I wrote a book a decade ago on precisely this theme. Wisdom and Ministry (SPCK, 2008) was an elaboration of ordination retreat addresses I'd already given in the Diocese of Durham. My focus on wisdom in relation to public ministry had been prompted a few years earlier when the Church of England draft revised ordination rites were presented to the General Synod. I made a speech about the readings from the Hebrew Bible that were proposed for ordinations. All of them, I recall, were drawn from the Prophets: call-narratives like Isaiah's "Here am I: send me" (Isaiah 6. 1-8), and Jeremiah's "I have put my words in your mouth" (Jeremiah 1.4-12), or passages that affirm the prophet's vocation, like the Isaiah passage quoted by Jesus in St Luke, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me" (Isaiah 61.1-3).
Now these are all great texts, I told the Synod. But invariably to read passages such as these at ordinations suggested that the role of a Church of England vicar in the contemporary world was like being a Hebrew prophet in antiquity. I said that I seriously doubted that. And despite the importance of being able to speak "prophetically" on occasion, it would be seriously misleading to expect clergy to function as "prophets" all the time. Years ago Bishop John Habgood once spoke about the relentless call on church leaders to "speak prophetically". He said that it's very hard to do when you can see several sides of the same question. I guess that "being prophetic" is all the more effective if we don't attempt it too often.
But Habgood's seeing many sides to the same question is precisely what wisdom is about. So in my Synod speech I offered a model for public ministry that I believed was closer to our contemporary reality. This could be found among the wise of ancient Israel. Here were men and women whose role was to reflect on our human experience, help us find our place in creation, discern God's presence in ordinary life, foster our capacity to "see into the life of things" and find meaning there, explore the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of life such as purpose, destiny, suffering and love, handle the ambiguities and paradoxes of life, and above all to, be led by wisdom into reverencing and loving the God who is "not far from any one of us" as St Paul put it in his sermon at Athens (Acts 17.16-34).
So my ordination addresses were based on wisdom texts that I believed spoke straightforwardly to the privileges and demands of ministry today. Solomon's prayer for wisdom at the outset of his reign, for example (1 Kings 3.3-15), or precepts for living and leading wisely in the first nine chapters of Proverbs, or wisdom-influenced stories of leadership in action like those of Joseph (Genesis 37-50) and David (2 Samuel 9-20, 1 Kings 1-2, the so-called "Court History" or "Succession Narrative"). And I drew on other wisdom writings to suggest how in preaching and pastoral ministry we bear witness to the central issues of human life that are common to our human race: suffering (Job and some of the Psalms), meaning and purpose (Ecclesiastes), love (Song of Songs).
After the Cardiff day, someone tweeted about what I'd tried to share. Not the drama of the edgy + prophetic, or busyness of the big personality charismatic leader, but priest as humble servant of Holy Wisdom. Yes. Which put succinctly what I was on about. I could have spoken at length about the danger, as I see it, of the romantic idea of the minister-as-hero: always energetically engaged in some grand projet (and being remembered for it), fixated by strategic plans, smart objectives and measurable outputs. It plays into the excitable culture which it's easy for the church to emulate (as it already has in some quarters), like Paul's Athenians loving anything that is new and different and that arouses us from our unacknowledged boredom with religion. I caricature of course. I'm all for thinking and planning ambitiously for the sake of the gospel. My concern is how the big, the dramatic and the busy can be better grounded in a proper Christian humility, better rooted in a contemplative, ancient and holy wisdom. I want to ask how we all learn to become, as the good jargon has it, reflective practitioners in the spirit of our great Anglican forebears.
Hebrew wisdom is full of both encouragements and warnings to those who lead. In my session on David, I drew attention to how the story gives us what Robert Alter calls "the most unflinching insight into the cruel processes of history and into human behaviour warped by the pursuit of power. And nowhere is the Bible’s astringent narrative economy, its ability to define characters and etch revelatory dialogue in a few telling strokes, more brilliantly deployed.” It shows “an unblinking and abidingly instructive knowingness about man as a political animal in all his contradictions and venality and all his susceptibility to the brutalisation and the seductions of exercising power.”
The beauty of the narrative is how it doesn't do the work for you of asking questions about your own leadership style and use (or abuse) of power. At the end of the session I set out the seven "Nolan Standards in Public Life" and invited my audience to lay it over the story of King David as a template by which to calibrate his performance. These are ethical values and virtues that should be required of anyone in a public role - monarchs, political leaders and elected representatives, educators, civil servants, business leaders and, yes, clergy and readers! Here's the list: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership-by-example.
I'm pretty confident that the author of Proverbs or the stories of Joseph and David would endorse that list. So having begun to understand the successes and failures of David's reign, his virtues and his flaws, we as ministers need to apply the same wisdom/Nolan template to our own careers too. This should be one of the tasks of the Church of England's programme of Ministry Development Review (MDR). This isn't about reviewing attainment targets or dwelling on past achievements and future objectives for their own sake. It needs to focus on how to promote development and growth in ministry, how to address precisely the leadership challenges posed in the story of David. I measure that not by success or failure, but by how far our progress as ministers is being informed and motivated by an underlying God-given wisdom.
"Priest as humble servant of Holy Wisdom." In Greek, that is Hagia Sophia, elided by ancient Christian readers of the Hebrew Bible with the Holy Spirit who is the Comforter, Teacher and Advocate. I gave another set of ordination addresses last year on the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus that is sung at all ordinations of priests in the famous seventeenth century version of John Cosin in the Book of Common Prayer: Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire. You can read that as a prayer to, and for, Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. What better hymn to sing, what better prayer to offer as we serve God in this sacred vocation of bearing witness to grace and truth in the name of the church?
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