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The Website of John A Williams
John Williams has been an ordained minister of the Church of England since 1986. For the last seventeen years he has worked in diocesan education and training, and for the last ten in Local Collaborative Ministry. Over the years he has published around 15 articles on theological topics including Ecclesiology and Ministry, Faith and Contemporary Culture and Sociology of Religion. John is passionately committed to seeking the renewal of local church life through affirming and enabling the gifts of the whole people of God in each place, challenging the dependency culture of the clerically-dominated church. As a key part of this challenge, he is committed to Adult Christian Education that liberates Christian people to reflect upon and re-appropriate their faith in the light of their experience. Engaging in this process together with local church people, John encourages them to pay close attention to their context in order to develop strategies for mission and development that answer to local patterns of identity, community, spirituality and social need.
Follow the links to the pages below for articles, discussion and opinion about Ministry and Mission in the Church today
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The Revd Dr John Williams is Dean of the Wakefield Ministry Scheme, which supports and resources parishes developing collaborative ministry and trains candidates for Ordained Local Ministry
See the OLM section for contributions to the discussion about Ordained Local Ministry!
Leadership
We need to cultivate a vocabulary for leadership that gets away from the language of hierarchy and control. I have been attracted by Professor Gillian Stamp's account of it in her 2004 Christian Research Leadership Lecture. I've quoted her below, with some of my own reflections...
We need to cultivate a vocabulary for leadership that gets away from the language of hierarchy and control. I have been attracted by Professor Gillian Stamp's account of it in her 2004 Christian Research Leadership Lecture. I've quoted her below, with some of my own reflections...
Leaders need curiosity.
'Curiosity will be about reaching into all sorts of odd places and nooks and crannies for what might be happening, and indeed for what might not be happening and to try and get some sense of the implications for what one is trying to do.’
How often have I been taken aback by the apparent lack of curiosity shown by a new clergy person coming into a parish, who comes seemingly knowing exactly what he or she wants to do there, but doesn't give time and attentiveness to the task of finding out how things tick...
'Curiosity will be about reaching into all sorts of odd places and nooks and crannies for what might be happening, and indeed for what might not be happening and to try and get some sense of the implications for what one is trying to do.’
How often have I been taken aback by the apparent lack of curiosity shown by a new clergy person coming into a parish, who comes seemingly knowing exactly what he or she wants to do there, but doesn't give time and attentiveness to the task of finding out how things tick...
Leaders need imagination.
‘If one is negotiating with people or seeking to collaborate with them the most effective way of doing that is to imagine what it is like to be in their shoes…The imagination genuinely to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is a key part of this reading of the future which is the essence of strategic leadership.’
Because the future we are envisioning has to be God's future and God's future is a future for everyone, and how do I know someone else's hopes and fears unless I have attended to them?
‘If one is negotiating with people or seeking to collaborate with them the most effective way of doing that is to imagine what it is like to be in their shoes…The imagination genuinely to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is a key part of this reading of the future which is the essence of strategic leadership.’
Because the future we are envisioning has to be God's future and God's future is a future for everyone, and how do I know someone else's hopes and fears unless I have attended to them?
Leaders need discernment.
'In a time of transition discernment becomes the central and most elusive Christian value. Reading the times whilst inhabiting them is fraught; discerning what can be taken from the host culture without fatal compromise and transferring it into ongoing practice.’ (Malcolm Brown) That kind of discernment is being open to what may be happening, being willing to ‘see things which might not even be there’.
Surely the art of church leadership is especially bound up with this 'reading the times whilst inhabiting them'?
'In a time of transition discernment becomes the central and most elusive Christian value. Reading the times whilst inhabiting them is fraught; discerning what can be taken from the host culture without fatal compromise and transferring it into ongoing practice.’ (Malcolm Brown) That kind of discernment is being open to what may be happening, being willing to ‘see things which might not even be there’.
