John Henry Newman: a personal debt

Tomorrow, John Henry Newman is to be canonised in a ceremony at the Vatican. He will be the first English man or woman to be pronounced a saint since the seventeenth century. So this is an event of major significance to Christians in this country as well as worldwide.

And I mean Christians in an ecumenical sense, not just Catholics. For Newman was the most famous (some said notorious) Catholic convert of the nineteenth century. He was brought up as an Anglican with evangelical tendencies. But his studies of the Christian fathers and the medieval church led him progressively to contemplate a vision of the church that was larger in its embrace and more profound in its theological and spiritual reach than the protestantism in which he had been reared. As one of the leading Tractarians of the Oxford Movement launched in 1833, he preached and wrote energetically in defence of the Church of England as an organic part of the ancient catholic church, for the time being divided but always yearning for ultimate union.

That theological position proved unsustainable for Newman. Always a man of conscience and integrity, he came to realise that the logic of his developing convictions was pointing him away from Anglicanism and towards Roman Catholicism. He crossed the threshold in October 1845. It’s not correct to say that “the rest is history”. His was a questing, searching pilgrim soul, so beautifully and accurately described in his famous hymn Lead, kindly Light. Perhaps he was always too much of an Anglican to regard his conversion as any kind of terminus. Books like The Development of Doctrine articulated his belief that revelation, illumination, “faith seeking understanding” as Anselm said, never stops. “To live is to change” said Newman, “and to live long is to have changed much”. Even a cardinal of the Catholic Church!

On the eve of his canonisation, I want to recall the influence of John Henry Newman on my own formation as a Christian and a priest. In my teenage and student years, I was a fervent evangelical of the most conservative kind. I embraced Calvinism to a degree that was thought extreme even by Christian Union mentors. As an ordinand I inevitably chose to train at what was then regarded as the most reformed and protestant of all the Anglican evangelical theological colleges. (It amuses me now that some colleagues conjecture that I must have studied at Westcott House or Cuddesdon! Let the reader understand.)

In those days, nearly five decades ago, if you had a degree in theology, your training for ministry could be improvised around the Bishops’ modest academic requirements alongside gaining practical experience in pastoral ministry. My tutor sat down with me and asked what I thought I needed to do by way of study during my final year before ordination. I replied that my theology degree had given me a rigorous grounding in the Bible and the Fathers. But my knowledge of church history more or less stopped at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Perhaps I needed to dip my toe into modernity? My tutor’s response was immediate. “Your experience of church has been limited to protestantism. But there’s a bigger world out there. Have you ever read John Henry Newman’s Apologia?”

It’s one of those questions I’ll always be grateful for. Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua was published in 1864. It is his “defence of his own life” in response to Charles Kingsley’s attack on him for lacking honour and integrity in abandoning his Anglicanism. It’s one of the classics of spiritual autobiography of the Victorian or any other age. I found a copy in a secondhand bookshop and paid, I think, 20 pence for it. I don’t want to dramatise things, but it’s not too much to say that it changed my life.

As I began to read, I found I was struggling somewhat. Not with Newman’s limpid writing (he was an acknowledged master of English prose). It was his intellectual and spiritual thought-world. I almost said sound-world, an interesting comment on the almost aural effect of reading him. It was so different from, even alien to, what I was used to. This was a different kind of journey, or at least a differently described quest for holiness from what was familiar to me. We didn’t use the tiresome language of comfort-zones (being out of) in those innocent days, but this was where I was finding myself. Thank God for discomfort!

What changed everything were three insights in particular. The first was the realisation that Christian belief and the church's experience walk hand in hand. What we call “the tradition” isn’t a fixed immutable body of biblical texts or formal dogma so much as a living memory of how the church has reflected on its faith across the centuries. This is what Newman had come to call “the development of doctrine”. It echoed a saying of one of the Scottish Covenanters that I’d come to love: “God has more light and truth to shine out from his holy word”. I glimpsed how the formulation of Christian thought - any thought - was a dynamic process. Tradition means that which is “ handed on”. Newman’s reverence for tradition as a process recognised how each generation cherishes what it has received in order to pass it on to the next. It shouldn’t have been a startling discovery (not if I’d been paying attention to St Paul in 1 Corinthians).  But for me, a light had been switched on.

