SCM Studyguide Practical Skills for Ministry

SCM STUDYGUIDE TO PRACTICAL SKILLS FOR MINISTRY

Andrew Pratt

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© Andrew Pratt

Published in 2010 by SCM Press

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978-0-334-04359-1

Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London

Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham SN14 6LH

Contents

1. The Nature of Ministry

The place of God

The place of people

The pastoral basis of ministry

Being reflective practitioners: theological reflection

The place of the individual in ministry – self-knowledge and personal integrity

Supervision and spiritual direction

Ministry beyond the church, including chaplaincy, hospitals and schools

Summary

2. The Context of Ministry 1

The Church in England

Ministry in the light of history

Starting out and arriving in a new place

First impressions

The legacy of others

Audits

3. The Context of Ministry 2

Mission

The shape of congregations

Working with other Christians (ecumenism, different traditions)

Different models of church

Fresh Expressions

Emerging church

Pioneer ministries

Inherited church

4. Leadership and Change

Different styles of leadership

Authoritarian leadership

Collaborative leadership

Consensual leadership

Authority and power

Managing change

Dealing with crises

Closing churches

5. Working with Others

Basic principles

Accountability

The integrity of others

Representative ministry

Collaborative ministry and working in teams

Different types of ministry working together

6. Worship

The nature of worship

Leading worship

Personal gifts

Working with others – including organists and choirs

Working with others in worship

Preaching

A note on the use of technology in worship

7. Baptism

Baptizing a dog?

Baptism policies

Infant baptism

Practical questions – Infant baptism

Visits and preparation – Infant baptism

Visits and preparation – Adult or believer’s baptism

8. Communion

Background

The nature of communion

Practicalities

Ecumenical dimensions

Home and hospital communions

9. Marriage and Civil Partnerships

So what is marriage for?

Pastoral questions

Be prepared

The wedding day

Same-sex relationships and civil partnerships

10. Death, Bereavement and Funerals 1

Trying to be prepared

Self-awareness

Listening

Rediscovered grief

What can I do?

Funerals

11. Death, Bereavement and Funerals 2

Some practicalities

Every death is different

The grief ‘process’

Afterwards

12. Pastoral Practice

Pastoral visiting

Caring like Jesus

Talking and listening

Facing truth

Hearing each other

Respect and boundaries

Confidentiality

Recognizing our limits and working with local agencies

13. Working with Children, Young People and Vulnerable Adults

Spirituality and children

Telling the story

Worship

Music and song

School assemblies

Pastoral care

Safeguarding

Vulnerable adults

14. Meetings

How to make a meeting work

Dynamics

Preparing for a meeting

Chairing a meeting

Making decisions

Whose meeting is it anyway?

15. Management

Using time

Expectations

In the beginning …

Personal devotions

Study and preparation

And beyond …

Administration

Paperwork

Email, texts and technology

Remuneration

16. Beyond the Church

Priest or prophet?

Prophetic ministry

Chaplaincy

The media

Politics

Mission

Integrity

17. Personal Spirituality

Discipline

Prayer in a vacuum

Prayer using the Bible

Spirituality found in other places

Ways of prayer

Retreats at home or away

Spiritual direction

A warning

18. Conclusion: The Way Ahead

Personal growth and development

The future of the Church

Personal futures within the Church

1. The Nature of Ministry

The place of God

My son used to say, ‘Don’t use that word! That word god. It carries too much baggage. When you say god it may mean things that I don’t mean. Think of something else.’ Well, I can’t. Paul Tillich spoke of ‘ultimate concern’ – what matters most to you. Well set down this. However you see God, what matters most in ministry, lay or ordained, is this:

In the beginning: God.

Come back to that again and again. Were it not for God you would not be reading this book, because you would not have been called to ministry or be working with people who have been. Were it not for a sense of vocation, God’s call, I would not have survived this far in ministry. I wouldn’t be writing this.

Ministry is partly being and partly doing. Trying to disentangle the two is impossible. A friend of mine was once a policeman. Now, ministry is not just a job, but there’s something here we can learn. Bob has long since retired, but there is something that still makes me feel that he is a policeman. It changes the way I respond to him. Similarly, those who act as ministers, representatives of the church, are set apart in one way or another, ordained or not, they have a different character. It is something intangible, something on which you can’t put your finger. God seems to invest something in them irrespective of their own theology or understanding, regardless of what they do, of what their function is. Their way of being is different.

If you want to talk theologically, the being is to do with ontology; the doing, teleology. And this can all tie into the way the church sets people apart for different roles. For some, this setting apart, which is sometimes seen as ordination, offers an immutable, God-given change in the person. This is ontological. Ordained, you will never be the same again. For others this setting apart is functional. You take on a role for as long as the task requires. When it finishes, you are no different from when you began. This is teleological. Experience says that this setting apart always contains a mix, something of the ontological, something of the teleological, however we might like to see it.

Sometimes the only way we can minister is through who we are. There are no words, no actions, nothing to be done. God simply commands our presence – in worship, with those who mourn, in celebration, beside those serving tea, in the sacramental, but also in the significantly mundane.

