Minifigures and Ministers: Formation in the Church of England

There was a time when a Lego figure was as simple as the plastic person you put in the house you’d built or sat in the car you’d made out of oblong and sloping bricks. There was a time when the great Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s description of a minister in the Church of England as a distinctively full time Christian, ‘the beacon of the church’s pastoral, prophetic and priestly concern’[1] was a fully adequate description. Today however, like Lego minifigures, ministers have evolved to be more diverse than Ramsey’s image. If Ramsey were to comment on ministers today, he would see much that he would recognise; some ministers are that iconic presence in a parish; some ministers are in chaplaincy; some ministers are in secular employment, all or part of the time; some ministers are in full or part time ministry and yet not ordained.

This model suggests that ordained ministers in the Church of England can usefully be reimagined from Ramsey’s iconic image by comparing them to a similarly iconic figure which has evolved over time whilst maintaining its essential identity. This model should promote an exploration of ministry not just of the ordained but also of those who share in that ministry as lay people.

Ministers need to be like the Lego minifigures. They need a certain core identity. Just as Lego minifigures have the four distinct parts: head, hands, body and legs. So likewise, there are four key building blocks for the ministers which the church needs today: knowledge (head), skills (hands), character (body), and focus (legs).

In terms of knowledge, there are certain things any minister needs to know; the teaching and study of the Bible throughout the tradition of the church and for today; how to celebrate the liturgical times and seasons; the legalities of marriage and the faculty process; the Creeds and canons; the structures of the church and who does what; theories about change management, teams and personalities.

As well as knowledge, there are also skills which ministers need to acquire; the practical ability to speak in public in a way which is not only audible but engaging, challenging and inspiring to heart, mind and soul; how to sing the evening office; how to listen and remember people’s stories, as well as their names; how to chair a meeting, especially when controversial issues are being discussed; how to hold a baby for baptism; how to write a eulogy for someone when the family themselves struggle to find the words.

Yet just as the head and hands are nothing without the central body block of the minifigure, the church needs ministers who are more than just people with particular knowledge and skills. As Magdalen Smith has said:

While we can help ourselves by adding to our own skill base through additional training, ultimately we bring just our plain selves, with the experience and tools that we know.

Magdalen Smith, Steel Angels: The Personal Qualities of a Priest (SPCK, 2014), 83.

Priestly ministry is not simply a profession to learn. It’s about character; that core part of the person which is distinctive, and which is formed over time before, during and after initial training. For the kind of minister which the church needs, that means a character which is wise, attentive and resilient. Much of this is what Emma Percy identifies as ‘what the clergy do when it looks like nothing,’ those intentional virtues, like kindness, patience, joy and humility.[2] Always keeping that sense of call to the diaconate, to ‘specialise in the ordinary’ as Eugene Peterson puts it.[3] A Church of England minister should have a character which is creative, compassionate, able to care for self and others. Character in this sense is not about personality but about approach or disposition. It is rooted in who we essentially are but formed as we train and practise.

Knowledge, skills and character are important but without the focus, without those legs, ministry can’t go anywhere. I think the fundamental element of the kind of ministers which the church needs is their focus; people who are rooted in prayer and reflection, their feet firmly planted in the church yet also able to bend to prayer, walk into the community or leap into action. People who are able to discern which of those is the right thing to do when. Someone with a still centre and a sense of calling; rooted in their faith, the traditions of the church and scripture. Someone who is able to help the church discern which of the seven good ideas, the church should put its energies into. Someone who can focus on which individuals to mentor, equip and empower to their own ministry. Someone who can discern the balance of time spent in discipleship of the church regulars or in mission with the wider community; who can balance contemplation with action. Someone down to earth enough that people engage yet holy enough that engaging with the minister encourages them to be holy. There are so many things which the ministers of the church can do that I believe this gift of focus, or discernment, is the most important, especially in the increasingly changeable climate which the church is facing; when some people question whether the parish has had its day; when finances are tight and when issues of gender and sexuality continue to cause dissention.

These four common building blocks of ministers enable diversity and individuality yet retain ‘the framework of the traditional role of priest – the ontological and functional – being and doing.’[4]

The Lego minifigures have distinctive characteristics and yet they conform to these common basic blocks. Likewise, the ministers the church needs today may vary in nature. The church needs beacons but today it also needs more than one minister as the central beacon figure in a single local parish. The church needs ministers who are lay and ordained, authorised, licensed and otherwise. It needs those engaged nationally in the media and those firmly rooted in local communities.  

In other words, the church needs ministers who, like the minifigures, are adaptable to become the artful storytellers, multilingual interpreters, painbearers, attractive witnesses and those many other models of priesthood which John Pritchard describes.[5] They need to be able, mentally and physically, to leave a school full of excited children and then visit a house of a bereaved family and because of all the necessity for adaptability to also be collaborative, enabled not simply as beacons but also as the lighters of beacons because the circle of those in ministry has widened. As Graham Tomlin says, God ‘chooses some to be the means by which the blessing he pours out in Christ reaches the rest.’[6] So they need also to be missional watchers who have the knowledge to understand culture and people with the skills and character to be able to engage people and the focus not only on the church but also on those not yet inside it.

For those currently training for ministry of some kind, it would be worth reflecting on these four areas of knowledge (head), skills (hands), character (body), and focus (legs).

• Where are you now with these?

• What more needs to be built in to make you ready for ministry?

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References

[1] Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today (SPCK, 1972 revised edition 1985), 6.

[2] ‘virtues such as humility, … and resilient hopefulness, to keep on going when it is hard to define successful outcomes and others do not behave in ways that you had assumed they would.’ Emma Percy, What Clergy Do Especially When it Looks Like Nothing (SPCK, 2014), 164.

[3] Eugene Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (William B Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996), 1.

[4] Magdalen Smith, Steel Angels: The Personal Qualities of a Priest (SPCK, 2014), 111.

[5] John Pritchard, The Life and Work of a Priest (SPCK, 2007).

[6] Graham Tomlin, The Widening Circle (SPCK, 2014), 113.

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© Sarah Brush, 2022.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: © Sarah Brush, 2022.