 |
MinistriesEquipping the SaintsThe History
1. The 2004 meeting of Assembly welcomed the report Equipping the Saints, produced at the request of the Assembly by the Ministries Committee. Assembly challenged every congregation to respond locally to the first two recommendations (have you done so yet?); asked for comments on the remaining recommendations; and sought further proposals for the 2005 meeting of Assembly in the light of the feedback received.
2 .The 2004 report was in the book of Reports to Assembly and is also on the United Reformed Church website www.urc.org.uk The text below reproduces the Summary and the list of recommendations.
SUMMARY OF THE 2004 REPORT
A fast changing society provides a challenging context for the Church’s mission. In our interim report to the 2002 Assembly, we suggested that the Church’s response would need to recapture a sense of the ministry of the whole people of God, and our post-bag has supported this view. One way of viewing this key concept is to think of making people more active members of the Church focused outwards into the world - from disciples to apostles. We challenge every local church to think afresh about its support of its members when they are dispersed in their daily living.
Fortunately our heritage provides many riches to help us understand and implement ministry that is not restricted to the clergy. We believe that the ministry of the Elders is central in this and, indeed, that it is a precious gift the United Reformed Church has to offer its ecumenical partners. The Church needs to be more careful and focused in the way it appoints, develops and uses Elders. It also needs to be clearer about the role of Local Church Leaders within the Eldership.
Ministers of the Word and Sacraments are a valuable and scarce resource that the Church must use more effectively. As Elders become more confident in their leadership of local churches, the Church can allow itself to think differently about the deployment of Ministers. Spreading Ministers ever more thinly cannot possibly be the best mission strategy. We believe that the assumption that every congregation should have a slice of its own Minister is unsustainable, but every congregation does need effective leadership. The Church needs to be much more imaginative in its development of flexible collaborative leadership patterns.
If the Church is to develop more diverse leadership patterns then it needs more flexible arrangements for the training, funding and deployment of Ministers and other church leaders.
More diverse leadership patterns also make it desirable and necessary that the Church should think again about presidency at the sacraments.
In presenting this report we know that the changes it recommends cannot happen instantly, that some of them require further work, and that they do not address other major issues for the Church. But we believe that they would contribute to Changing Ministry for the Challenge of Mission.
RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE 2004 REPORT
1. Every local church should be challenged to review its life at all levels with the specific aim of being more supportive and enabling of the dispersed ministry of its members even if this means doing less ‘in church’ activities. Local churches should look for ways, within the context of worship and otherwise, of affirming the ministries of their members outside the church. This needs to be an inclusive activity from which no one is left out.
2. Every local church should be encouraged to explore new ways of gathering at different times and places – the Church going to meet people where they are rather than the Church expecting people to come to where it is.
3. The appointment and ordination of Elders should involve a commitment to continuing development, including appropriate training. Synods should facilitate this training, working with local Ministers and making full use of available resources. District Councils should formally acknowledge the call of Elders by local churches and be represented at their ordination and, if they are transferring from another District, their induction.
4. Whilst welcoming the current Local Church Leaders as successful experiments and effective forms of local leadership, the Church should build on this experience to create a flexible framework for the introduction of Pastors of local congregations, a role working from within the Elders’ meeting. All Synods could then be encouraged to make use of this as one optional form of leadership available to local churches.
5. The United Reformed Church should adopt the title ‘local preacher’ in place of ‘lay preacher’.
6. The United Reformed Church should re-commit itself to the development of appropriate and effective leadership in every local congregation, whilst recognising that this does not mean that every congregation will have a Minister directly providing their day-to-day leadership. The deployment of Ministers should be determined by the need to make the best use of this scarce resource in equipping, empowering and leading the Church in its participation in God’s mission.
7. Churches should be encouraged to work in groups or clusters, wherever possible ecumenically, with Ministers, Elders, Local Church Leaders, Lay Preachers and others offering them collaborative leadership.
8. The Church should develop a new way of classifying its Ministers according to the service being offered that can supersede the existing stipendiary ‘Patterns’ and non-stipendiary ‘Models’.
9. The Church should continue to develop the flexibility of the initial and continuing training of its Ministers and Church Related Community Workers to meet more effectively their varied circumstances and their fast changing contexts and to enable them to more easily transfer between different forms of service.
10. Work should be done on the implications and mechanics of making the remuneration package of all Ministers and Church Related Community Workers more flexible according to their circumstances, such as dependent relatives, within the maximum figures approved each year by Assembly.
