Dumbing down the priesthood
by Marcus Walker, Sounding Board:
Unless the Church reinstates rigorous college-based training for clerics, it will wither away.
‘Key limiting factors”. Two and a half years ago a firestorm engulfed the Church of England as Canon John McGinley, one of the driving forces behind the recent transformation of the Established Church, rhapsodised about a church set free from the “key limiting factors” of “a building and a stipend and long, costly college-based training for every leader of church”.
Slowly but surely the national spotlight has focused on the plans to sell off the church’s physical treasures (a secret report by the disgraced Paula Vennells — leaked last month — revealed plans to dispose of 1,000 churches) and schemes in dioceses such as Truro and Leicester to scrap traditional parish ministry, replacing it with impossibly huge “minster communities” overseen by priests in a car pool-style management structure.
So schemes are well advanced to get rid of buildings and stipends, two of the three key limiting factors. But what about the third, the “long, costly college-based training”? It will come as no surprise to learn that theological education has been lined up for summary execution, too.
There are two dangerous developments working in tandem. The first is an anti-intellectualism which has crept into the church over the last few decades. Where once the scholarship of ordinary clerics was called the Stupor Mundi of the church, and we could brag there was a scholar in every parish, now the church actively downplays academic study in favour of “contextual learning” and an exercise of pointlessness called “theological reflection” — which, as its name suggests, can only work if you have enough theology to use during this reflection.
To give some meat to this, the Church’s Common Awards programme students are expected to spend ten hours working on “credits”, with ten or 20 credits making a module. Fully half of these credits can be earned by contextual experience, “on placement or in ministerial practice, in activities directly related to the module learning outcomes”.
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