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New Ways of Being Anything
Just as the men in white coats looked likely to arrive and take me away I gave up being a teacher-priest and thankfully accepted the bishop's offer of full-time parish work. It wasn't that the little darlings sometimes drove me to the edge of insanity, it was the others - them in the office. The educational establishment is full of failed teachers who are promoted out of harm’s way and who spend their time thinking up initiatives, new ways of imparting knowledge. The fact was that they rarely succeeded but that didn’t stop the boffins imposing them upon us wretches at the chalk face.
What I, in my innocence, had not realised was that the church has its fair share of whiz-kids who think that they can improve things by introducing faddish ideas. The latest buzz word is “new ways of being church”. In order to bring the Gospel to the reluctant general public we have to engage with them in a different way. The silly thing is that those of us who are traditionalists (or old fashioned as the bright young things would call us) have been doing what they suggest for decades.
My diary for June looks like a mad professor's note book. I am out of church more than I am in it, notwithstanding Trinity Sunday, Pentecost, the Patronal Festival and Corpus Christi and all that they entail. They are a blessed relief, when I can be solely a priest for a short while. A parson who sits in church and waits for his flock to arrive is like a shepherd who e-mails his sheep to find out where they’ve got to.
When I gave up the day job I vowed to be a community priest and that is exactly what I did. Anglo-Catholic clergy have always been out there in the highways and byways. This isn’t a new way of being church, it’s a very old one, Jesus and his disciples did it. If children don’t come to church we go and talk to them at school. I hoof around this parish not only for the good of my health but because people stop and talk to me, or frighten me half to death by hooting their car horns at me when they drive past. I do hope that they cannot lip-read. Sitting on endless committees brings me into contact with people who I would never meet in the ordinary course of my work. This is the Gospel in action and it’s good to see so many of the laity witnessing in exactly the same way.
May God bless you all, Fr Allan
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