11. Detailed consideration should be given to broadening the terms of the Ministry and Mission Fund so that it could be used not just to pay for Ministers and Church Related Community Workers but also to support other forms of leadership within the Church. An attractive annual report on how the Ministry and Mission Fund is spent should be made available to local churches.
12. Area/District Councils should recognise and use the flexibility provided by the Basis of Union with regard to presidency at the sacraments to ensure that the needs of each local church are properly met. Where ‘situations of pastoral necessity’ occur, the Councils should take great care to keep them fully and regularly under review, out of respect to the congregations concerned and to the Church’s ecumenical partners.
13. Formal discussions about the recommendations in this report should be arranged with representatives of the Methodist Church and other ecumenical partners.
3. Equipping the Saints is one dimension of the Catch the Vision process. Issues relating to ministry intertwine with many other issues being reviewed and so it is natural that work which flows from the 2004 report will appear in various places in the Assembly agenda in 2005 and beyond.
The Feedback
4. We are very grateful for all the thinking, praying and discussing that lay behind over 200 written responses. We heard from the majority of Synods and District/Area Councils. While some responses were formal statements agreed by a Council of the Church, others were confined to reporting the flavour of various personal views.
5. We were encouraged that the overall tone of the responses was to support strongly the thrust of Equipping the Saints.
6. As we expected, the responses underlined the variety of situations in which local congregations and their Ministers and other leaders work. The village chapel, the suburban congregation and the inner city ecumenical partnership will not necessarily need or produce the same ministry patterns. Some people searched Equipping the Saints for a new standard pattern of ministry to apply everywhere. They searched in vain.
7. Our patterns of ministries need to be rooted in our shared principles set out in the Basis of Union, but the feedback reinforced our belief that the United Reformed Church is not best served by a standard pattern. Nor do we want a hierarchy of patterns with hints that some patterns are superior to others. Rather we want to make it easier for the pattern best suited to the possibilities of each place to be available in that place.
8 .We were also glad that the feedback underlined the comments in Equipping the Saints about the special and vital place amongst us of our Ministers of the Word and Sacraments. Their theological expertise and leadership is clearly highly valued and even more prized as their numbers diminish.
9. This reinforces the need to provide our Ministers with the best possible support and to make sure that the work we ask each of them to do makes the best use of their particular gifts.
10. Mission Council has asked the Ministries Committee, in consultation with the Training Committee, to shape a policy on the development of Ministers and Church Related Community Workers (CRCWs). This will include looking at Continuing Ministerial Education and best practice in appraisal patterns. Ministers in non-stipendiary service (or ‘self-supporting’ ministers), CRCWs, ministers in Assembly appointments and those on the Special Category Ministry scheme, together with some other paid ministers, already benefit from periodic review procedures. We note moves in the Church of England towards compulsory annual appraisal for all clergy.
11. Our postbag and e-mails have also reminded us of the stress felt by some Ministers. As in any organisation in a period of change, the leaders bear the double burden of dealing with the personal implications of change as well as having to be its advocate to others. While workload is often a factor in stress, we believe the root problem is often ambiguity about the role. We remain strongly in favour of honest and explicit discussions between Ministers and others involved to identify agreed, realistic expectations concerning this particular Minister in this unique setting. These expectations then need to be regularly reviewed by the Minister and their pastorate.
12. We are also aware that some Ministers and others feel their work is devalued by being seen as merely ‘maintenance’. A mantra like ‘From maintenance to mission’ may be helpful shorthand but becomes unhelpful if it is heard to denigrate faithful, unglamorous tasks that actually build the foundations on which other work can rest. As one correspondent put it, ‘Blessed are those who keep the roof on and make the tea – they enable mission to happen’.
13. So the vision of patterns of ministries we offer the Church is one where we seek to use our resources to equip everyone to engage in God’s mission in the world. To further that aim, we envisage a wide variety of patterns in different congregations as they serve their own communities. In all of them we look for an Eldership focused on its key tasks and able to be the core leadership team. In some places, the Elders might be complemented by a Minister (paid or self-supporting) working in that one church and community. In more places, a Minister would be deployed as part of a collaborative leadership team across several congregations, with an agreed role for the Minister. In other places, there would be no Minister providing day-to-day leadership but the District or Area Council would ensure the congregation had access to a Minister when support was required.
14. With this pattern in churches, we would hope Ministers would be released from stressful and sometimes quite impossible expectations. We believe it is possible to provide effective leadership across several communities provided the model of leadership used takes account of the more limited time and engagement available in any one community. And sometimes the best use of a Minister’s gifts will be to engage with a community not as a leader of a settled congregation but as a chaplain; or to be a trainer; or an evangelist; or....