A lot of ministry can look like social work to the outsider, and in many ways it is, but if that is the limit of it, then something vital is missing that ought to inform all we do and all we are. God has everything to do with ministry, and ministry has everything to do with God.

The place of people

If ministry is nothing without God, it is equally true that ministry is always about people. It inevitably has a pastoral element. If it doesn’t, you’re missing something. That is true, whatever your theology. I remember years ago learning about the priesthood of Moses. It was used as a model for all priesthood. Moses, it was said, represented God to the people and the people to God. Moses was also a prophet calling people back to God. In each role, whatever our view of God, Moses had a relationship with people.

For some this focuses too much on history. They would argue that there is a sharp demarcation between the Old and New Testaments. Jesus supersedes all that has been before. He becomes the model for our ministry. That all seems very straightforward until we reflect on it a bit. Think on this:

Jesus was dedicated in a temple, came of age with a Jewish Bar Mitzvah and was baptized as an adult. There is no record of him being married and he was buried in a borrowed grave with, as far as we can see, no funeral service. As far as the Gospel record indicates, he baptized no one (in spite of the ‘Great Commission’), married no one and when called to minister to the bereaved raised the dead!

And you still think that you can base your ministry on that of Jesus? It is not as simple as all that. That is why I want to consider a pattern for ministry that is grounded in God, yet altogether human. This ministry is fundamentally incarnational.

The pastoral basis of ministry

Ministry is about relationships, and whatever we think of God, or Jesus, when we minister we deal with people – real people with all their problems and foibles and fears.

Imagine, if you will, that the undertaker has called you. A man in your congregation has died. You make arrangements to go to see his widow, June. You offer her support, kindness, care. You pray with her. Conversation inevitably turns to the funeral which will take place next week. On Sunday Jim, the man who has died, and his grieving family are remembered in prayers. You glance up and notice that Rosemary, one of the lay leaders in the church, is quietly crying. She obviously knew Jim, but this is unusual. She is normally quite stoical. After the service you seek her out for a quiet word. In private, it all pours out. Jim was the closest friend she had, but it had gone beyond that. From her perspective Jim and June’s marriage was on the rocks. Rosemary and Jim were having an affair. But that is not how she saw it.

I wonder how you react to this. How do you minister to Rosemary? Does it change your perspective on June? You have known the couple for some years. They seemed to be happily married, but you have to admit you only really knew their public faces. Let me fill you in on a few things.

I’ll begin with Jim, whom you have known as a leader in the church. He seemed to command respect. He was well organized, helpful, considerate. He had a responsible job in commerce. He and his wife were comfortably off. As a child Jim was not particularly strong. Often he was bullied at school. When he got home, his father told him he should give as good as he got, tried to ‘teach him a lesson’. Though he was a man with a gentle exterior, Jim’s father was brutal at home. Jim had seen his mother beaten more times than he wanted to remember. This had been a learning ground for him, a time when his character had been formed. His relationships with women always began gently enough, but soon deteriorated into control and often physical violence.

June, Jim’s wife, did not see this side of his character until a couple of years into their marriage. She was an easygoing woman who kept close to his side and never did anything that was likely ‘to set him off’, as she later recalled. Gradually she had seen how the land lay. She would spend more and more time at work, and Jim had more and more freedom. She regretted ‘neglecting’ him.

Rosemary had been on her own for many years. Strong and independent, she had met Jim through work and church, found him charming and quite humorous, a man of the world. They had enough in common to provide enjoyable conversation. He filled a gap in her life and experience, and he found a bit of excitement with her that seemed to be lacking with his wife. Rosemary had yet to come up against Jim’s rougher side. Then she had heard from a friend of his death. She had felt that she was likely to become his wife, he had implied that, or so she thought. The death was sudden, a heart attack brought on through stress, the coroner said.

And it was to this that you were called. Rosemary was Jim’s ‘friend’. You were a minister to June and Jim. You are also minister to Rosemary. Nothing is straightforward.

Tangled up in our pastoral relationships are our own feelings and background, and that prophetic strand which asks the questions: ‘Where is God in all of this? What would God say or do?’ And it is tempting to play God, to ‘magnify his strictures with a zeal he would not own’ as the hymn writer Frederick Faber would say. And the next question for the minister is, ‘Is it legitimate for me to minister to someone who might, in the eyes of the world or even other Christians, be in the wrong?’

It is at this point that we need to reflect theologically. And that can be quite a simple process. Jesus met a woman at a well who needed his care. He approached her, took the initiative, asked for a drink, joined her in conversation:

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)

Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’ Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come back.’ The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, I have no husband; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet.’ (John 4.7–19)

From the point of view of the world and his religious laws Jesus shouldn’t even have spoken to her. So the door is open for us to make contact, but we need to know how we feel and where we stand before we do. Remember that this is a human being, someone loved by God, with whom we are talking. Of course that is true about the other people in the story. And the minister is dealing with them all. It’s quite a tangle.

