New Cranmer Society Publications

Signposting the Future:

Why the Idea of Lay Vocation in Society has become a Bad Idea for Australian Anglicans

An address given to New Cranmer Society 23 March 1999
The Reverend Dr Bruce Kaye, General Secretary of
The Anglican Church of Australia, General Synod

In our parish we have recently had a change of minister. As part of the process for finding the new minister a parish Consultation was held. At that Consultation the facilitator asked what were our strengths as a parish. From that it emerged that we saw ourselves as accessible, friendly and open. At a later point in the Consultation we were asked what things might be improved, and the first thing that was mentioned was our capacity to reach out to the society around us. The Facilitator then asked why if we were an open accessible and friendly community of Christian people, such a problem existed?

One of our members explained the difference by saying "We are not sure that what we believe and practice in here in our church, will work out there in society."

It was a telling remark and was greeted by one of those silences that clearly indicate that something important has been said.

There are many reasons why this Christian person and this Christian group might feel that way in modern Australia. It is not a question which is peculiar to Australia, but there are particular Australian lineaments to it.

While there is not established religion or church in Australia, there is close interaction between church bodies and government, especially in such areas as welfare and eduction. That interaction , however, is increasingly conducted on market based values, which church agencies are finding more and more ambiguous. These tendencies mean that the distinction between the values of the Christian community and those of the public culture in Australia are changing. A divide seems to be planting itself in the minds of our culture, and it has the effect of dividing each Christian internally in two, for in fact we each live on both sides of this divide. The Christian lives in this public culture in this society "out there", and if what we believe and do "in here" does not, or is not working "out there", then we are all, personally caught across a disturbing fault line.

It is not a total divide, not a dualism. But it is a divide of such degree that we are regularly at sea in believing and practicing our faith outside the presumptions of the church community.

The historical circumstances of Australian Anglicanism have not particularly helped us in this matter. Indeed, in many ways they have compounded the problem. The Book of Common Prayer which has for centuries shaped the habits of our hearts presumes an almost total continuity between church and society. There is no host society for the Christian Church. The society is a Christian society and the church is an aspect of that Christian society.

One might have thought that in 1995 when APBA was produced, some consciousness of our changed circumstances in this respect might have been represented in that book. However, I have not yet found one prayer in the whole of the 850 pages of that book, which is directed towards the challenges and problems faced by the people in the congregation in their everyday lives. There is prayer for national institutions, societies and other things but nothing about what it is like as a Christian person living across this divide.

Of course, historically in Australia we as Anglicans find ourselves at the end of a process which has significantly put us on the back foot. Anglicanism came to Australia in 1788 as the established religion. Step by step the Anglican hegemony has been reduced. Once we controlled the privileges of church state relations, we controlled the whole of the education system, and had a stranglehold on the terms of public culture. Now by a series of steps taken over a period of 200 years we have moved from dominance to hegemony, to leadership, to being just one of a number of players on the side of a game whose centre of gravity has shifted elsewhere.

Given the story of the Anglican Church's relationship with the state and our present community memory of that past position, it is understandable that we should use images about our internal organisation which are drawn from the state and government. So one hears talk of synods as parliaments, of the resolutions of synods as legislation and of the use of parliamentary practice in the synods. All these things are part of the memory of a past situation. It is as if, in some sense, what previously was an external relationship between the church community and the institutions of the state, has been internalised into the inner life of the church community.

The time has come however, for new images and new understandings, a different notion of what it is to gather as a community of Christian people and to make decisions. Better images that are informed by our theological tradition, with some sense of the Spirit of God amongst the people of God.

This Anglican memory of a previous time, fossilized in the imagery of current internal arrangements, is at one level, a memory about a good thing. It was about the openness of Anglicanism to the society around it through its principal institutional expression, the state.

That changed situation does not mean that Anglicans should refuse to be open to the society in which God has placed them. On the contrary, that openness is part of their spiritual heritage. However, the time is now for creative thought and experiment to be applied to the shape and character of that openness.

The difficulty, I believe, is that we very often have taken up the wrong aspects of our heritage, and sometimes not fully understood the seriousness of our position. It is not just that people are not coming to Anglican Churches as much as they used to, nor is it just that the people who do come to Anglican Churches tend to be elderly, nor any of the other things which are revealed in The National Church Life Survey or in the census material. The real problem for Anglican Christians in Australia is that we do not find it easy to know how we should live Christianly in this society. It involves not just what we do in church. It much more fundamentally involves what we do as citizens, as members of social institutions, and how we participate in relationships outside the confines of the discrete church community in an appropriate Christian way.

