Being Titus
Andy Griffiths has taught in a theological college in Hungary for five years, worked in France for 5 years and is now a Vicar in Essex. In 2014 he “guest blogged”some posts about incumbent ministry on the site http://davidkeen.blogspot.co.uk/; they are reproduced below.
1. BEING TITUS: A NEW MODEL FOR INCUMBENT MINISTRY Most people either didn’t notice Titus, or they did notice but were disappointed that it was him who’d come. In the first category is Luke, who never mentions Titus at all, despite at least twelve apostolic team members being name-checked and despite Titus having been (on the evidence of the letters) a key figure in the expansion of the Christian movement. Outside the book of Titus, Paul names him twelve times in letters, but he does so in such a way that he makes clear that no one else shares Paul’s high view of him. In Galatians 2.1-3 we learn that the Jewish believers were unconvinced that people like Titus were converted at all; in 2 Corinthians 8.23 and 12.18 we learn that the Corinthians were disappointed that it was Titus whom Paul sent with a letter, and so Paul has to justify his choice at length. Titus was a disappointing nobody. In other words, Titus is an ideal patron saint and model for incumbent ministers today. And a new model is very much required. Chelmsford Diocese, for example, is calling churches to move from being “communities around a Minister” to being “ministering communities”. Most parishes will gladly sign up to this aspiration – but where does leave those of us who are “Ministers”? Take Galleywood, the parish which I have served as Vicar for 10 years. Its PCC (Church Council) is chaired by a layperson, its life is largely run by a lay “administrator and vision coordinator”, there are multiple licensed and authorised lay ministers doing over 50% of the leading of worship and preaching, and pastoral care in the hands of an able pastoral care team which I do not lead, so what’s my role? Surely it’s not only the Eucharistic prayer and volunteer management? Is there a way I can meaningfully discharge my “cure of souls” without being central to church life? My concern here is mostly with Anglican incumbents – I include Priests in Charge, Vicars, Rectors, Team Vicars, and Ministers in Charge – all those to whom is entrusted the “cure of souls” of a given parish or set of parishes, whether they happen to be paid or not (though as a matter of fact the enormous majority of incumbents are paid). In the Church of England, there is an additional complication, because a high proportion of incumbents will be retiring in the next 10 years – about half, by some estimates, so that an influential article spoke recently of “the leading of the 5,000”, suggesting that there will be approximately five thousand paid Church of England incumbents left, compared with 23,235 in 1901. So there’s a danger that those of us remaining will be stretched ever more thinly and be ever more isolated. I want to suggest that the book of Titus provides a fourfold model that is life-giving. It has to be worth a try. |
2. FROM INCUMBENT AT THE HEART OF A PARISH TO INCUMBENT AS APOSTOLIC TEAM MEMBER
Titus (and the letters to Timothy) have a special status in the Bible. They give us a window into the organizational structures of the early church. The later they are – and New Testament scholarship continues to debate their date – the more significant this window becomes, because it implies that we are seeing a mature church after the first flush of charismatic enthusiasm. To put it bluntly, the letters to the Corinthians presume a context extremely different from the contemporary Church of England, but when we read 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus we are on slightly more familiar ground. And a quick reading of these letters reveals one simple fact: there are no Vicars in Crete at this time. At no stage is Titus commissioned to be their Pastor or Parish Priest. Instead, we see teams: an apostolic team that Titus is part of, and a team of elders/overseers in the Cretan church(es) whom he is to select and assist. We have relatively little information about how the apostolic team functioned. For example, was it “a team led by an apostle” or “a team of apostles”? (Both seem to have been the case at different times – an example that is contested for quite different reasons is Andronicus and Junia in Romans 16.7). My own view is that apostolic teams were “flatter” in structure than a first reading of Acts might imply. Paul, though not a person with a lack of self-belief, seems to have been wary of acting alone in any way, and even the letters we commonly refer to as “Paul’s epistles” often had multiple authorship (Paul and Silas or Paul and Sosthenes or Paul and Timothy or whatever). With direct relevance to Titus, take Paul’s words in 2 Cor 12-13: Now when I went to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ and found that the Lord had opened a door for me, I still had no peace of mind, because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I said goodbye to them and went on to Macedonia. Here Paul – even