More clergy, or less?

Someone on twitter (who will remain nameless) recently asked "what would it take to have a vicar in every parish?".

It was an interesting question, but I had - have - some serious problems with the question. The core question is that we need more "paid" people make church happen for us. I think that the opposite is in fact the truth.

Putting the question another way round, what would be the effect of having a full-time (and so, almost certainly paid in some form) minister in every church in the UK (just to stretch it beyond the CofE)? The effect would be, I think, to kill off lay work in local churches. There are two reasons for this:

1. Having someone paid as a full time minister would make it easy to leave all of the local ministry work to the minister - especially as a lot of this needs to happen during the day, and many church members are working during the day (in particular to pay for these ministers), and so the minsiter is liable to be driving these and making them happen. This is not to say that others will not be involved, but it makes it likely that the minister will have a significant role.

2. If we were to populate every church with a minister, all of the people in the churches who have any leadership sense, any ideas, any drive, would be needed to stock these churches. This would also tend to empty the churches of natural leaders, remove any sense of lay leadership for the simple reason that the lay leaders would not be there.

I should point out that the issue is not about them being paid - the same issues apply even if they are not paid to fulfill their role, although this has a new set of issues. If you don't pay your ministers, then you will only attract people who can do this without recompense.

At core, I think the problem is that we do still too often rely on "clergy", in the sense of professionals to do the ministry work.

As I will expound more in another post, there are plenty of people and organisations providing support to people who need it, and it might do better to support them, become involved with them, than try to set up new systems, or try to maintain unsupportable systems.

Of course, as always, I might be wrong.