that call. But I suggest that we need to see a greater emphasis for all ministries on the discerning role of the community. Even St Paul, who has one of the more inner-directed vocations of the New Testament, is still represented in Acts as receiving a significant commissioning through the community:

Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the ruler, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off. (Acts 13:1-3)

The other change I suggest we should be contemplating follows on from this. For the last quarter-century or so we have been deeply inconsistent in our thinking. When numbers of new vocations to ordained ministry appear to be in steep decline, we have said "God is telling us something important about shared ministry." When numbers of vocations to ordained ministries appear to be rising, we have simply welcomed them and got on with business as usual. We continue to have, however much the system is creaking at the edges, enough clergy to pretend that the parish system is working, while having nowhere near enough to make it work. As a result, virtually every penny we have, whatever is said about being a mission-shaped church, goes into maintaining ministry, without ever asking if it is the right ministry that we are maintaining.

This goes hand in hand with the emphasis on inner-directed vocation. God is left to choose the numbers, the Church of England gets to decide exactly where to spread them, even while the spreading is getting ever more sparse and thin. The individual discerns, with help, but primarily for themselves, whether their calling to the priesthood is to stipendiary or non-stipendiary ministry. yet surely this belongs as much if not more to the church community discerning its mission strategy and financial commitments as it does to individual vocations.

Taking the community role in discerning vocation seriously however, could help change all that. I suggest that we should increasingly see the pastoring of local church communities as a non-stipendiary ministry, and reserve the stipendiary ministry for a more wide ranging "episcopal" ministry of team leading local clusters, and an apostolic and pioneering ministry in new contexts. That means that many more priestly ministries could be seen as primarily unpaid and local, and some more lay ministries seen as paid and diocesan, depending on specialism, strategy, discerned need and individual ability. A vocation to ministry does not, and should not, commit the church to any particular deployment of that vocation. But a greater emphasis on strategic deployment, diversity of ministry, and communal discernment of vocation could help us shape our ministerial selection and deployment for something other than maintaining the status quo for as long as possible.