The second insight from the Apologia was about the place of conscience. For Newman, conscience was crucial in the forming of Christian mind and character. The externals of belief could never stand on their own, disconnected from their inner reception and embrace by the believer’s conscience. That’s about integrity and honour, "truth in the inward parts" as the Prayer Book version of Psalm 51 puts it, the very qualities Kingsley had accused Newman of lacking. And quite suddenly I realised that this was a personal dilemma for me too. It dawned on me that my evangelicalism was not going to survive this Tractarian scrutiny unchanged. And that would mean a serious renegotiation of my faith and my relationship with what I was coming to speak about as my own tradition. Again, I won’t dramatise by speaking of a “Here I stand” moment. But this profoundly disturbing yet liberating discovery of the role of conscience did, I think, prove life-changing.

Newman’s final gift to me was the spirituality with which his writing was imbued. Quite simply, I found it irresistible. Possibly for aesthetic reasons that bear closer  examination (how easy it is to be seduced by Newman!) I was becoming catholic not only in my thinking but also in my praying and feeling. I found myself increasingly at odds with evangelical worship, especially its relentless stream of words, its extraverted busyness and its lack of feeling for the numinous. I can see that this probably sounds like a caricature, but it’s what I was experiencing at the time. No doubt personality type, temperament, comes into liturgy and spirituality. If so, I owe to Newman the instinct to take it more seriously. Eventually I came to serve as a curate in what we would now call an affirming catholic parish where they wore eucharistic vestments, swung the censer from time to time, preached a socially inclusive intelligent Christianity and reserved the sacrament. How much I learned there! It set the direction of my entire ministry.

So it seemed fitting to include a hymn by Newman in our marriage service, “Praise to the Holiest in the height”. A year later my wife sang Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius with the local choral society and I heard that great work for the first time. Newman’s poem, from which the hymn is drawn, is not without its flaws. But somehow that performance in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre set the seal on a personal journey I knew would be lifelong.

Decades later I found myself in the company of - well, I won’t name him because he is a well-known church leader. Without any preamble, as if he’d been saving up for this moment, he looked me in the eye: “Michael, back in the seventies we were looking to you as a future leader of evangelicals in the Church of England. It all looked so promising. What happened to you?” It was hardly the question I’d been expecting as we sat over a cup of tea enjoying Belgian biscuits. But I didn’t hesitate with my answer. “I read John Henry Newman” I replied. “That’s all.” “Ah. I see now” he said and smiled. And changed the subject.

After all these years, how better to acknowledge the debt than to echo Newman’s own praise to his Creator and Redeemer, the Holiest in the height: “in all his words most wonderful, most sure in all his ways!”

** There are many Newmans. Like all great men and women, he encounters us in different ways. Here's another blog about him on the Laudable Practice website. It's a somewhat different take on him, but well worth reading. This week's edition of The Tablet also has a number of thought-provoking articles.

The Report on Cathedrals: Further Thoughts

Last week I blogged about the report on cathedrals produced by a working group under the chairmanship of Bishop Adrian Newman and now published as a draft for consultation. I warmly welcomed the report as a real attempt to get to grips with cathedral governance in the light of the recent difficulties experienced at two cathedrals, Peterborough and Exeter.

I need to say a little more, not least following discussions I've had since the publication of the report. The first point is a general one. Several times the report asks us not to cherry-pick the recommendations but accept them as a package. I think they will (in the words of a well-known politician) have to whistle for it. It's not realistic to imagine that the reviewers will have got everything right, even when the consultation period is over and their final report written. It's true that some of the recommendations inevitably have implications for others, but that's the way of things. No text is so perfect that it can't be improved in the light of wise and patient discernment.

A central theme of the report concerns accountability. In particular, there has been a lot of discussion about the proposed direct accountability of residentiary canons to the dean (and of lay cathedral staff through the chief operating officer). I have to recognise that what follows is inevitably the perspective of a retired dean - though before serving as a dean in two cathedrals (Sheffield and Durham), I was myself a residentiary (at Coventry), one of its two full-time "Commissioners' canons". It may be a case of "well he would say that, wouldn't he?" But let me try to be as objective as I can.

I regard canons residentiary as senior roles in a cathedral, and agree with the report that exceptional gifts and talents are needed in those who are going to lead in key aspects of a cathedral's mission such as worship and music, education and learning, pastoral care and outreach. I was 37 when I became canon precentor at Coventry. That fitted the profile of the report that wants to see younger men and women appointed to these posts because they offer unrivalled opportunities for the formation and development of future leaders (not only as deans, I should say). But at Coventry, my fellow Commissioners' Canon was an older, more experienced man from whom I learned a great deal as I tried to understand the Cathedral and my role within it. So I don't buy the apparent implication that residentiary canonries should no longer be offered to those who, through their long years of parish or sector ministry also have distinctive insights to bring to cathedrals.

