The New Archbishop of Canterbury Needs to Stamp Out the CofE’s Reliance on Volunteers
If new Archbishop Sarah Mullally wishes to seize the revival of interest in religion that is said to be gripping Generation Z, she ought to stamp out the absurd level of volunteering within the church. Volunteering is a habit in danger of stifling rather than invigorating religious flourishing. What is needed instead is fully paid vicars, one per church.
This rather unsettling insight occurred to me during our village harvest festival, when I realised the entire splendid production was put on by volunteers. We are without a vicar so the service was run by an unpaid focal minister. The churchwarden’s wife had polished all of the church brass as well as baking a loaf, shaped into a sheaf of wheat, that was propped up on the altar surrounded by cans of Waitrose Essentials beans. A team of six amateur florists had bought heaps of flowers and arranged them beautifully. One of the sidesmen had visited the church early to turn the heating on. The local squire had filled up the church oil tank gratis, the organ has recently been restored by another member of the gentry. The organist is unpaid and his wife brings their own sherry and glasses in a lovely wicker basket to share with the congregation. Another churchwarden will drive donated tinned and dried goods to the local food bank. Spit roast lamb for the harvest lunch is provided by the local shoot owner, with various accompaniments and puddings cooked by everyone.
The Church of England at its best.
Or not?
It is my contention that this noble level of volunteering hides a church that is not doing its job properly. With all the volunteering hoopla, the actual spiritual side of things is almost entirely overlooked.
For those readers who are not frequent churchgoers let me put things another way. Imagine you’re interested in getting fit. You venture with trepidation to your local gym and enjoy your session. So delighted is the management when you return for another visit you’re asked if you would like to get involved in running the gym. Before you know it, you are manning the front desk, doing a spot of admin for the company, coming in at weekends to clean the gym, paying for floristry to make the entrance look pretty and running various charity fundraisers to restore fading gym equipment. You realise the gym owner does not pay a gym instructor, so the girl running the classes is doing for the love of it all. While you very much enjoy the sense of community that occurs when everyone is milling around together after doing their various jobs for the gym, you suddenly remember you’ve done little exercise nor got any fitter.
While such exemplary community spirit is usually to be applauded, the tremendous team of Church of England volunteers plasters over the fact that in most parishes the hierarchy of the Church of England doesn’t even employ a vicar. Think schools without teachers, hospitals without doctors, gyms without gym instructors – all run instead by volunteers. Not quite modern-day slaves, (because of course they are volunteering), but close enough to make a decent Archbishop of Canterbury squirm.
Next to our tiny Norman church is the most splendid Old Rectory: a picture-perfect Queen Anne’s house sold off in the 1940s. The vicar once lived there and served the parish and the parish alone (population 200). Until she resigned earlier in the year, our current vicar lived in a modest modern house in the local town (population 5,000) and was in charge of the town parish as well as six village parishes. Is it any wonder that she stepped down earlier this year with emotional, physical and spiritual exhaustion? This lack of vicars and over-reliance on volunteers is happening up and down the country.
While the community spirit of a church run by volunteers is to be treasured, the real purpose of the church’s existence – to be a Christian presence in every community – is often lacking. Without paid, theologically trained vicars, it’s really impossible for the flower-arranging, cleaning and sherry volunteering teams to do much about deepening an understanding of the Gospels, cultivating a sense of immanence or encouraging churchgoers to live directionally moral lives. For those newly interested churchgoers, there’s nothing like being invited to volunteer on the Parochial Church Council to snuff out any sense of the divine.
Revd Marcus Walker’s Save the Parish venture states that “Over many decades parishes have been starved of priests and money” and encourages the Church of England to properly fund parish churches – with paid vicars. Who’d have thunk it! Vicars – rather than volunteers in church!
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
My suspicion is that any appointed vicar is as likely to put off would-be congregants. Inspired by Jordan Peterson, or even Russell Brand, young men, & possibly young women, interested in the church, seem to want a more stoical & muscular Christianity than they’re likely to find in most CofE parishes.
I suspect in cities there’s enough choice for people to find what they want but out in the countryside, trying to cover the spectrum of belief & worship must, inevitably, be virtually impossible. There’s no easy answer.
Absolutely. Less hand wringing apologists needed. Christians like OSXKM are getting popular for a reason. Very good YouTube channel too.
Sounds like the C of E is now basically just an arm of Social Services.
I wouldn’t know personally since I’m not C of E and haven’t attended a service there for many years and since it’s gone full virtue-signalling “woke” I’m not likely to.
Surely this can’t be righ. The Christian church is, before all else, a community of believers.While it needs priests and vicars to administer the sacraments, it may just have to get along with fewer of them for the time being. God will provide. In the meantime, thank him that so many are still willing to man the barricades!
Indeed.
The Christian Church is the community of believers.
Don’t get me wrong, I love our beautiful neo-gothic church (not CofE). But if two or more believers gather in a cowshed to worship, then Christ will be present there too.
All Christians are priests (1 Peter 2:5, 9).
Yes, but not all Christians have decent theological training – not that that absolutely means a paid clergy, but it does require to have been taught from the start by those who know what they’re teaching – and that means knowing their Bibles backwards, having a fair grasp of church history, and experience in a functional pastoral setting.
One of the C of E’s problems is that potential lay preachers get sent on courses where they are indoctrinated in liberal values. If they’ve done a degree at the Open Theological College or have run a non-conformist fellowship for a couple of decades (or in my friend’s case got a full Anglican training at Moore College, Sydney) the Bishops won’t touch you with a bargepole.
