Wednesday 26 January 2011

The Priest in Modern Society

My vocational advisor gave me the task of writing on "What do you see as the role of the priest in modern society?" - didn't get terribly far with it, due to my life being chaos central 99.9% of the time, but thought I'd throw out the fragments I managed to come up with, just in case anyone's interested. When reading, remember the name of the blog...
The heart of priesthood is, of course, primarily about ‘Being’ rather than ‘Doing’ (Nouwen In the Name of Jesus). It is not, however, a Being dichotomised from Doing – an erroneous forced-choice either/or approach. It is not even necessarily a both/and approach, for at its best it is a seamless cycle of “prayer and ministry of the word” practiced by the first leaders of the church, and illuminated wonderfully by Brother Lawrence in his The Practice of the Presence of God.

 So what is this Doing which is the fruit of our Being in Christ? The original charge laid down by Jesus still applies today – “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…” – as indeed, does all the apostles good advice to church leaders contained within the epistles, but what does that look like in concrete terms in the early 21st Century?


  1. We need to help people reconnect with the context in which Jesus taught – Community. For, unlike Jesus, we live in a society which has increasingly fragmented and undercut many of the things which have acted for centuries as ‘social glue’. Even in the relatively short time since Vanstone faced a seemingly content secular community (as recounted in Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense), we have almost entirely lost the idea and practice of meaningful communities, and we need to re-establish these. The founding of meaningful communities of people dedicated to Christ and each other, where the Kingdom of God can break into this world, has to be a part of what we do.
  2. In a society driven by the constant need for ‘more’, even in the face of the current global financial problems, we need to live lives that say “enough”. We need to be the first of the least, to lead in living a ‘downwardly mobile’ lifestyle that shows there is a different way to do things – the way of God’s economy. In contrast to Vanstone, who found himself a priest in the church at a time when the State had all the solutions to society’s ills and the church was increasingly seen as “irrelevant”, we are living in a time when the State is reaching the limits of what it can achieve for its citizenry, and the church once again has the opportunity to play a real and vital role in caring for the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, and the alien.
  3. 1 Timothy 4:12 “…set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.” And not for them only, but also for all those whom we live alongside and come into contact with. To hold out what Ramsey (The Christian Priest Today) called “the timeless truths” (p.73) of the Gospel to a post-modern world that often no longer recognises anything as ‘true’ by “living” Jesus every day.
  4. Not to do things “for” or “to” people, but “with” them. Never to condemn, but to raise up and release the God-given potential within each and every individual (for we must never cease to appreciate “the infinite worth of the one” (Ramsey p.42) in our attempts to reach/organise the many), that they might grow in grace and love and so fulfil Christ’s call upon their lives.
  5. To teach the teachers, to lead the leaders, so that the church can grow effectively. In order to be able to do this, it is vital that we not only have a vision for the place we’re in but that we can convey such a vision to people in a way that they can grasp it and move forward with it.

I want to wander for the love of Christ, like the peregrinati of old.
I want to teach, live & obey Jesus wherever I go.
I want to be a transmitter of ideas from one ekklesia to another.
I want to found meaningful communities of people dedicated to Christ & to each other,
in the Celtic monastic tradition, where the Kingdom of God reigns supreme.
I want to help the Church be all she can be.
I want to see a world in which all the resources of the earth are shared equally
between all the people of the earth,
so that even those most disadvantaged are able to meet their most basic needs
with dignity & joy.


Originally posted 22/08/10

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