Indeed, perhaps only an older ordained colleague on the Chapter will have the confidence (or do I mean courage?) to challenge the dean when necessary. No team leader should be exempt from this. "Challenge" does not mean behaving seditiously or subverting the leader's authority. It means asking necessary questions so that decisions are properly scrutinised and the best outcome achieved. My experience of working with Chapter colleagues who in age have been more or less my peers was that even when their exacting questions ("challenge” is not too strong a word), were uncomfortable, they were for the best. I encouraged colleagues to speak up. I strongly discouraged deference (not that my colleagues were much given to it!). Our debates were robust at times. But because we were all trying to act in the best interests of the cathedral, I believe we were working together in an essentially healthy culture.

However, a team will only function well when roles are clearly defined and understood (this is a subtext of much of this report). This applies to its leadership. To me it is clear that the dean must be allowed to lead. He or she needs to be acknowledged as the head of a religious foundation, that is, the body corporate of the cathedral, and therefore as the leader of the senior "ministry team", i.e. the dean-and-residentiary-canons, as well as chair of the chapter as the governing body. The accountabilities flow from this. In day to day terms, I don't see how the canons could not be accountable to the dean as members of his or her team. Provisions about ministry development review (MDR) flow from this (though not necessarily exclusively - for it remains the bishop's prerogative to review anyone who holds his or her licence, including the dean and canons).

But this needs to be understood in quite a sophisticated way. Because according to the Cathedrals Measure, the ultimate accountability of both dean and canons is to the chapter itself. So the day to day relationships of canons to the dean expresses their common loyalty to the chapter. The dean has no authority independent of the chapter (except in the very limited ways spelled out in the Measure). His or her role is to be its guardian, its representative and its mouthpiece. Which is why a dean is always primus inter pares presiding over a governing body and a ministry team that are collaborative in every aspect of their work. If this is the presumption (and how could it be otherwise in today's church?), residentiary canons have nothing to fear from the new arrangements for governance and management that are proposed in the report.

However, as I've said before, no system of governance is better than the human beings who inhabit it. The best structures in the world won't protect cathedrals from abuses of power and status - and unfortunately, these don't simply reside in the pages of the Barchester novels. Only virtues like wisdom, self-awareness and emotional intelligence, married to a shrewd reading of human nature, can ensure that it all works as it should to serve the cathedral's mission. This highlights the importance of having a values statement as well as a purpose statement so that it's clear not only about what the cathedral exists to do but how it will behave in pursuit of that purpose.

But there does seem to me to be an anomaly in the report. I alluded to it in my previous blog. The review is very hot on accountability within the cathedral institution, and it is right to be. Yet when it comes to the chapter's own accountability, it weakens it considerably. It's true that it recommends that cathedrals are brought into the regulatory framework of the Charity Commission, and that make sense to me. However, top-level oversight of that kind can never be enough. There is a need for rigorous scrutiny to which executive bodies in every institution should be subject, if only to provide public assurance reports that all is as it should be. This is where the council comes in at present. I have to say that particularly in Durham, we took this very seriously (not least thanks to the quality of the council chair who had (has) wide experience in the corporate world). The discipline it imposed on the chapter was invaluable.

So while not all deans agree, I remain puzzled that the report removes the legal requirement for the council to hold the chapter to account on behalf of the bishop, diocese and wider community. Audit committees are necessary for scrutiny, but as committees of the chapter they don't have the necessary independence. The report wants to see a "quinquennial inspection" of the cathedral's operations, and this is welcome, but that too doesn't provide for continuing oversight and answerability. Bishops' visitations remain an option but because of their complexity and cost they tend only to be invoked when problems arise in cathedrals. (In nearly 30 years of cathedral ministry, I never experienced one.) So to write the legal functions out of the council's brief seems to me to be a mistake. It could open the way for a badly led chapter to behave autonomously and even recklessly in the way some were famously accused of doing before the Cathedrals Measure of 1999. And if (God forbid!) a cathedral ever suffered under a mad, wicked or incompetent dean, who, in the absence of the council (for which this is one of its statutory functions) would petition the bishop to instigate a process for his or her removal?

Enough for now. There's another big question that continues to exercise me and it's this. Running a cathedral well, even a small one, is a big assignment. And while the chapter is the body legally responsible for the life of its cathedral, it takes a special combination of spiritual wisdom, theological insight, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, organisational ability and leadership skill to equip a dean to lead such a complex entity. My question is, what do we look for when deans are appointed? What is a good dean? I'd be sorry if deans ended up as no more than ultra-competent CEOs of their cathedrals. If they did, what would be the point of deans being ordained at all? Discuss!