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THE author announces his thesis provocatively enough: “For 350 years the Church of England has been haunted by a pattern of parochial ministry which is based upon a fantasy and has been untenable for 100 of those years. The pattern, derived from a romantic and wrong-headed false memory of the life and ministry of George Herbert, finally died on the South Bank of the Thames in the mid-1960s — and nobody noticed.”
There follows a well-informed account of Herbert in context, reminding us that the saint of Fugglestone-with-Bemerton was in fact in his single-parish post for less than three years. Justin Lewis-Anthony then takes us through the changing status of the clergy in the following centuries, drawing substantially on Anthony Russell’s well-known work on the professionalisation of the clergy in the 19th century.
He coins the term “Herbertism” to refer to a tenacious but unsustainable model of ministry, wrongly claiming Herbert as inspiration, in which the priest runs everything and is available to all.
This actually expired, he claims, in the self-proclaimed failure of the social-praxis ministry led by Nicolas Stacey in Woolwich. But it is a model that still haunts us, whenever it is assumed that “the clergy of the Church of England are to be omni-present, omni-competent and omni-affirming.” A chapter entitled “The Cult of Nice” is appropriately followed by a chapter on the classic lineaments of clergy burnout.
As Lewis-Anthony moves from demolition to reconstruction, the book becomes more theological, and he shapes several chapters around themes drawn from an essay by Rowan Williams in celebration of Michael Ramsey’s writing on priesthood. Other heroes include Küng and Schillebeeckx, Yoder and Hauerwas, Bonhoeffer and Neibuhr. It’s good to be reintroduced to the giants, though the summaries read at times like a tour of the author’s theological education rather than a development of the book’s argument.
The final chapter offers a renewed approach to priestly ministry. Successive chapters commend a rule of life (the author appends his own as an example), clear job-descriptions, the insights of systems theory, and an understanding of leadership styles and of conflict management. These are all helpful, drawing heavily on authorities in each area, though they provide an overview of contemporary good practice rather than the radical re-thinking that the book’s subtitle promises.
If You Meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him is full of good material that doesn’t always seem to belong to the same book. Justin Lewis-Anthony enjoys an attractive, opinionated style that is undermined at times by a cocky, knowing tone. He has a gift for sharp anecdotes, but can’t resist the odd snide remark about particular bishops. He presents a helpful range of authorities, but is over-dependent on citation (not always identifiable without resort to the endnotes). The use of George Herbert is an imaginative way into his subject, although it sets us up to expect a more original prescription for con-temporary ministry than the sound advice that he actually delivers.
Nearly 30 years ago, one of the author’s heroes, Edward Schillebeeckx, slipped a sentence into his book Ministry which a clericalised Church has never cared to unpack: “Another fundamental consequence of the canon of Chalcedon was that a minister who for any personal reason ceased to be the president of a community ipso facto returned to being a layman in the full sense of that word.” Now that might be a thought to start some radical rethinking of priestly ministry.
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