though God had “opened a door” for his ministry – could not operate without Titus. It was Paul and his team, or nothing. If we ask “why couldn’t Paul preach without Titus around?” we might answer psychologically (“he just didn’t feel comfortable”) or practically (“Paul was physically weak, at least at this point, and needed Titus to be his spokesperson, or to physically hold him up.”) But there seems also to have been an ecclesiological point: Paul, on principle, was not in favour of going it alone – that would have modelled quite the wrong sort of Christian life. So Chelmsford diocese is modelling what it calls “Mission and Ministry Unit Teams” (MMU Teams). An MMU team contains several incumbents, and may also contain other team members including some self-supporting priests, working together to serve a set of local churches and supporting the local (largely unpaid, and sometimes including “locally deployed” self-supporting priests) “ministry teams” in each local church. Take, for example, Southwest Chelmsford Churches, a MMU comprising 5 churches in 4 parishes, served at present by 3 incumbents, a curate and a flourishing lay team. I am one of these incumbents, and have the “cure of souls” for one of the churches in the MMU; but I am also licensed as an assistant priest in the other 4, and have responsibility across the five churches in the areas of Vocation, Vision and Pioneering. My colleagues Stephanie and Carol each have the cure of souls for two churches each, are again licensed as assistants to all the churches in the MMU, and have responsibility (respectively) for Education, Evangelism and Worship and for Community Involvement, Pastoral Care and Spiritual Growth. It so happens that I am at present also “Warden of Ministers”, which means that I have the responsibility of drawing us together for regular clergy meetings, and also inviting lay people appointed by each church to meet with us; but Southwest Chelmsford Churches is a self-consciously egalitarian MMU, and neither Stephanie, nor Carol, nor I are in any sense the “leader” of the Unit. (I was LITERALLY appointed on the toss of a coin). If asked to describe my role, I tend to say “I’m Titus”, which is unhelpful for anyone who has not read this post. My intention is not to try to recapture the first Cretan church in some fundamentalist, proof-texting way, but to maintain that there is a resonance between the apostolic team implied in the book of Titus and the structures we are discovering here in mid-Essex. I think this “Chelmsford Model” has significant advantages over similar schemes in other parts of the Anglican communion, which group churches into clusters but then still treat incumbents as sole practitioners. It has something in common with what I saw when I received the hospitality of the Augustinian Canons in Poitou, in western France. Sixteen local parishes come under the “episcopé » of four (stipendiary) priests, who live in the centre of the area. Each parish has its own équipe animatrice, a lay team which is responsible for the ongoing liturgical and spiritual life of the parish. One Sunday a month, a priest from the central team visits the parish, celebrates mass, provides episcopé, and trains and supports the équipe animatrice as to how they can lead services of the word over the next three weeks. In Poitiers diocese the policy is to avoid communion by extension, as it is felt to devalue the real Mass. In Poitiers diocese, the équipe animatrice (also referred to as ‘anciens’, elders – though they say this makes them feel old!) are all equal members, without one of them being appointed as ‘team leader’. So the first part of my fourfold description of incumbent ministry today is this: Incumbents have a responsibility to work together in teams. It would be good if training included how to work in teams To those who say that incumbents are too eccentric, too autonomous or too awkward to do so, I can only point again to the eccentricity, autonomy and awkwardness of Paul, and say “if he had to do it, so do we”. |
3. FROM INCUMBENT AS FOCUS OF UNITY TO INCUMBENT AS ENABLER ON THE MARGINS
The team sent Titus to Crete to appoint a ministry leadership team and let them (not him) be central to church life. And then he was to leave them to it, and move on to a new assignment. So Titus 1.5-9 describe the qualities to be looked for in this local team:
The reason I left you in Crete was that you might put in order what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town, as I directed you. An elder must be blameless and faithful to their spouse; if they have children, they should be believers not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient. Since an overseer manages God’s household, they must be blameless—not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain. Rather, they must be hospitable, loving what is good, self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. They must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that they can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it. The criteria for the ministry team members are clear: faithful in their families (v6), faithful in self-management (v7), faithful in relation to outsiders (v8). Incumbents oversee the selection, empowerment, training and encouragement of ministry teams. This is a better use of their time than acting as Vicars. “Vicar” is an oddly apposite word for what incumbents have often found themselves doing – they are substitutes, standing in for others. They sometimes stand in for the parishioners by having a prayer life so other people don’t have to (“Say one for me, Vicar”) and they sometimes stand in for those in the pews and chairs who would be more than able to lead worship, preach sermons, care for one another and run the church if only the Vicars got out of their way. (I was present at a diocesan consultation day where we were asked for a word that gave us the most hope for new life and growth in their parishes – every single layperson in my group chose “interregnum”). We incumbents may try to justify this in terms of us being the “focus of unity” (how did this choice of words enter the conversation? Isn’t it meant to refer to bishops?), but in fact I wonder if we are simply resisting a call to move towards the margins and let others be centre-stage. (I was deeply unsettled to meet a priest who had discouraged a congregation member from seeking ordination with local deployment, because that would have compromised his position as “Eucharistic Focus”). By contrast, Titus was not a vicar but an enabler, appointing and enabling the elders/overseers to do their tasks as a team. I have made this move very imperfectly – I still sometimes wake in the night, concerned about Galleywood, which implies that I may still somehow see myself as indispensable to it. But here are two anecdotes that give some impression of how I have tried to be less vicarious and more like Titus. First: back around the year 2008, we were starting to set up a pastoral care team. But I was hearing complaints from some of the elderly and housebound people we would visit: when a couple of laypeople from the pastoral care team dropped in, it felt as if “that didn’t count” or “the church hadn’t been”. After the death of one elderly parishioner, the son complained that in her whole last six months, the church hadn’t been to see her at all. “I’m so sorry”, I said, “I’d understood that Elva and Edith were regular visitors.” “O yes, they were often round, I don’t know what mum would have done without them – but they’re not the church, they’re normal people!” So I made a decision: for a year, I wouldn’t visit anyone, ever, in their homes for pastoral reasons. By the end of the year, it was a common subject around the village that the Vicar didn’t visit. But it was also commonly known that there was a pastoral care team, and Rosemary (a lay person) led it, and it was really good. Make no mistake, a parish’s felt need to have the incumbent at the centre of everything is often at least as strong as the incumbent’s felt need to be there – but we must engage in the struggle to extricate ourselves and get back to the margins where we belong. Not long ago I covered a service in a parish I didn’t know. I asked what their expectations were (is someone doing the intercessions? Is someone reading the epistle? that sort of thing) and was told that in that church, the members didn’t get involved in saying things at the communion. Imagine my surprise to discover that “not getting involved” included not even saying the words in bold print in the service booklet – including not only the sanctus and Gloria, but even the Lord’s Prayer and the amens! I guess that would have felt unanglican. Brothers and sisters, we took a wrong turn somewhere. . A second story: in 2010 there was a sense at St Michael’s that a member of the clergy (myself or my colleague Stephanie the curate) “ought” to be in church every week. It wasn’t that anyone resented there being lay leadership or laypeople preaching – but “it just didn’t feel right” for there not to be a vicar in the building. So we decided that at least once a month, we’d make sure neither of us were in church on Sunday morning. We were not service-providers for a set of consumers, but encouragers of a people with a purpose. Three years later, all the churches in the Unit have incumbent presence exactly 50% of the time on Sunday mornings, and another important step has been taken towards breaking the curse of dependence on incumbents, though not without the cost of decreasing the number of eucharists offered. (Our hope is that several people from our congregations will respond to God’s call to be locally deployed priests, which will mitigate this disadvantage; and indeed we believe that creating an occasional vacuum in which there are felt to be insufficient eucharists might be an important part of stimulating an exploration of priestly vocation. In the meanwhile, I personally feel that communion by extension might be worth exploring further as a temporary expedient. What’s absolutely clear is that for me to spend my Sunday morning driving from church to church, celebrating communion and then getting straight into the car to get to the