In teasing out what it means to be a PSW, a key question is whether and how it affects the way we do our secular work, and whether and how it affects our
relationships with secular colleagues. In this section, quotations are taken from those labelled with the IPA themes of ‘church/secular interface’ and ‘work matters’.
Relevant sections of chapter 6 include 6.3 and 6.4, and specifically work in the saeculum, and the church in the saeculum.
… it's who I am, and it comes back to this ontological question: this is what I gave myself to be. … I was priested, and I can't erase that from my character, if I can put it like that. … it's … what are you at the bottom? … But the fascinating question for me, which I've asked often, is – does it affect the way I do my job here? And I don't know the answer to that …
During the course of the initial contextual conversation, the interviewees told me about their secular jobs, and how their priestly ordination fitted into the picture, and we discussed the impact of each on the other. While I did not specifically ask the question ‘does it [ordination] make any difference to how we do our jobs?’, I did probe connections they saw between their work in the church, and their work in their secular
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workplaces. Some interviewees felt that it was entirely positive, that each fed off the other constructively: “my calling is to be blended between ministry in secular
employment … ministry in the day job … and ministry in the parish … are equal and complementary to me”.
For others it was less clear: saying that ordination does make a difference could be construed as disparaging how colleagues do their jobs, while saying that there is no difference would suggest that ordination, or even faith, is meaningless in the
workplace:
But does your faith matter to you in the place of work? Well, yes, actually, it really does, it really needs to. So are you better at it than your secular colleagues? No, it would be wrong to say that I was, and that would be an awful thing to say. So I'm strung there between two different perceptions, looking with two eyes: one which I'm saying it's very important, my faith; and the other in which I'm saying it doesn't make me a better employee.
For some interviewees, the main issue was the practical one of keeping two significant areas of work going, while doing both properly:
… although I’ve got much better at saying, no – I can’t do that here, and I need to do that there. … it’s easy to feel a jack of all trades and master of none, that you do two half jobs badly, rather than the one job well.
This echoes a concern that some of the 1970s NSMs expressed in Hodge’s report (1983), that it was important to do their secular work properly, and not to allow
ministry to detract from that. Being in a secular workplace, allowing the challenges to be part of our priestly formation and ministry, however, is at the heart of being a PSW. The PSW has to:
… do a decent job of whatever it is you’re being paid for, and then, okay, the other, if appropriate, will come. But you cannot expect to go in there as the great I am now that I’ve got this collar, and all the rest of it, and have people treat you in any sort of different way …
That means sharing in everything, being as involved as everyone else in all that happens, good or not: “one of the things I enjoyed about the [workplace], was working with the tough bits because that way we were working with the real, and, in some sense, that we can't be so precious about our place, that we have always to be pure … [we have to] be happy to get our hands dirty, or else who will?”
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While PSWs who work in manufacturing industry or in the health service may literally get their hands dirty at work, none are immune from issues at work which challenge their faith, and ‘getting our hands dirty’ then has a personal cost. A teacher talked about the effect on her school of suddenly being classed as ‘failing’ when the criteria changed: “the stress that that immediately almost overnight brought to everyone at school, was horrendous”, leading to
… some really unfortunate patterns of behaviours, which I found very
uncomfortable and stressful. Sometimes I was a victim, sometimes I was just a witness. … I tried during that time to talk about it [to those in the church who should be able to offer support to a priest], but there was just total
incomprehension of what it’s like to go to the same people, the same place of work day after day after day, when you’re being reduced in the national press …
She talked later about the “corruption” this led to in school, as people resorted to inappropriate ways to improve results, and the way that affected her as a priest. Another interviewee talked about the moral cost in working in a service which was understaffed, relative to the demand: “either we can help nobody … or we could help some people, but we had to make the judgement”. Yet another talked about
conducting disciplinary hearings, a part of her current working life that she did not enjoy, while for another it was about working out how to teach business studies given the ubiquity of a profit-driven lens which he felt was contrary to his faith. One
interviewee told me about a female PSW he had known who worked as a secretary in a small building firm, whose experience was very different from his in a professional workplace:
… I learnt from her about what I didn’t know about, because of the nature of the life of the whole of that firm. And the whole question of what is divine was very different for her and for them …
An interviewee who worked in manufacturing industry emphasised the importance of putting on his high-visibility jacket and hard hat, experiencing all that his colleagues experienced. I doubt that he would, as I foolishly did in an interview with a recently retired manager, suggest there might be a compassionate way to make people redundant. The PSW to whom I said this firmly rejected it: “there is nothing vaguely … kind or affirming about being made redundant”, but she completely accepted that, as part of her role, it was necessary for her to be involved. Rather than feeling that, as a priest, she should keep clear of such situations, she ensured that she did it in a way which prioritised the welfare of the employee. She later commented that when
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she occasionally meets worker priests, who fulfil their priestly vocations through working on the shop floor, she defends her way of being a worker priest because management is also work that needs the impact of priestly presence.