It is because these questions are so ambiguous that we struggle to reflect or to demonstrate what it means to live a Christian life as an Australian Anglican. It is not lack of commitment. Rather it is an inability to see how Christian faith makes a difference to our living in Australia. It is more a lack of vision about life. Such a vision will emerge in its details only as we open ourselves to a process of re-invention about the way we live as Anglican Christians and as an Anglican Church.

The real uncertainties, upon which such a reinventing must focus, have to do with the way in which we are able to make judgements in the kind of plural environment we have in Australia.

Our first challenge is to find sufficient confidence in making those judgements. It is not dogma or even a body of doctrine that we lack. It is a living theologically informed vision of how we might live. It is a question of judgement, of understanding, of faithful interpretation and perception. It is also a question of risk and adventure.

Secondly, we have before us a challenge about the nature of the church community. How we are to conceive of and to foster the relationships which are appropriate within a Christian community whose internal differences are accented, and whose boundaries with other groups are changing and unclear. In a very important book published in 1995, Phillip Hughes, Craig Thomson, Roan Prior and Gary Bouma concluded their study of Australian Spirituality and the Churches in the 1990's, by saying

The major challenge is finding new ways of developing community in a society which is not at all sure what community is. The major challenge is identifying and naming the presence of God in our fragmented life, that the dynamic quest for faith might be sustained."

There is an urgent necessity to reinvent what we mean by the church community.

Thirdly, there are real uncertainties as to how we should act Christianly and politically as citizens in this country and in our global environment, both as Christian individuals and as a Christian community. Our habits of domesticated church Christianity have their corollary in our silence in the company of strangers to the faith.

In one sense these questions, making sense of the present and interpreting the heritage are secondary questions. The primary question is about the presence of God in this situation. How do we hear God? How do we see God? How do we feel the presence of God? How are our lives shaped, led, transformed, renewed by the living God? How shall we live so that we are able to pray and how shall we pray so that we are able to live? This primary question must pervade any re-inventing of the church and of ourselves. There is a real place now for us to re-discover the adventure of abandoning ourselves to the Divine Providence.

In this context I want to introduce the idea of strategic living. At the beginning of this century New Testament scholars paid a good deal of attention to the attitude of Jesus and the apostles to the social institutions of their day. Shailer Matthew's book, Jesus on Social Institutions, is a good example. The intention of this concern was to find a basis for the reform of society. It was popular in the USA because it was caught up with the liberal social reform agenda. In more recent years New Testament scholars have returned to the social question using the disciplines of social psychology and anthropology. This later enterprise has sought to explain early Christianity in terms of social science disciplines.

There is of course a grain of truth in each of these approaches because early Christianity, by its very nature, brought its adherents into contact with the social realities of their day. They were not called to be hermits, nor yet did they show themselves as political or social revolutionaries. In fact one can see in the New Testament changing styles of relating to the social institutions of the day. Jesus' harsh demand of the priority of the kingdom of God as compared with family ties, (anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not fit for the kingdom of God) changes as the apostles find themselves dealing with situations where the family are all Christians and Christian parents have to relate to their children. A Christian appreciation of the family as an institution is thus hammered out in the light of the Kingdom of God.

In Paul's letters we see him developing what I would call strategic approaches to social relationships. He urges the Thessalonians to earn their own living and gain the respect of their neighbours. He advises the unmarried and widows to remain unmarried. He will not eat meat in the context of dining in a pagan temple, if it causes his Christian brother to stumble. He advocates a policy of moderate passivity in 1 Corinthians 7 in relation to social position in favour of seeking to be Godly where you are.

This kind of strategic approach shows two important things about Paul's Christianity. On the one hand the gospel is not a social programme, and on the other that the gospel calling to live faithfully creates an obligation to make judgements in particular situations and in relation to particular issues. It was in the exercise of such judgement that risks were taken and faith was exercised. That practice has marked the history of Christianity and we have inherited the results of many such judgements. Such judgements have, of course, often been controversial, such as the political settlement with the crown at the time of the English reformation.

I want to take up one of those inherited strategies and suggest that what we inherited has become a bad idea for Australian Anglicans and inhibits a capacity to live Christianly in Australia.

LAY VOCATION IN SOCIETY

One of the important ways in which we have approached the challenge of how we are to live as Australian Anglicans is through the notion of vocation. Within the church we speak of a vocation for the ordained and we have also come to speak of a vocation for the laity, and sometimes of the ministry of the laity.

