Old ways
Phoning Pat, my good friend and churchwarden yesterday afternoon, to break the news of the new appointment, our conversation came around to the future needs of our parish. “We are a conservative and traditional people, I have come to realize that. Someone coming in needs to understand that”.
It’s not exciting, groundbreaking stuff. It’s routine, sometimes monotonous, but it’s what matters.
Looking for some time to be quiet last night, I travelled to Kilkenny where Katharine, dean-designate of the cathedral, had a meeting. Wrapping my Leinster scarf around my neck, and putting up the collar of my coat, I walked out into the frosty night air, to spend an hour or so ambling the streets of the city and walking beside the Nore
My old friend Brian came to mind, as he often does at such moments; he has appeared here before.
He farmed amongst the drumlins of Co Down; a quietly spoken and reflective Ulsterman who had never more than a few words, but every one of those words counted.
Brian was one of those who appointed me to my first parish, some twenty-one years ago; taking a great risk in appointing a twenty-eight year old blow-in to a conservative and traditional rural congregation. At the interview with Brian and his fellow parochial representatives, I asked what they wanted from their new Rector, Brian spoke up, “We want someone who will bury our dead, visit our sick and teach our children”.
Brian’s words hit home hard at the time. This wasn’t the sort of vision and strategy statement that we had been taught in college; this was something from a bygone age.
Over twenty years after that first encounter with Brian, his words carry even greater weight. Falling foul of the cult of managerialism, the Church of Ireland has all but disappeared in some places. The belief that the Rector was there not to work, but was to “lead” and to “facilitate” has led to an abandonment of the workaday duties that Brian would have expected from his Rector. The shepherd of the flock has turned his back on his charges to spend his days in his office; his phone is turned off or diverted after five in the evening.
Perhaps Brian belongs to the past, perhaps he is a remnant of the 19th Century, but Brian would have pointed to the numbers in his church – seventy or eighty per cent of the people in Brian’s parish attended church. It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t innovating, it was plain and traditional, and rooted in the Rector doing the old fashioned stuff.
I grew to love Brian’s community; they were very different from me, but there was never a moment when I felt that I could turn away from them, never a moment when I would not have answered a call, never a moment when I would not have gone to a house that wanted to see me. Perhaps much of my motivation was fear of a guilty conscience, but it wasn’t such a bad motivator.
The Church of Ireland is a church of many, many people like Brian.
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