Most PSWs, while perhaps not literally getting their hands dirty, use this as a metaphor to express how our way of being priests is different from that of the FTS: “people who have spent most of their life in full-time parish-based ministry, simply don't have the same experiences … I mean, all this management stuff and money, and decisions, and risk-taking and so on, and … that's not what you're about if you're a member of the clergy”. A PSW who had started out as an FTS talked about the “alienation of work” experienced by people in his parish who worked in a government weapons research station. He had wanted one to be a churchwarden, but this person felt he could not be confirmed, and so could not be a churchwarden, because being confirmed would force him to confront moral questions he could not afford to face if he wanted to keep his job (discussed further in section 9.2).
Anecdotes like this contributed to my interpretation of the PSW as necessary to the church’s involvement in the world in the saeculum, witnessing as it does to the need for Christians to live out their faith in ‘Babylon’. For both these PSWs, the “work questions people were bringing into their engagement with church, [that] we didn’t know how to deal with”, ultimately led them out of full-time parish ministry to become PSWs, seeing it as important for the church that some priests grapple with issues like those described here:
… an otherwise admirable bishop, but who also would say … ‘what can I do for you?’ And yet, I think we all felt it was the wrong way around: what could we do for him? Because, in a way, what an MSE does is to bring … an experience of work into the life of the clergy.
The alienation of work is an aspect of the civitas terrena, of life in Babylon. It is possible to interpret the situation in which the putative church warden found himself as an example of “Bonhöffer’s dilemma” that there is no choice but to be tainted by evil, despite being a Christian: “where Christians, in the same frailty and tension as any other human beings, become participants in specific violence they do so confessionally, acknowledging throughout the sin of it” (Stringfellow, 1973, pp. 132- 133). The PSWs saw it as important that not only would they seek the welfare of the people they work with (cf. Jeremiah 29.4-9), but that they were implicated in the same ethical issues as their fellow workers, and so could present an authentic Christian response:
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… he [PSW’s work colleague] said if more priests were like X [the PSW], I might actually consider, because X talks with me, listens to me, respects me, he does a job of work and I can relate to all that he says. If more people were like X in the church, I would actually look again.
The PSWs I spoke to were clear that they were not there to be workplace chaplains, apart from the two for whom it was part of their role description, with time specifically allocated for it. Even these two differentiated between that part of their work and their other responsibilities. A key difference is that, because the PSW is paid to do a secular job, they are subject to the same pressures as everyone else, whereas:
… the chaplain comes in and goes away, and comes in and goes away, and is insulated, in a personal sense, from what the people to whom they are chaplain are experiencing, because they don’t experience it themselves.
The PSW stands anxiously with the other employees when redundancy, or pension rights, are discussed, not arriving after the axe has fallen to provide pastoral support for those affected. In a secular workplace, you earn any right you may have to speak of matters of faith by being a fellow worker: taking your job seriously, doing it as well as you can, and taking what comes, good or bad, alongside everyone else.
Does our priesthood make a difference to our secular work? Work matters for the PSW not just because it helps us to identify with, and be accepted by, our colleagues, and not just because it gives us credibility, because we are subject to the same pressures and issues as they are. All the interviewees saw their secular work as an end in itself, and not a means to something else. They all talked about the fulfilment and satisfaction it gave them: “your work is valuable to God”. Indeed, four of the six interviewees had discerned their call to ordained ministry as much through their secular work as their church involvement, and felt that they had been called
specifically to be PSWs. The other two started out as FTS priests, but fairly early in their careers felt that their call was to be a priest in a secular work setting, rather than in a parish, because they wanted to engage with questions that the workplace poses to faith.