For a number of years I have struggled with this question. Let me tell you something of that struggle. In the Arnott Oration in Brisbane in 1994, I made use of the 1989 encyclical of John Paul II on the Vocation and Mission the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World. I drew attention to the convergence between what John Calvin says in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and what John Paul II said in his encyclical.

In 1995 at the end of my book A Church Without Walls , I said that the most important item on the agenda of Australian Anglicanism which was "foundational for all the others, is an assertion in deed and word of the integrity and divine value of lay vocation in society."

In 1996 I published an article in St Mark's Review called, The Forgotten Calling, the Theology and Vocation of the Laity. I put forward eight theses. I struggled there with what seemed to me to be a cultural semantic issue. I put it in these terms:

"The Anglican Church has I believe concentrated far too much on the ecclesiastical role of the laity. Lay ministry in the church has subjugated lay vocation in society." (Calling p.10)

In order to locate the issues of Christian life in the broad arena of society and to counter an ecclesaisticizing, if not a clericalising conception Christian life, I underlined lay vocation rather than lay ministry and defined that vocation as being located in society.

However, in the last eighteen months I have been forced to rethink this whole strategy. Three things have prompted me to conduct this rethink.

In April 1997, I attended the St Augustine Seminar in London, which was called in order to write the preparatory material for the 1998 Lambeth Conference. I was allocated to Section III, which was concerned with our plural environment. The Section was chaired by an American bishop and had an American theologian as its Secretary. The Episcopal Church of the United States has developed a particular way of looking at the laity in their church life and mission. They decline to speak of the laity other than as the Laos of God, that is to say the whole people of God. They then speak of the Laos of God as called to the work of mission, a vocation that arises from the common baptism of all.

At one level I felt able to sympathise with this way of putting the question. But during the course of the Seminar it became clear to me, that there was something wrong with the way in which this formulation actually worked. I was concerned that the preparatory material should address the problems of Christian people who often have to live in hostile social environments, and how they as Christian people can be assisted to live faithfully in those circumstances. Again and again the focus of the Section seemed to me to be slipping back into the context of the church community and the plurality within the Anglican Communion. Something seemed to be wrong with the strategy.

Later in 1997 I attended a Seminar on Australia Anglican Theology in Brisbane. Here was a group of Australian theologians, intelligent and articulate, working at the theme, Towards a Theology of the Laity. We had useful and good papers presented to us. The discussion was lively and energetic. The instincts of those present were similar to mine in wanting to see how a theology could be developed which more effectively and more helpfully dealt with the challenges facing Christian people in modern Australia. Despite this, the group seemed to go around and around in circles. The very concept of laity seemed not able to lead us outside ecclesiana. The language of ministry seemed to be drawn magnetically back into the arena of ecclesiastical life. Vocation did not seem to be an adequate bridge.

After that seminar I mentally took a vow not to use the term laity for six months, but to try and find ways of speaking without the terminology which I had previously used. It was a salutary experience.

The third thing that has prompted reconsideration arises from my recent reading of the Greek New Testament. For the past year I have been reading through 1 and 2Corinthians. In the middle of last year I arrived at 1Corinthians 7, and in particular 1 Corinthians 7.20, "Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called." This prompted me to return again to the question of what is meant by "calling" in Paul's letters. This was not new territory for me, but the recent experience of trying to struggle with the way in which we speak about our situation in society as Christian people vividly underlined what I already knew but had forgotten.

In the Pauline letters it is almost always the case that God is the subject of the verb to call, and that for Paul calling is a calling to be Christian, to be in Christ, to peace with God, to reconciliation with God, to belonging to Christ. In other words, in Paul's usage vocation does not mean our employment or professional commitment. It is altogether to do with our calling from God to which we respond in faith and trust.

These three experiences have led me to believe that the idea of lay vocation has become a bad idea for Australian Anglicans. I want now to try and elaborate why I think it has become a bad idea and what I think we can do about it.

The Double Jeopardy

I believe that in the present circumstances we face a double jeopardy in this area

The first jeopardy is that when we speak of lay ministry, it inevitably comes to be thought of in an ecclesial context. For the Christian person living and working in society, which includes all Christians of course, ordained and unordained, lay ministry inevitably comes to mean lay ministry in church and as often as not it means doing what used to be called clerical things. I am all in favor of wide participation in our services and gatherings by all members of the congregation, ordained or unordained. How and it what way is another question. My point here is that such involvement, when spoken of as lay ministry has the effect of diminishing or even closing off the social and other contexts in which we live, and in which we are called to be Christian.

