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The Making of Priests: an Examination of the Post Ordination Experience Of

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The Making of Priests: an Examination of the Post Ordination Experience Of THE MAKING OF PRIESTS An examination of the post ordination experience of mature stipendiary clergy within the Church of England in the first three years of parish ministry. by ROSAMOND MARY LATHAM A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY Urban Theology Unit Department of Theology and Religion College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham December 2012 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. THE MAKING OF PRIESTS An examination of the post ordination experience of mature stipendiary clergy within the Church of England in the first three years of parish ministry. ROSAMOND MARY LATHAM ABSTRACT The research project being undertaken explores the experience of mature stipendiary clergy within the Church of England in the first three years of parish ministry. My curacy did not take account of my age or previous life experience and upon its completion I found myself ill-prepared for parish ministry. It was this that prompted my research. Interviews with six mature curates showed a direct correlation between the perceived effectiveness of post ordination training and the quality of the training incumbent and curate relationship. Consideration of different theological understandings of priestly authority and an examination of the changing parish context from single parishes to multi-parish groupings confirmed that training must prepare curates for more collaborative and relational styles of ministry. I concluded that training relationships exhibiting greater mutuality and less hierarchical leadership styles would enable improved training. This thesis recommends greater emphasis be placed on the development of every priest’s unique personal identity and inner growth with less emphasis on the acquisition of ministerial skills. This would be achieved across all age ranges by extending the training couple of incumbent and curate to form a more widely skilled team, and prioritising the practice of reflective working. CONTENTS 1 Context and Autobiographical Background 1 Context 1 The background story 5 Initial call 6 Initial training 8 Search for a curacy 9 Curacy 12 Post of first responsibility 15 The new curate 16 Integrating life experience with ministerial practice 22 Relevance 22 2 Methodology 25 The nature of the research project 25 The importance of context in theology 25 Researcher’s context 27 Feminist and postmodern influences 31 Research context 32 Theological considerations 33 Qualitative research methods 48 Preliminary findings 44 Contextual theology and qualitative research 45 Gathering the data 48 Anonymity 54 Ethics 55 The transcripts 57 Sorting and analysing data 57 3 The Interviews 62 Conducting the interviews 62 Response to the figures 63 Defining Success 66 Relationships with the trainer 71 The importance of a therapeutic relationship 74 Similar human pairings 77 4 The Marriage 82 1. Matchmaking 82 The stakeholders 82 The agendas 87 The final match 92 The working agreement 101 2. Life Together 104 Making the relationship work 104 Working with The Prophet 106 Loyalty 122 Further observations 126 The working agreement 130 3. Divorce 135 When a marriage goes wrong 136 Duty of care 138 A black mark 139 When a marriage is happy 141 Reflections 143 5. Exploring the Nature of Priests 148 Formation 151 Relational ministry 156 Models of priesthood 158 Concepts of obedience and authority 159 Humility 170 Insights from the praxis model 176 6. Exploring training needs 181 Collaboration 192 Changes in marriage 202 The foundations of training 208 7. Training Criteria and Recommendations 209 1. The Building Blocks 209 The curate and training incumbent relationship 209 The Hind Report 211 Collaborative ministry 211 A first response 212 2. The Content of Training 214 A trinity of being 215 What is maturity of being? 219 Human development theories 220 Maturing of Christian discipleship 226 Priestly development 229 3. The Delivery of Training 233 Returning to the marriage metaphor 235 Matchmaking 235 Life together 241 Divorce 247 A further issue 248 Potential obstacles 249 Age related issues 250 Summary and reflection 254 8. Final Reflections 256 1. The Main Findings 258 2. A Reflection on the Usefulness of the Methods Adopted 263 Is further research necessary? 269 3. Contribution of these findings to the training debate 270 Final comments 272 Appendix 273 Bibliography 274 1. CONTEXT AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND The Context The research project being undertaken explores the experience of mature stipendiary clergy within the Church of England in the first three years of parish ministry. This is usually referred to as a curacy and is regarded as an integral part of the training of every priest following his or her ordination within the Church of England. This research is sourced in my own experience. My rationale for beginning the research is personal and experiential. I wish to explore the particular issues relating to the training of mature curates within the Church of England in their first three years of parish ministry. I define mature curates as those who are over forty years of age. I choose to concentrate on the post ordination training period of curacy because this was the period which I found most challenging and in which understanding of a personal priestly identity is forged at the interface of theory learned and reality experienced, where priests first face the challenge of “integrating the realism of the task with the idealism of the ordinal.”1 Anecdotal evidence gained from colleagues suggests other trainee priests have also found their curacies particularly challenging. My impression was that few ordinands dropped out or significantly changed course during the first three years in theological college, but were more likely to encounter a crisis in training during the second stage of training or curacy period. My personal story formed one strand providing impetus for this research. 1 Archbishops’ Council, The Trajectory of Vocation from Bishop’s Advisory Panel to First Incumbency, (London: Church House, 2011), p.2. 1 I was a ‘second career type’ and began training for ordination in 2000 at the age of forty six years old. I was surprised to find in my cohort of twenty seven ordinands resident at a Church of England theological college, that thirty per cent would be ordained priest when they were over the age of forty. These statistics were confirmed within the Lincoln Diocese where I served as curate from 2002 to 2005. In Lincoln, three women were ordained priest in 2003 at thirty eight, forty seven and forty nine years old. Church of England statistics confirm that the average age of men and women being ordained priest is rising significantly. In 1990, thirty two per cent of those recommended for training were over forty years old, in 2004 this figure rose to sixty seven per cent, thirty seven per cent of those were over fifty and nine per cent over sixty years old.2 There have been some more recent initiatives aimed at encouraging more young people to explore the possibility of a vocation to the priesthood, especially those under the age of thirty3, but this initiative, even if effective, will take some time to feed through and significantly affect the statistics. The formal process of becoming a priest was and is commencing with ordination training for people whose average age is rising significantly. The nature of priestly development is rarely clearly defined but has, in my personal experience, been variously described in terms of conformation, transformation, deskilling, sacrifice, growing into the role of priest, learning priestcraft and apprenticeship. These descriptions do not always take account of the wealth of preordination experience of the curates involved or recognise the development as mature adult and growth as baptised Christian that has been taking place for several decades of the individual’s life. My own experience as a mature curate offered no differing pattern of education or training opportunities than might have been offered to 2 Archbishops’ Council, Formation for Ministry within a Learning Church – Reviewing Progress (London: Church House Publishing, June 2005), Appendix 1, p.17. 3 See Church of England, Call Waiting, http://www.callwaiting.org.uk accessed on 11/08/2012. 2 a younger person. There was little flexibility offered in pattern or length of curacy and my training incumbent referred frequently to his own curacy, undertaken twenty five years earlier as a young man in his twenties. The new context was not acknowledged. During forty six years, I had grown physically, mentally and spiritually. I had learned the rudiments of being human from family, school and community, I had grown in stature, skills and knowledge. I had grown in self understanding, married, borne and reared my own children and divorced and returned to single status. I had been educated, trained and worked in my chosen profession. I had been taught about Christianity at home and church. I had explored my faith in depth, based my life choices upon its tenets and trained for leadership in my local church. I had, like Jesus, “increased in wisdom and in years”.4 It had been a long journey towards ordination training and only now was I to be ‘formed’ into a priest in the Church of England. My understanding of vocation and calling was that all my previous life experiences were part of my development as a priest and I was now entering a particular specialist phase of training in that process.
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