next eucharist, would not be sane for me or missionally helpful for God’s people). St Michael’s Galleywood has become a Church of Teams – an evangelism team, a pastoral care team, a leadership team, a preachers’ team, and so on. Most days, I’m glad. Some days, it feels like being at the margins instead of the centre is a good place to be, giving me a chance to get involved in mission to those not part of the church community. Frankly, we have to do something. I met with an ordained colleague this morning, and the subject turned to whether any of us knew any incumbents who work full-time (that is, 40 hours a week approx.) but no more. We came to the conclusion that neither of us did know anyone like this, and we feared that if an incumbent did work like this they’d be in danger of ending up guilty in themselves, bullied by their congregations and suspect to their Area Deans. Which means that the post of incumbent is closed to all but a select few able to sustain this kind of rhythm, week in week out. It is probably closed to anyone with small children and a spouse in inflexible full-time work. When I was a curate, my daughter was aged 4 months - 4 years, and she had an imaginary dad. A bit like an imaginary friend, but a dad. He was called "bubble daddy" and he was around to play when I wasn't. As a model for Christian family life, I was clearly not cutting the mustard - and although I don't live quite like that now, I still wince at the memory. I write as (most of the time) a happy incumbent – even one whose ministry gives him some satisfaction most of the time. But I am determined, if only as a model for others, to do better at not being indispensable. I’m nobody’s hero, and I just don’t have the energy to be Jesus any more. 4. FROM INCUMBENT AS MANAGER TO INCUMBENT AS VOICE OF GRACE
My previous post may have given the impression that the incumbent’s job is primarily that of being a manager of volunteers. If so, it is perhaps a surprise that Titus’ role is primarily focussed on what he is to say. He is not to manage every part of church life, but he is to be a voice for what really matters. “Keeping the main thing the main thing” is going to be crucial, because there will be so many distractions, and his method to keep the main thing the main thing is primarily rhetorical. At Crete, the “disruptions” (1.11) centre on the promotion of circumcision and the telling of mythical stories (1.10-16); in 3.9 we hear that foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law are unprofitable and useless. Some people are “divisive” (3.10), and it seems to be Titus’ role, not that of the ministry team, to warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them. “When the church needs hard work and generous action”, comments Tom Wright with reference to this passage, “it’s interesting how some people, perhaps as an avoidance technique, suddenly discover that there are all sorts of theological and biblical disputes that they need to hide behind”. In the face of these disrupting alternative narratives, and of a bent towards Law (whether this is to be understood as Torah-based boundary markers or a more Gentile legalism), Titus is to be s single-minded champion of a message of “grace” followed by “zeal”. Here is that message in Titus 2.12-14 and 3.4-8: Grace teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, zealous to do what is good. But when the kindness and love of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Saviour, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life. This is a trustworthy saying. And I want you to stress these things, so that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good. The pattern repeats several times in these verses: the Saviour delivers by grace, and that grace, given quite apart from any worth in our actions, leads us to devotion, zeal, doing good, saying no to ungodliness, etc. John Stott expresses the message of these verses with customary thoroughness: “Salvation’s need is our sin, guilt and slavery; its source is God’s gracious loving kindness; its ground is not our merit but God’s mercy in the cross; its means is the regenerating and renewing work of the Holy Spirit, signified in baptism; its goal is our final inheritance of eternal life; and its evidence is our diligent practice of good works… The past is justification and regeneration. The present is a new life of good works in the power of the Spirit. The future is the inheritance of eternal life.” This goes beyond a Reformation commitment to sola gratia (by grace alone) – it may suggest sola gratitudine (living by gratitude alone), in which a life eager to do good is motivated not by pride (you’re better than this), threat (you’d better do this) or guilt (if only you’d done this) but simply by unforced, confident, cheerful gratitude. If your zeal for good works is slipping, don’t look to the law, look to the grace of salvation. The incumbent is to be a voice for grace that leads to zeal to do good. “The dominant theme in Titus is good works for the sake of outsiders”, says Gordon Fee, but the way to stimulate these is to help church