The second jeopardy arises from the fact that the meaning of "laity" comes to be defined by default as the alternative to "ordained". It is a derivative category, and when it is extended beyond the ecclesial context it lacks force and interpretative value.

In the remembered Christian society of our tradition, where the church was the spiritual face of that society this was a comprehensible distinction which could be carried into all reaches of society. However, in our circumstances the church is much more of a discrete community within a host society. The distinction "lay" and "clerical" has dramatically less significance in this wider context. The derivative quality of the concept "laity" means that its meaning and use is driven by the category "ordained", and that term now has valence in the narrower frame of a discrete sub-set of society, the church community.

The jeopardy therefore is that like the term ministry, the term laity is ineluctably drawn to the ecclesial and ecclesiastical context.

The phenomenon to which I am drawing attention is the powerful colonization of the terms "ministry" and "laity" by the predecessor cultural situation of Anglicanism. Sometimes this pattern is referred to as the Christendom or Constantinian model. In the important European Roman Catholic countries of Italy and France this Christendom model was a casualty of revolution and political conflict. The model lasted much longer in the Protestant countries of Europe, especially in England. The Anglican form of the Christendom model collapsed in Australia in 1836 as a result of the Bourke Act, and the general Christendom model which followed fell to the secular statism of the second half of the nineteenth century. It is not now part of our social and cultural arrangements.

The problem is that this predecessor model colonized the terms "laity/clerical" and in turn "ministry" was colonized in a clerical direction. The same is true to some extent of the term "vocation", though the power of this term derives from the rise and social power of the professions during the nineteenth century. The result is that these terms and categories now serve not only to confuse us in our attempts to be faithful in our present changing circumstances, but they also seriously hinder our capacity to think creatively about how we might be Anglican Christians in modern Australia.

The strategy which I previously used to overcome these problems was to emphasise lay vocation in society, and to speak of it as a forgotten calling which should be recovered. That strategy I have come to conclude does not work. The effect is to perpetuate personal confusion and it has proved to be ineffective in opening up the question of how we as Australian Anglicans are to live in modern Australia. It is ineffective in part because of what I have called semantic colonialism.

This particular example of lay vocation also illustrates the difficulty we have in recognising that we are no longer in Christendom, and that the church is no longer a spiritual government in society. Rather we are a discrete sub-group of people within society who by our profession of faith are called to be open and engaged with society in the way in which we live our lives.

It is sometimes feared that the alternative to the Christendom mentality is sectarianism. I think that is a bogey properly to be put aside. The very fact of the Reformation Settlements being what they were indicates that we belong to a religious tradition, which is open to engagement with others, whose community boundaries are porous.

What then might one do in these circumstances?

A CATEGORY / SEMANTIC STRATEGY

I want to suggest four things that will help us to open a window onto this question. If we are able to gain some clarity on this question then it will open up many other issues in our Christian experience in modern Australia as well.

The Terminology "Lay"

In 1997 I began my response to this problem by trying not to use the word "lay". I think that there is a great deal to be said for that strategy, but it becomes difficult in ecclesiastical organisational arrangements, because these distinctions are important in securing appropriate representativeness in decision-making arenas. They are also, of course, significant in labelling the power struggles between the ordained or unordained in our institutional arrangements. Such power struggles do not always have the effect of opening us up to the future.

My present proposal then, is that the term lay and laity should be reserved strictly as an ecclesiastical term in the narrow sense in which it is used in other professions. The risk in this strategy is that it treats the ordained as professionals and therefore runs the risk of perpetuating a nineteenth century reconstrual of the idea of the ordained in terms of modern ideas of professional. In the broader processes of society professionalisation was in one sense a staking of a claim to an area of expertise or knowledge. In that sense therefore, to speak of the clergy as professionals and others in the church as lay, may not be entirely helpful for clergy because it may lock them into this nineteenth century enlightenment model of knowledge and of theology, a model which is not only significantly out of step with the longer history of Christianity, but also is being significantly eroded by the forces of what we call post modernism. However, all that said, it still seems to me that the risks to clergy in the strategy are less and more readily dealt with by other means.