Of course, things are not always this simple! What if the three people were all men or all women? Now how do you feel? Does your attitude change?

Pastorally there are always questions of an obvious, relatively simple nature. Overlaying these are our own background and experience. We bring our own prejudices to every conversation, whether we like it or not, and we have to live with the words that we say, the decisions we take and the wounds we make. And so do the people we’re dealing with. We have to be true to our own integrity and we need to know what that means. Otherwise we end up playing games with people’s lives and making hypocrites of ourselves. Remember that hypocrites were the only people that Jesus consistently and roundly condemned.

In the context of the story of the woman at the well, we need to know where we stand in relation to divorce, adultery, domestic violence; or had she been in same-sex relationships, about our attitudes to gay and lesbian people. If our integrity means that we cannot do anything other than condemn, then we’d better not do anything. One thing that is sure is that people coming to Jesus, even hypocrites, went away from him better for the meeting. What they heard and what he said was sometimes unpalatable, but in the end they gained in self-knowledge and ‘God-knowledge’. They grew, found healing and a right sense of affirmation of their worth and the worth of those around them. We should seek to enable that same sense of healing.

Broaden your thought beyond this single story, and you have a rule of thumb which you can apply to all pastoral relationships. The end point of the relationship is to leave each and every person to whom you are ministering better than you found them. That doesn’t always mean they ‘feel’ better, but the process of ministry is to heal and to help. If our own prejudice in any situation prevents us from doing our best to achieve these ends, then we need to let someone else do the ministering. That is not an expression of failure, but an admission that we cannot be all things to all people. We are human too.

Being reflective practitioners: theological reflection

Why did I do that? A question worth asking. And where is God in what I’m doing? And what could I have done differently?

It is possible to use the scenario described in the last section as a means of working on our pastoral practice with a view to becoming reflective practitioners. Any field is filled with jargon. Sometimes it is useful. To be a reflective practitioner means asking the questions outlined above and then acting on the answers. Some people will talk of a pastoral cycle to describe the process.

If you had been involved in the story, why did you behave as you did? The answer may be complex. It will reflect something of your theology, your intellectual outlook, the people with whom you are ministering and your attitude to their situation. If you or your parents have been divorced, you may react one way. Your gender will skew the way you behave. Your culture can have a profound effect. Someone brought up in a culture where gender roles are clearly delineated is likely to have a different attitude and response to someone of the opposite sex than someone brought up in a household where gender roles are inter-changeable.

Then where is God in all of this? Are you representing God as judge? Do you see God as Christ in the person with whom you are ministering? Is it a mix of these? Does the question of God seem irrelevant or remote? Or does your image of God obscure your view of the people?

Think this through and, to begin with, keep a journal you can look back over. It helps you to work out what you are really doing and why; what you believe and whether your actions mirror those beliefs. Later, in similar situations, you can monitor any change in how you are working.

In the light of these notes, on reflection, what might you have done differently? In the light of your answer, how are you going to modify or strengthen your action in future?

Eventually you will be doing this reflection naturally and applying your observations as you act without it being a conscious process. Even then, from time to time, it is good practice to go through these motions of analysis, reflection and reaction. And while this can be done alone it can often be better facilitated by someone else through a process of supervision. We’ll come to that in a moment.

The place of the individual in ministry – self-knowledge and personal integrity

Clearly, from what I have said, the effectiveness of pastoral ministry focused in the single lay or ordained person is dependent to a large degree on the person themselves. Developing self-awareness – knowing yourself – is of paramount importance. Sometimes it can make the difference between a pastoral interchange bringing healing or bringing harm.

If I have been recently bereaved, I need support myself. When I meet with friends or colleagues, they may ask how I am. Sometimes I won’t want to talk at all; at others I pour out everything and become like a wet jelly! Imagine now that I am called to someone who is, herself, bereaved. We begin to talk and her situation echoes mine. I might not want to or be able to talk about the issues that she needs to address. Alternatively I may find myself talking more than I should, relating all my own grief and woe, seeking comfort. Neither will help the other person, and however naturally good I am at counselling I am not able to offer this at present.

Past experience can paralyse our ability to minister, temporarily or sometimes permanently, in certain situations. Equally our prejudices can make us less than effective. It is so important that we know ourselves, our weaknesses and our strengths, and our points of vulnerability.

I knew a minister once who was very tall. Talking with people, guardsman-like, he had a wonderfully upright posture; wonderful for a guardsman that is. His congregation used to say, half joking, that he couldn’t get down to their level. There was something here about intellect, but it was also physical. Without knowing or meaning to, I’m sure, he dominated and seemed to over-power others.

Ask yourself how your build, the way you stand, how well you enable eye contact, what you wear, the tone of your voice and the words you use; how all these things affect the way in which you relate to others and they relate to you.

John Humphries, the broadcaster, is known as a bit of a pedant. He always wants language to be used correctly. How do you use language? And how does this help you relate to others. Correct usage may seem pretentious to one person, but very necessary to another. It is not that you should slip from one mode to another – though different forms of communication are suitable to different situations – but that