I saw this Tweet the other day.
I think I get the point the tweet author is making. I can’t say for certain. I’ve watched a TV adaption of Jane Eyre as a child and seen trailers for similar adaptions of Pride and Prejudice but I’ve read neither book. I write as someone with post grad level education and who has read and reads a lot. The Brontes and Austen have just never really appealed to me. But I get the point, the characters portray particular views of what clergy should be and are like.
However, I find this kind of comment frustrating.* It’s the kind of comment that assumes a shared knowledge and then suggests that it is critical to gifting and suitability for Christian ministry. This comment on its own probably isn’t too much to worry about but it’s part of a general culture which assumes that pastors are people with a particular level of education and a particular cultural background.
My response is to say that I want to see pastors and people training to be pastors who haven’t ever read the Brontes, Austen, Dickens and Hemingway. I want to see us training people who have never been to University, let alone Oxbridge, who haven’t had successful careers in law and medicine and were never likely to be spotted as “Boys Worth Watching” for the large church ministry training schemes.
Comments like the ones I’m making here do tend to get a little pushback. I’ve had two challenges to my argument. First, that it is compulsory for children and young people to stay in education until they are 18 and second that the majority of people now will have a degree since Tony Blair set the target of 50% of young people going through higher education.
In response to the first challenge, I would respond that whilst education and training is compulsory up until 18, that includes a wide range of options including vocational training and does not mean that children are being instructed in classical and high brow literature. Many young people in the least reached parts of the UK will also have found ways to opt out of the system whether or not they physically attend school and college.
Regarding degrees and university education, this too covers a wide range of options. Furthermore, whilst Higher Education may no longer mark you out as part of an elite, the majority of people still do not end up with a degree. Current figures suggest that around 30% of young people go on to University, significantly higher than when I was a student but still a long way short of the majority.[1] Even of the 37%, not all will gain a degree with the odds again stacked against those from poorer and deprived communities. Drop out rates in the first year are around about 1 in 10. Whilst the majority of church members are likely to be graduates (around about 80%), the reverse is true in the wider population and especially in the least reached areas of Britain.[2]
If we want to see churches in the least reached parts of our country, especially in inner city and council estate contexts then we need a different strategy to the one that has relied upon us spotting and training people that fit a particular cultural background and educational attainment.
In fact, as I’ve frequently argued, this means that we need to be training people for Gospel ministry, not in seminaries that may feel like home to graduates but are alien places to the very people we want to be training and equipping to plant and pastor urban churches. I’m glad that around the country, there are people who both get this and are doing something about it. One excellent example is Medhurst Ministries, operating mainly in the North East. Or if you have a particular interest in urban ministry in the West Midlands, you might want to link in with our own Faithroots Training options.
In the end, I don’t care too much if some vicars and pastors like reading the Brontes but please let’s not create another hurdle to gospel ministry.
[1] Higher education student numbers – House of Commons Library (parliament.uk)
[2] C.f. David Williams, Hope For the City: Urban Subversive Fulfilment, 3. hope-for-the-city-urban-subversive-fulfilment.pdf (wordpress.com)
* For clarity the emphasis is on “kind of” I’m not saying that this comment and this individual in isolation is frustrating but that it is made against the background where similar things are said and where our systems for spotting/training appointing work with those assumptions
Faithroots 