Being good at our jobs, doing them well, is as much a part of the PSW’s service to God, our way of participating in the missio Dei, as anything we do in church or in the parish. One interviewee told me of an occasion when his line manager complimented him on being his best bureaucrat: “I know … you didn’t accept the call to be a priest in the Church of God to be a bureaucrat, but it doesn’t stop you being good at it”. A PSW, who had recently retired as a school teacher, commented that: “the world of education hasn’t let me go yet, and I’m not letting it go”, because she felt she still had
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something to offer there. Both were celebrating their ability to do their secular work well, because they felt it was important to God, as did the PSW now working in a portfolio of voluntary occupations, one of which is research in a very niche area, which she saw as “exploring the real meaning of what some people a long while ago did … partly for the glory of God”. As she said this, I remembered a girl I sat next to in school, many decades ago, who used to write AMDG in the top margin on every page of her exercise books – Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, to the greater glory of God.
For me, this sums up a major feature of the vocation to be a PSW, that our secular work is in many ways the key to our priestly vocation: we do it as well as we can to the glory of God, to help build Christ’s kingdom here on earth, to participate in the missio Dei:
… your work is valuable to God, it’s just everything you do. … because it’s your job, that’s your vocation.
<And you do it well because you – this is what you do and that’s important to God?>
Yes.
7.3
Narrative 3: how does this proclaim Christ to the
world?
This narrative is about the relationship between the PSW and the wider, secular world. Themes from the IPA on which it is based include ‘church/secular interface’, ‘aware of God in all of life’, and ‘building the kingdom’. It is also based on theological literature discussed in sections 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3: the missio Dei, theology and models of priesthood, sacred space and sacramental presence.
… that’s the acid test for anything we do here, how does this proclaim Christ to the world? … proclamation isn't just shouting; proclamation is saying, actually, there's a whole way of looking at life if you factor in even covertly the God of Jesus Christ. And factor that in and the world looks different, and you may even concede it looks better. Even if you don't accept the gospel of Christ, you may concede that this is a way of looking at life that answers questions that your world view doesn't answer.
The PSW who works alongside others may well have far more opportunity to
demonstrate a different way of looking at the world than does the FTS who only sees people in the time outside work: “I think it’s a question of being a presence, of
bringing the church into the community in a very tangible way.” An important aspect of being a PSW in a secular workplace, therefore, is the opportunities this creates to
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form connections and bridges between life in the church and life outside it. The PSW, in common with lay Christians in the workplace, has the duty and the opportunity, as part of their contribution to the missio Dei, to ensure that a Christian perspective is heard, which expresses “how religious people think, rather than what people think religious people think”, and which helps people to see the world differently.
The interviewees understood proclaiming Christ as something that happens through relationships, and that it is generally “slow and long and gentle”. For one, it is about enabling others to understand their Monday to Saturday lives as part of the missio Dei:
… it’s about ordinary people being able to see and feel that everything that they do is part of vocation, in inverted commas, or building the kingdom, or service to God, or whatever particular terms you want to use for it.
She illustrated what she meant by talking about the “lady who does the coffee rota” who is a hairdresser, listening to her clients’ problems, giving advice, chatting to them, and generally making them feel better about themselves and their lives (this is discussed further in section 9.2). It is part of the role of the PSW to help such a person recognise that what she is doing in her daily work is Christian service,
because the PSW has “to work it out for themselves, they are better placed … to help people work it out for themselves”, especially if the “vicar is not going to acknowledge that as a form of service, as a general rule”. This may be unfair to many FTSs, but it is not uncommon for lay Christians to feel that it is running the church coffee rota which forms their Christian service, rather than understanding their daily work as part of the missio Dei. Many Christians limit their understanding of ministry to what happens in church, and so part of the significance of PSWs is that their ministry “is not merely non-stipendiary, it's secular”. I interpret the failure of both ministers and lay Christians to interpret secular work as a potential contribution to the missio Dei as an instance of the misunderstanding that the kingdom of God is somehow more present in the visible church than outside it.
A PSW employed in a multi-ethnic workplace, where there are people of all faiths and none, saw no problem in talking about matters of faith with them all, not to convert others to his way of thinking, “but trying to broaden the horizons and the world view of those around me, but also accepting and listening to them with their faith”. His
openness to insights from the faith of others resonates with the interviewee who admitted that there are times when his Christian world view “doesn't answer the questions that their world view does”. All the interviewees indicated in one way or another that just because we are people of faith, it does not mean we have all the
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answers, and that we can learn from our non-religious colleagues and colleagues of other faiths.
Not all PSWs can speak openly about their faith, however. One interviewee talked