The benefits of such a semantic strategy of reserving the term lay and laity to the ecclesiastical realm is that it keeps it in relation to the real distinction which is involved. It helps to diminish the power of the residual legitimation markers of the Christendom model. We live in our society not as lay people, but as Christians, a category which includes both ordained and unordained.

Of course such a strategy raises serious questions as to the basis of these distinctions in the organisational arrangements of the church. That question of course is directly on our agenda as a church in this country already. We will only be able to deal with it on the basis of a better ecclesiology which sees the particular issue of ordination and the reservation of certain activities to the ordained, as in fact serving the whole. It is, I believe, not adequate to say that the arrangements that we have are simply a matter of order as if that were just an historical accident. On the contrary an ordered ministry is one of the institutional markers which serve to sustain the apostolic character of the community's faith. But that is a paper for another day.

So my first strategy is to reserve the term lay and laity strictly to the ecclesiastical arena.

My second strategy is to use the term vocation only to refer to our calling by God to belong to him. This is actually more in line with what Calvin actually says in his Institutes as distinct from the way in which his views have been developed in later European social theology. It also seems to me to be in line with what St Paul says; though of course the social circumstances and the social strategies which Paul adopted for his Christians, were cast in a very different environment.

A consequence of this second strategy would be that it underlines for us that where we are is where we are called to be Christians. It takes away from that location any absolute connotation of our being there. It emphasises that wherever we are we should belong to God. In other words it underlines the contingent character of the circumstances of our lives.

My third strategy is to speak of occasions and locations in which faithful Christians find themselves, according to the terms of the social circumstances. So one would speak about the environment in which we are called to be Christian, the environment of work, of entertainment or leisure, the family or social engagements, political activity, and civic involvements.

Most of these activities take place within institutional frameworks. It would greatly help us if we actually began with the reality of the social circumstances and sought to understand what that might mean in relation to our being Christian in those social circumstances.

If we do speak of the situation of Christians in terms of the social realities in which they find themselves, then it becomes manifest that we need a different and more radical kind of theology of the Christian life. A theology which is set in the context of an interpretation of those social realities. In such a theology there are two great challenges conceptually for Australian Anglicans. The first is an account of the plurality of Australian society, of our place in it, and the second is an account of institutions and institutionality and the way in which as Christians we are part of them.

I must say that I worry very much about the so-called lay theology, which is widely offered in courses, in that because of its structures, it does not and cannot address these questions. I suspect that a lay theology which realistically addresses these questions, may need to be located in a different institutional framework from the one which currently predominates. It may be that the increasing integration of our theological institutions with public universities will be a significant advantage in the transformation of the theology which is possible within those institutions.

My fourth strategy is to seek to reinvent and to re-imagine a way for the Christian community to be a distinct entity and agent in the social context. By this strategy I want to avoid our engagement with society being thought of simply in individual terms. We are not just individuals and our church is not just an aggregation of individuals. We are a community bound together to behave Christianly as a community as well as individuals. In that context I believe there is a place for church community action. I do not believe that has to be the whole church, but it may properly be Christian groupings acting socially even politically, and supported and encouraged by the whole Christian community.

I think of the work of Archdeacon Bill Kendall in the Bronx in New York. He stimulated Christian groups so that they were able to find the funds to rebuild the buildings, to enable the recreation of communities in the area of the Bronx, which had been dying and derelict for years. The result is, that creeping across the Bronx area of New York new communities in new environments are emerging despite the trends around them. It is a creation of a Christian group supported by the Christian community. It is an action, which speaks about care for the poor who dossed in the derelict buildings in upper New York.

What is at stake here is the cultivation of intervening social networks and institutions, which provide the framework or platform for securing freedom. Freedom needs to be secured in our day from the polarities of radical individualism on the one hand, and the inevitable tyranny which is the companion of such individualism on the other. We are, I believe, confronted with major community challenges as a result of the impact on us of the ideology and practices of the market. The market and its handmade post modernist individualism, has the capacity to undermine the basis of our freedoms in this country, and to make us subject through manipulation to the forces of a mass society and the power of the powerful. The Christian community, acting as a group can and should have a role in this situation.

So the four strategies that I commend to you are:

I believe that these strategies are more likely to:

To re-invent ourselves in this area will open up many possibilities and not a few risks to our own personal sacred cows. Like all perceptual shifts it will affect our practices and may even bring to birth in us a vivid sense of abandoning ourselves into God's hands. Such an abandonment is the first step to the renewal of our lives and of the church, for in the end, and from the beginning, the renewal of the church is the activity of God.

- Dr Bruce Kaye