Refusing to be Indispensible

My daughter had an imaginary dad.

Many children have imaginary friends. But during the period of my curacy (the first four years of her life) I was home so little that my daughter created an imaginary daddy – his name was Bubble Daddy – who would come and play with her. And it was my fault. I thought I was indispensable to my church. Or I hoped I was indispensable. Or more likely, I feared not being indispensable. It wasn’t good for me, my family, or the church I was serving.

So when I became Vicar of Galleywood in Essex, in July 2005, I made God a vow:

‘No one but Jesus will be the sun in this solar system.’

I think I meant two things: firstly, I wouldn’t make myself central to church life, and secondly, aware that my curacy church had taken too central a place in my life, I refused to make St Michael’s church central to my discipleship or that of its other members.

I think I kept the vow, at least in part. I sought a focus on grace, a more unhurried lifestyle, ego-diminishing prayer and the courage to say no. I cultivated teambuilding. I discovered more and more areas where I was incompetent (incompetence is useful for incumbents vacating the centre of church life – if you don’t have this gift you may have to pretend) and put together flat teams of equals to work, initially with me but soon without my regular participation, to achieve the team goals. Eventually, no area of church life was running without a team to lead it, and there were over 120 people who were members of at least one team, from preaching to social action and from youthwork to PCC – which isn’t bad for a church with an average Sunday morning attendance of 110. And none of the teams were chaired by me.

Make no mistake, a parish’s felt need to have the incumbent at the centre of everything is often as strong as the incumbent’s felt need to be there – but we must engage in the struggle to extricate ourselves and get back to the margins where we belong. In 2008, after the death of a housebound church member, her son complained that in her whole last six months, the church hadn’t been to see her. ‘I’m so sorry’, I said, ‘I’d understood that Elva and Edith were regular visitors.’ ‘O yes, they were often round, I don’t know what mum would have done without them – but they’re not the church, they’re normal people!’ Clearly, the village culture was labouring under a misunderstanding. So I made a decision: for a year, I wouldn’t visit anyone, ever, and I said so to anyone who would listen. By the end of the year, it was a common subject around the village that the Vicar didn’t visit. But it was also commonly known that there was a pastoral care team, and Rosemary (a lay person) led it, and it was really good. Once perceptions had changed, I gladly visited people from time to time.

Team-building set me free – once I had built teams to do the work of ministry, I could be released to spend at least 50% of my (now manageable) working week with those outside gathered church; being Vicar of Galleywood, not chaplain to St Michael’s church! Of course, I could merely have said that serving God in the world was more important than gathered church, but if my diary still rotated around serving church members my words would have had no credibility. At the same time teambuilding built the capacity of a range of lay leaders, especially those from non-graduate backgrounds; being trusted in a public ministry inside the church made them much more likely to speak confidently, think theologically and serve intentionally outside it. Ironically, it was their gathered church responsibility that made them such impressive 24/7 disciples. For me, the “non-church 50%” included chairing the local community care group, launching a (not very successful) church in a pub, lots of schools involvement and plenty of time supporting parishioners in magistrate’s courts.

In the most mature New Testament church – the church of the pastoral epistles – there seem to be two types of leader: a) local leaders, like the elders in Crete, who are rooted in the soil of their communities, and b) mobile leaders, like Timothy and Titus, whose call is to set a culture of grace, to build up, supervise and encourage the local leaders, and to move on. Today incumbents, like bishops, are in category b), though some other priests and most lay leaders and in category a). In the Diocese of Chelmsford we are asking incumbents to work in teams (we call them mission and ministry units), as they enable each church, with its local leaders, to be transformed from a community gathered around a minister into a ministering community. They “build effective teams. Things get done. People think they did it themselves. They are right. Great leaders make themselves redundant.” (Stephen Cottrell). It’s life-giving. Put it this way: Bubble Daddy did not come back.