15. Identifying the best pattern of leadership for an individual congregation or the best pattern of working for a particular Minister is a responsibility of the local Councils of the Church, acting within the parameters of the Basis of Union and the Structure of the United Reformed Church. It is not a task for an Assembly Committee.
This Report
16. Having considered the feedback from the 2004 report, we have reviewed all the Recommendations. In the next section we outline where matters now stand on those Recommendations which are not the subject of formal proposals at the 2005 Assembly.
17. The Resolutions on Eldership derive mainly from Recommendation 3. Our feedback reinforced strongly the emphasis given in the 2004 report to the central role of the Elders in each local congregation. We want to harness the momentum behind these ideas and so bring four Resolutions to capture some of the key points concerning the working out of our principles in practice. This is all within the context of renewing congregational life and equipping church members for their witness in the world.
18. In addition to our work, included within Catch the Vision is a wider review of the structures of the local church, which obviously involves the Eldership. The Life and Witness Committee were asked by the 2004 Assembly to take the lead in this and to bring proposals to the 2006 Assembly. They hope to build on the work in Equipping the Saints and so further resolutions on Elders may be proposed in a year’s time. On a longer timescale, work is also planned on the issues surrounding the ordination of Elders. In the light of these further pieces of work, we have avoided bringing any proposals this year which would involve a change to the Basis of Union.
19. The delivery of most of our proposals depends on Elders’ Meetings, Church Meetings, District and Area Councils and Synods. We are aware that the Church will be debating the future of all these bodies in the near future, but for clarity in this report we refer to current structures. If the structures change in the future, we believe the proposals will need to be picked up by the new bodies.
The Journeys of Our Recommendations
Recommendations 1&2: Style of Local Church Life
20. We are glad to hear of congregations that have risen to the challenges set by Assembly and started fresh thinking about their life. We have pointed out to those working on the Structures part of Catch the Vision that the ability of local churches to respond to these challenges does depend on the wider church structures owning them as well.
Recommendation 5: The Title ‘Lay Preacher’
21. There is no consensus favouring any new title so we bring no proposals for change. We need to remain alert to the problems the title can cause ecumenically, especially in relation to the status of ‘lay’ presidents at the sacraments.
Recommendation 8: Classification of Ministers
22. There was general support for this Recommendation. We therefore intend to change the classification in the URC yearbook to move away from a classification based on payment to one based on role. We envisage categories such as the following:
F/t Full-time P/t Part-time MSE Minister in Secular Employment Chap Minister principally engaged in Chaplaincy SCM Minister working under the Assembly Special Category Ministry Scheme R Retired R(a) Of retirement age but authorised to continue in active Ministry
Thus a full-time University Chaplain working under the Special Category Ministry Scheme would be designated as ‘F/t SCM Chap’. Ministers in the list with no classification against their name would be those who have been given permission to remain on the Roll of Ministers while below retirement age but not actively engaged in any form of ministerial service within the Church.
23. There is further work to be done on the implications of decoupling payment from classification. We welcome Assembly’s endorsement for the concept of Non-Stipendiary CRCWs. The Ministries Committee will continue to work with the Training Committee on issues relating to the training for, and transfer between, paid and unpaid ministerial roles.
Recommendation 9: Training Needs
24. Response to this Recommendation was positive but the action will await further progress on the Hind review and the United Reformed Church Training Committee’s own review.
Recommendation 10: Flexible Remuneration
25. We suggested that the logic of the concept of a stipend (a payment according to need) ought to lead to more variation in the levels of stipend actually paid. This idea received only minority support from our correspondents and so we have not pursued the idea. We trust that all Church members will give to the Ministry and Mission Fund with an enthusiasm that demonstrates this commitment to paid ministry.
Recommendation 12: Presidency at the Sacraments
26. The gist of what Equipping the Saints said received strong support. We therefore simply reiterate the importance both of using the flexibility already available and of reviewing arrangements regularly and carefully so that our provisions and practice do not fall into disrepute. The policy is set out in paragraph 25 of the Basis of Union.
Recommendation 13: Ecumenical Consultation
27. We received a substantial and thoughtful response from the Faith and Order Committee of the Methodist Church, which may be of particular interest to those in united congregations. Copies can be obtained from the Ministries Office.
The Worker Bees
28. The Equipping the Saints work in 2004-5 was mainly done on behalf of the Ministries Committee by:
The Revd Pauline Barnes The Revd Christine Craven (Secretary) Mr John Ellis (Convener) Mrs Wilma Frew The Revd John Piper The Revd Dr David Thompson
Resolution 25
|