Hear, hear!
It’s an honour but also a responsibility.
But no Protestant church “needs priests and vicars to administer the sacraments”, which are a Catholic invention.
There were no priests or vicars among the Apostles or early disciples.
There was a hierarchy, right from the beginning.
St Paul was never considered just one disciple with a penchant for writing letters.
And of course Jesus is the high priest for ever.
In fact, Paul was disliked by the Apostles as an untrustworthy nuisance, and by many as just a nuisance, because he was so fond of his own voice that he kept followers up all night by his endless lectures, talking non-stop for hours & hours on end, to the point where one young disciple fell asleep and plummeted down to the ground from an upper window. Luckily the young man survived, but Paul took credit for healing him. Paul also took every opportunity to compare himself favourably against the Apostles, criticizing them for not proselytizing as much as him. And in Paul’s letters, he was fond of listing his own sufferings and making everyone feel guilty. His forcible circumcision of Timothy at the insistence of the boy’s Jewish mother, in defiance of the boy’s Greek father who had forbidden it, was sneaking, immoral hypocrisy. Especially since Paul had refused to allow Titus to be circumcised in Jerusalem (Galatians 2:1). As for Jesus, he never claimed to be a “High Priest”, nor did he claim to be Almighty God, Creator of Heaven and Earth and the entire Universe. He never said that, but deferred to his Father in everything. Much as… Read more »
“Before Abraham was, I am”, said Jesus. That’s good enough for me.
Er, maybe you should read the New Testament before making this assertion. The priesthood of all believers is a Lutheran invention dating from the 16th century.
A neat summary of what happens in parish churches. The gym analogy is brilliant. Sadly, the paid clergy seem to be more intent on saving the planet than on saving souls.
And giving away the church funds in reparations to the Africans who sold the slaves.
Dear Joanna, I doubt if Bishop Sarah, as she now is, or Archbishop Sarah, as she soon will be, is a reader of the Daily Sceptic, so I suggest that you press your suit upon her in the form of a letter to her personally. I have just written her a letter suggesting two topics to which she should give priority: reparations and Net Zero. In short (for it was a lengthy letter) I said that reparations should not be paid to descendants of the slave trade, but to the still living victims of the mRNA jabs who have suffered serious and life-changing injuries as a result of being urged to take the jab as an ‘act of love’ or as a ‘moral duty”, urged on the public by the Bishop of London and her fellow bishops. One bishop even described the jabs and associated technology as a gift from God. As for Net Zero, the C of E should not prevent churches from installing or renewing heating powered by oil or gas: I suggested that oil, coal and gas can be looked on as God-given natural resources to provide for our energy needs, without the need to destroy wildlife,… Read more »
In my limited experience, theologically-trained paid clergy sometimes have a poorer grasp of theology than lay preachers. On such paid clergyman, boasting of his decades of experience, could not even lead the congregation in saying The Lord’s Prayer without reading it from his handbook.
Some even abuse their position of trust, and their own happy marriages and families, to seduce immoral women in their congregations, or submit to such immoral women who appear to be pillars of the community. One elderly woman even got rid of her own slightly disabled husband, falsely claiming he had dementia and telling the hospital “Do Not Resuscitate”, so she could have it off with the minister. Disgusting adultery is rife in churches.
Not my experience and I don’t think we can generalise. Sure, there are sinners amongst the clergy – no surprise there, as we are all fallible – but most fully fledged clergy whom I have met have been devoted, helpful, well-educated and effective. Likewise lay clergy.
In another church, the popular, happily married vicar was relentlessly pursued and seduced by an adulterous married woman in the congregation, a pillar of the community on the surface, but he did the right thing, giving up his job and home, requesting a transfer to another church far away, trying to save his formerly happy marriage. But the evil adulterous woman followed him even there, stalking him and his wife until his wife left him in despair, and the vicar finally caved in to the woman’s demands, because his life and reputation were already destroyed.
Agree with comments about the need to keep more of the CofE funds in the parishes to finance full-time clergy, rather than central church wokery. A problem not mentioned in the article is a serious lack of ordinand candidates, especially male ones. Like the NHS, the CofE has an overbalance of women priests. In an increasingly secular UK society, the vocation of priest doesn’t have the cachet that it once had, particularly for men.
I don’t think it has anything to do with cachet. I am sure that there are two groups of men who might once have put themselves forward for ordination, the strongly Evangelical wing who do not believe that women should be in a position of teaching/authority in the church, and the Anglo-Catholic wing who do not believe in the ordination of women and therefore have joined the Roman Catholic Church. I am very well acquainted with both these strands within the church, and believe that is the reason for the growing predominance of women clergy.
“If new Archbishop Sarah Mullally has any sense“
I don’t think she has. She’s as stupidly and blindly woke as her predecessor.
Using similar logic to Groucho Marx, who didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as one of its members, the Church of England needs a leader with the wisdom to know that the task is impossible.
This presupposes that priests (or as they are more likely to be “priestesses”) trained by the CofE will be orthodox Christians. They won’t. Most likely they’ll be dogooding social worker types with an elan of universalist “spirituality”. It’s telling that the author aporovingly quotes Marcus Walker as some kind of traditionalist when he is fulsome in his praise of the new lady Archbishop. He is typical of a kind of “liberal Anglo Catholic” who loves the externals like incense and vestments but it stops there. Let’s face it the CofE is a busted flush.