Surely the art of church leadership is especially bound up with this 'reading the times whilst inhabiting them'?
updated March 2008
Visit the articles section to find new additions
Thoughts in Holy Week 2008
I was looking at a DVD that arrived from the Fresh Expressions stable offering a taster of some of the innovative church projects springing up around the country, and I was struck by how relentlessly upbeat it all was. At one all-age worship event a young father said that he would not normally have gone to church, but having come along to this he really enjoyed it because it was fun: and he added that 'it's got to be fun, otherwise people won't come'. Of course I understand what he meant: too much that passes for worship is deadly dull or overly formal or fussy. But the notion that 'it's got to be fun' sat oddly with the readings and themes of Holy Week in my daily prayers. The Psalms- 'My heart is smitten down and withered like grass' (102:5), 'Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul?' (42:6, 13; 43:5), 'I have grown weary with crying' (69:3), and much more besides. The Lamentations ascribed to Jeremiah the Prophet: 'Is any suffering like my suffering?' (1:12), 'My eyes fail from weeping, I am in torment within' (2:11), 'I am the man who has seen affliction' (3:1)- these few words give only the merest hint of the searing quality of the poetry here. And of course, Jesus himself: 'he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death" he said to them' (Mark 14:33-4); 'Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? "Father, save me from this hour? No, it was for this very reason i came to this hour' (John 12:27).
The truth is that millions of people can identify with all this. Life is often precarious. Things do not work out as we should wish. Burdens and sorrows, doubts and fears and miseries, some rational and entirely understandable, others welling up as dark unnameable threats from some subterranean region of the psyche, are not an aberration from the serene human norm but part of the warp and weft of daily experience. The genius and glory of the Christian faith is that it addresses, engages with and enters profoundly into precisely these dimensions of life. In the interests of coaxing people into the church by making sure it is 'fun' we risk losing touch with exactly what Christianity uniquely has to offer, and which is starkly and movingly in the frame during Holy Week and Passiontide. That is, that life is unpredictable, that terrible things happen to people regardless of calculations about what we 'deserve', that we are not in control and things are not going to be neatly, rationally, sweetly sorted to our advantage; that there will be trials and tears, but nevertheless in the midst and at the depth of all that, there is God, holding, enduring, bearing with, agonising- transforming from within.
The mood of upbeatness and its demand for good news stories can contribute to the marginalizing of the dark events of Holy Week and Good Friday that scour the soul and confront us with the realities of pain, failure and emptiness: and yet only in making this terrifying journey do we grasp a genuine and lasting hope. It is not 'fun' and never could be, however much the pill be sweetened by Good Friday activity events and hot cross bun parties. Christianity cannot expel the Cross from the centre of its self-definition as a revelation of God: an inconvenient truth that remains to this day, as St Paul knew long ago, a stumbling block to some and an offence to others.
I was looking at a DVD that arrived from the Fresh Expressions stable offering a taster of some of the innovative church projects springing up around the country, and I was struck by how relentlessly upbeat it all was. At one all-age worship event a young father said that he would not normally have gone to church, but having come along to this he really enjoyed it because it was fun: and he added that 'it's got to be fun, otherwise people won't come'. Of course I understand what he meant: too much that passes for worship is deadly dull or overly formal or fussy. But the notion that 'it's got to be fun' sat oddly with the readings and themes of Holy Week in my daily prayers. The Psalms- 'My heart is smitten down and withered like grass' (102:5), 'Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul?' (42:6, 13; 43:5), 'I have grown weary with crying' (69:3), and much more besides. The Lamentations ascribed to Jeremiah the Prophet: 'Is any suffering like my suffering?' (1:12), 'My eyes fail from weeping, I am in torment within' (2:11), 'I am the man who has seen affliction' (3:1)- these few words give only the merest hint of the searing quality of the poetry here. And of course, Jesus himself: 'he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death" he said to them' (Mark 14:33-4); 'Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? "Father, save me from this hour? No, it was for this very reason i came to this hour' (John 12:27).