members appreciate the wonder of salvation. Without such a voice, a church will slip into legalism and distraction, and ironically the end result will be not only a depressed, defeated church, but a demotivated church not engaged in active love. This rings true to my experience – lay preaching teams seem to have a tendency to need bringing back to the rhythm of grace that leads to action for the community. The answer to this natural slippage is not for the incumbent to once again take on the mantle of “the preacher”, delivering all the sermons and leading all the midweek groups, but for her to use every rhetorical advice at her disposal to help the ministry team exemplify this rhythm – and if necessary to make sure legalists and distractors do not have a microphone at their disposal. And if we can move incumbents to the margins of the church, there is some hope that they will be able to bring grace to bear on the structures of the community, pioneer new projects, and be active in creative evangelism. Of course, this is not guaranteed. But if incumbents are still having to chair the PCCs, pacify the flower-arrangers, raise money for the spire and visit two housebound church members a day, the scope for this fruitful, grace-voicing marginal ministry is almost nil. 5. FROM INCUMBENT AS CHAPLAIN TO INCUMBENT AS SPONSOR OF INTERGENERATIONAL DISCIPLESHIP The final theme I see in Titus is that of the generations. This is a book all about discipleship – but there is no expectation that Titus will “disciple” the Cretan Christians himself. Rather, as we see in Titus 2.3-5 The older women … [are to] urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind… and we can infer a similar dynamic with the older and younger men. Before Titus leaves Crete, he is to have established the sort of church where the generations interact healthily, for the sake of Christian maturity. How this can be done is another matter entirely. The country is filled with churches that prioritise the needs of one, or at most two generations, and then co-opt incumbents to be the chaplain for that agegroup – this most commonly happens where churches are institutionally age-ist (so music, language and preaching style disenfranchises younger parishioners), but it is by no means unknown for a younger generation to “take over” and exclude their elders. I believe it would be a mistake to concentrate on the separation of the sexes (crucial in first and second century Crete, no longer very relevant in Essex), and should instead ask how incumbents can be sponsors of intergenerational relationships for the good of all. This is an area where my performance has been poor, though we have sponsored “team-preaching” on six occasions (the sermon being delivered in dialogue by one person in their 40s and one person in their teens). On Monday, Caroline Gemma and I (aged 47, 51 and 35 but not in that order!) met to plan Holiday Club. We have about 100 children coming, aged 5-10, about 10 young leaders aged 11-18, and about 6 retired leaders, plus ourselves. Our discussions focussed on how we could help the event be intergenerational. We decided that the children would be assigned to groups, each led by 11-18s, who would be the primary storytellers; but each secondary student would be assigned an adult leader to support them, ensure proper safeguarding, encourage them and step in only when needed. We would love these relationships to continue into the future. The bottom line is this: when I, like Titus, leave the local church for which I’ve presently been assigned the “cure of souls”, I want there to be a discipling culture so strong that it won’t depend on the next incumbent to underwrite it; and that culture has to be an intergenerational one. Ask me how this is going in a couple of years. EPILOGUE: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO TITUS? Church tradition tells us that once he had spent a few years in Crete, Titus’ next assignment was in Dalmatia (what we would call the Croatian coast). Such is the lot of the incumbent – unlike the ministry team, who are generally longterm members of the local church, we move on to new assignments, hoping that we have made ourselves dispensable enough for our successors not to have to struggle as hard as we did to be successful at equipping from the margins. A few years ago, I was given an icon of Titus by a colleague who had just visited Crete. An elderly Titus is in Crete, reading the scroll of the letter sent to him as a young man. And if church tradition is right, Titus did indeed, eventually, end up back in Crete – not as a member of an apostolic team, but as an old man, retiring back to the scene of his earlier ministry. Now finally, the story says, he has the chance to be a part of a local church team as an overseer. The icon captures the moment that he reaches the part where Paul declares that Jesus’ purpose was to purify for himself a people that are his very own, zealous to do what is good. He looks into the middle distance. Possibly, the icon writer intended that Titus is looking on us, seeing how we are doing with the legacy he left us. |