Product Description

This work explores the origins and development of the clergy using a variety of sources and insights from thinkers such as Darwin and Foucault. Martyn Percy, journalist, author, Principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon and Anglican Priest takes a serious but often humorous look at how the role of clergy has evolved over the years. This is a lively and engaging study including anecdotes and familiar cultural references such as the influence of the Vicar of Dibley on public perceptions of the clergy and a discussion of clerical dress. Keen to dispel romantic notions of the clergy Percy's study is informed by personal experience and the practical realities of being a parish priest. To encourage his readers to a new way of thinking about theologies of ministry in relation to their context and environment he examines three arenas: changing nature of clerical identity; role of the culture as an agent of change; and the function of churches, denominations and congregations as resistors and accomodators of cultural change. Percy's conclusion is that to survive the clergy need to adapt to their cultural environment whilst at the same time retaining a certain distance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #448134 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 205 pages

About the Author
Martyn Percy is Principal, Ripon College, Cuddesdon, UK. From 1997-2004 he was Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute for the Study of Religion and Society. Martyn has recently been appointed honorary Professor at King's College, London, UK, and also holds an Adjunct Professorship of Theology and Ministry at Hartford Seminary, Connecticut, USA.

Customer Reviews

Rambling, but with insight
Percy's big idea is this.
Theologies of ministry/ priesthood too often go down three lines of argument, all of which are misguided.
According to one line, the priestly role has been parachuted down from heaven, and his role is clear, because the Church has been guided by the Holy Spirit to establish it: "an Essential Ministry deriving from the Apostles themselves" (Kirk from 1946, quoted on p15). This holds too romantic a view of the Church.
According to another line, ministers just have to follow a path laid out in Scripture: see how Moses or Peter or Paul did it, read Acts 2 and then go and do likewise. This is again too romantic, but from the evangelical rather than Anglo Catholic side.
According to a third line, ministers need to look around at business and/or secular models, see what works and adapt their ministry accordingly. This ends up as a Godless giving-in to whatever is the contemporary trend.

Percy prefers to view clergy using the image of evolution: i.e. a species that has a real DNA (people are authentically called to be priests) but one that constantly needs to adapt to its environment in order to survive: thus, what a priest needs to be in, say, 14th Century Rome, could well be different from what a priest needs to be in 21st Century England.

So far, so good. It's a persuasive point, and Percy successfully shows that thinking through the environment in which clergy work is something that ends up having theological implications about the nature of ministry, even when we don't tend to think of it in that way. For example, on p69 Percy points out that the Church of England has just moved into a new financial situation where it is primarily paid for by its congregations: not the parishes, and not the central authorities. This is likely to have ramifications for the role of priests and the whole church will need to adapt accordingly. It's an important point and a perceptive one.

This book has major flaws though. First, Percy has the academic disease of never using a short word when he can find a long one. Thus evolutionary theory is not a good 'image' to talk about ministry: no, it's an "analogical lens" through which to "examine theological and ecclesial concepts". His approach is a "dynamic correlative theological" one etc.etc.

Second, it doesn't actually follow through an argument: when it comes to the crunch, the whole 'evolutionary theory' bit is a clever conceit, but doesn't have substance: it merely provides a veneer of unity for a book which is essentially a lot of subjects Martyn Percy is interested in, bundled up together.

He describes this in his introduction as following a "morphological style [sic], depending on a kind of 'mosaic' of resarch, insight, observation, analysis and reflection pieced together to make a representative pattern that challenges prevailing paradigms: ...this is a patterned theory that depends on fragments of knowledge,... it is deliberately artistic and therefore, inevitably, to an extent, impressionistic."
Hmm. One person's "impressionistic mosaic" is another person's series of essays and jottings, hastily joined up and stuck together in a book with a few nods to Darwin.
The saving grace is that, for the most part, Percy is interesting and engaging, even as he rambles: he writes perceptively on the future of Charismatic Christianity in the UK, the financial changes in the Church of England and why Methodism may need to recapture its soul as a movement rather than as a church.
He also has some fabulous titbits of information, often pertaining to the myth of the strength of the church's past: did you know, for example, that on Easter Day, 1800, St Paul's cathedral only had six communicants?

But by the end, he hasn't really cracked a conclusion: in his "coda", he just ends up restating the type of thing whereby the priest must be like Christ, in this world but not of this world etc.etc. All fine (indeed, true), but it's taken a long time to get to something which isn't that different from what has been said before.

For a more systematic, less rambling account of the history of ministry in the Church of England and its dilemmas today, head for Anthony Russell's "The Clerical Profession". It may now be over twenty years old, but it still holds the field.