Disappearing Clergy
Sot,—The key to Mr. Stockwood's thinking seems to be this: " This country . . . pays for schools and teachers and doctors. . . . If it believes in the Christian religion it must pay for the plant and fhe men." (1) The people do not " believe in the Christian religion." (2) They are under no obligation to believe in it. (3) It is the chief function of the Church (the Holy Catholic Church embracing all from Plymouth Brethren to Quakers and Roman Catholics) to persuade them and convert them and then to sustain them.
(1) and (2) being true, (3) should be the hourly preoccupation of the Church (was there not a famous document, Towards the Conversion of England?) But the Church is in no condition to evangelise effectively because she (that is, people like Mr. Stockwood) seems to think that the obligation to believe comes before the obligation to persuade. I share his resentment at the imposition on non-Roman clergy of a poverty accepted (and therefore sanctified) by Roman Catholics. But the poverty is not merely material. It is spiritual, tactical and strategic. The Church is a misshapen key that we insist must turn the padlock on men's spirits.
That being so, being a priest or a minister is today very largely an ill-paid waste of a good man's time. All the Churches are failing and failing conspicuously because they insist (in the midst of some frenzied attempts to ginger up the institutions: for instance the Free Church "Forward " movements) that the people's difficulties must fit the Churches' solutions; I would not advise any young man to enter the Christian ministry today unless he was prepared (a) to accept poverty; (b) to spend the next thirty years watching a steady decline and working for a complete transformation of—on my side of the fence—the Free Churches ; (c) to cultivate in poverty and patience rich qualities of character and spirit, a love for men and women, and complete, hardly won, but unquestioning certainty that, after Mr. Stockwood had gone, God will still raise up witness to build on what foundations they have laid. These men I would not describe as ministers. I would call them missionaries. The greatest obstacle to effective witness by our Churches is the bogey of " Christian Britain" and " our Christian Inheritance." It is not an accusation to say that we are pagan. It is a fact. Face the fact, and at least some Churches will get past their leaders (who feel of more public consequence in a mythical " Christian " Britain titan they could do in an actual pagan Britain) and will give. We have no title to receive. We have only an obligation to give.—Yours sincerely, Editor, the British Weekly.
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