THE tough school’s toughest boy, Peter always chatted with me after my assemblies, making wry comments beyond his years. After Rachel had a miscarriage, he called with a huge bunch of flowers. “Me mum’s sent these,” he mumbled, eyes downcast. “I hopes yer missus soon gets over her troubles.”
Alan Bartlett’s magisterial Vicar (Features, 4 October) is full of similar vignettes, veritable Kingdom moments in his Durham parishes. Though accepting that the parson’s work needs renewing and reforming, Bartlett sees parishes’ incumbents as indispensable to community: they prove both catalyst and crutch, “relating the given to the found”, and are conductors transforming cacophonies into beautiful symphonies. Hailed as “God’s sensible people”, they also play the clown, “irrepressible fools who bounce back for more, showing up death for the joke it is, voices merry with the laughter that is our saving grace”.
Bartlett concurs with Richard Hooker that the grace of ordination perfects nature and forms indelible character: priesthood is not a cloak to be cast on or off. But he firmly sets his face against a Father-knows-best approach, instead wanting to empower the ministry of the whole people of God for our context.
A vibrant, quintessentially modest parish church with a visible incumbent (sporting a cardigan!) strikes him as the best shot for delivering the distinctly unchurchy “Nazareth manifesto” of Luke 4.18. The hackneyed evangelism of “ten thousand thousand are their texts, but all their sermons one,” is countered by “How churchy are the Beatitudes?”
Throughout his ministry, he has constructively held the tension between individual conversion and social action: his missio Dei has “a charitable presumption”, and the parable of the Prodigal Son is his very Anglican controlling image.
He quotes extensively from Thomas Cranmer, George Herbert, and Hooker — often refining them: the pulpit, contra Herbert, is actually not the priest’s throne, but God’s; the priest is merely God’s mouthpiece.
Bartlett is a reflective practitioner, ever willing to learn new pastoral ways, risking both bruising and being bruised. Christ’s “What do you want me to do for you?” drives his approach to those who seek a ministry of authentic compassion. Inevitably market-led rather than product-led, Iit is an approach that must be ready for surprises. “Will it be a normal christening?” one baptism family asks. “Because we went to one where people were made to kneel at a rail and eat bits of cardboard.”
The sheer slog of ministry “in a very anxious and therefore dangerous institution” is relieved by glimpses of glory. A troublesome tramp turns up frequently, demanding two mugs of tea and a non-crumbly cheese sandwich. But one birthday eve, he brings an expensive card and a huge bar of chocolate. “That’s for your boy. I didn’t want to come tomorrow because I would have been in the way. Happy birthday to him!”
All ministry is ultimately cross-shaped: “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.” Bartlett concludes that it is both the peril and privilege of priesthood that Herbert’s reality can be routinised.
The Rt Revd David Wilbourne is an hon. assistant bishop in York diocese.
Vicar: Celebrating the renewal of parish ministry
Alan Bartlett
SPCK £12.99
(978-0-281-07917-9)
Church Times Bookshop £11.70
