THE COVID 19 emergency has taken over every aspect of our lives since mid-March – personal, commercial, educational and, in the church, spiritual, sacramental and relational. Can live-streamed or recorded worship and pastoral visiting by telephone fill parishioners’ needs? While it seems impossible, this is all we have for now. The larger question of how this will affect the church of the future will be considered at a later date. For now, Robin Eames offers his thoughts on the crisis, while Aonghus Mayes and Daniel Nuzum write on how they have been meeting the challenge in parish and hospital chaplaincy respectively.
But there are deeper questions than these.
Where is God in all this? How does it relate to the intensifying climate crisis? Will the human race survive? What happens next? Jacob Erickson of TCD is addressing such issues in his research and shares the fruit with us.
From the future to the past: the development of ordination and ministry training in the C of I since the 1960s has been remarkable, every decade bringing new initiatives. Only a small part of the story was told in last year’s Irish Anglicanism 1969–2019; in this issue Áine Hyland gives a fuller picture of its evolution and its leadership.
Not only training, but the nature and conditions of ministry in the Church themselves continue to require constant attention and
Improvement. If the Gospel is to be communicated and lived out in an inspiring manner, each decade will bring new challenges or intensify old ones. One such challenge in recent years has been the amount of clergy breakdown in the face of increasing secularisation and administrative overload. Psychotherapist Sue Phillips offers some helpful thoughts in this connection, noting the lack of effective counseling structures to help maintain clergy wellbeing.
Another challenge, an overdue one made more urgent in the face of declining numbers of clergy, is that of encouraging and enabling ‘every member ministry’ in the churches. In this, the Church of Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church have been moving forward on slightly different paths, which hopefully can enrich one another. David Godfrey and Maria Murphy, from overlapping church communities in West Dublin, share their experience and hopes for an increasingly lively ‘ministry of all believers’.
And the Brexit challenges remain ever present. In this issue Kenneth Milne outlines what they mean for the Church of Ireland and urges us to keep ourselves informed and active in
this area.
Contents
Training for ministry in the Church of Ireland, 1969 – 2019
IN THE CONTEXT of the 150th anniversary of the Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, I contributed an essay on theological training in the Church to the book Irish Anglicanism 1969 – 2019 published last year. Having no first-hand knowledge of the work of the Theological College before being appointed to the review team set up by the House of Bishops in 2002, I focused almost exclusively in this essay on the period from 2005 to 2019, making only brief reference to the earlier years.
LIKE MOTHS to a flame, plagues, pandemics and pestilence have long, extravagant religious and theological histories. The book of Exodus meditates on the shock and awe plagues that range from locusts to the death of firstborn sons leading to the first Passover. John of Patmos, the writer of the book of Revelation, points to a host of deadly plagues from sores to darkness to unseemly weather.
CLOSED churches. Locked parochial halls. Silent pulpits. Restricted funeral services. Hospital and care homes no longer on regular clergy visiting lists. Home calls and the house bound now a phone call rather than a doorbell away. Sunday routines a new experience. As for Holy Week and Easter Day . . .
Parish ministry in the pandemic – with no public worship, visiting or personal contact
TURN THE clock back a couple of months and I’m sure few of us would have predicted the restrictions to everyday life we now face. We’ve become acquainted with some new and unfamiliar phrases: lockdown, self-isolation, social distancing. Eleanor Parker in her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, called the whole situation ‘a long Lent’, which sounds much less frightening than ‘global pandemic’.1 Whichever term we use, it does not change the strange and uncertain times we have been living through, or the difficulties we have faced as clergy, in working out how we can best respond, particularly in light of the suspension of public worship and pastoral visitation.
The COVID-19 dilemma: how to maintain physical distance without sacrificing pastoral closeness
RELATIONSHIP and presence are at the heart of all pastoral ministry. Many dimensions of God’s grace and care are expressed in physical and embodied ways through the person of the pastoral minister. The onslaught of COVID-19 in recent weeks has posed an enormous problem for pastoral care under these conditions and has challenged us – chaplains, clergy and the church in general – to think of new ways to connect and to care in physically isolated and distant ways. How can we minister when we cannot be physically present?
Addressing clergy breakdown: self-care as preventive medicine
FOR A NUMBER of years there has been anxiety in the Church of Ireland about members of the clergy who have fallen victim to stress- related illness, whether physical, mental or emotional, and have lacked the support they needed. There have even been a number of suicides, one of them earlier this year.
From overlapping C of I and RC parishes in west Co. Dublin, Maria Murphy of St Patrick’s Esker, and Very Revd David Godfrey of Lucan, reflect on the actuality and potential for collaborative ministry in their area, where their churches work together in a number of areas.
BREXIT IS by no means a done deal, despite what its supporters may wish to be the case, and surely the corona virus has put paid to any such prospect, for if ever the continent of Europe needed stability and international co-operation, that time is now. Negotiations on the terms of the future relationship between EU and UK have commenced and have yet to be agreed, in particular where trade is concerned, though it seems that to some extent consensus has been achieved on the rights of UK citizens in the EU and vice-versa and in the matter of the UK’s parting financial obligation.