The truth is that millions of people can identify with all this. Life is often precarious. Things do not work out as we should wish. Burdens and sorrows, doubts and fears and miseries, some rational and entirely understandable, others welling up as dark unnameable threats from some subterranean region of the psyche, are not an aberration from the serene human norm but part of the warp and weft of daily experience. The genius and glory of the Christian faith is that it addresses, engages with and enters profoundly into precisely these dimensions of life. In the interests of coaxing people into the church by making sure it is 'fun' we risk losing touch with exactly what Christianity uniquely has to offer, and which is starkly and movingly in the frame during Holy Week and Passiontide. That is, that life is unpredictable, that terrible things happen to people regardless of calculations about what we 'deserve', that we are not in control and things are not going to be neatly, rationally, sweetly sorted to our advantage; that there will be trials and tears, but nevertheless in the midst and at the depth of all that, there is God, holding, enduring, bearing with, agonising- transforming from within.
The mood of upbeatness and its demand for good news stories can contribute to the marginalizing of the dark events of Holy Week and Good Friday that scour the soul and confront us with the realities of pain, failure and emptiness: and yet only in making this terrifying journey do we grasp a genuine and lasting hope. It is not 'fun' and never could be, however much the pill be sweetened by Good Friday activity events and hot cross bun parties. Christianity cannot expel the Cross from the centre of its self-definition as a revelation of God: an inconvenient truth that remains to this day, as St Paul knew long ago, a stumbling block to some and an offence to others.
Faithful Management or Managing the Faithful?
This is the title of an article by the ethicist and practical theologian Stephen Pattison, that can be found in a recent collection of his work, The Challenge of Practical Theology, published by Jessica Kingsley (London 2007).
One of Pattison's recurring themes is a critique of ideologies and methods that assume that there can be rational control of processes to fulfil certain desirable aims and objectives in contexts where human persons, their experience and relationships, are the matter with which the institution is concerned- as is clearly the case with the Church.
A managerial approach, Pattison argues, harnessing processes to the accomplishment of specified measurable aims in accordance with a mission statement, for example, tends to prize conformity and squeeze out awkward diversity. 'Clarity of purpose and exclusion of diversity may be accompanied by a kind of implicit dualism in which the managed organisation is self-perceived as good and legitimate, a realm of light, while other organisations and those around are thought of as being in a kind of darkness' (Challenge, p85).
In this climate 'not fitting in' and 'not playing the game' become problematic for the institution. If we can all 'sing from the same hymn sheet' (the rise of this particular metaphor is worth thinking about!) we can compete more effectively in a hostile world, with hope of gaining and consolidating our share in a possible dwindling market for the religion we have to offer. But Pattison questions whether this can possibly reflect the values of the Gospel: 'the Christian God seems to recognize that individuals and groups are not perfect, but that their imperfections, evil-doing and sin may not be the end of the world or of relationships in a community characterised by forgiveness rather than scapegoating and blame'.
The managerial approach, Pattison claims, requires high levels of control to ensure that as far as possible everyone remains true to the organisation's ideology and goals. It is, he argues, 'at odds with any kind of vision of a religious community that suggests thata it should exist principally for the benefit of outsiders' (p86)- interestingly for a 'mission shaped church', because those outsiders who might come in may well not toe the line when it comes to institutional beliefs and values. It 'contradicts any kind of notion thata authority given through the Spirit should be diverse and disseminated...it finds little space for the Christian incarnational kenotic inversion of power and authority whereby the meek inherit the earth and the ruler washes their feet'.
By contrast, the faith founded on Jesus of Nazareth is disturbing, non-conformist, unpredictable, a heartfelt denial of the myth of control: in Pattison's words, it offers 'an imaginative and symbolic space in which [we] can sing the songs of Zion and catch a glimpse of something more and something better figured by the Kingdom of God rather than having to murmur the mantras of quality, leadership, consumerism, standards, audit and excellence' (p88).
This is the title of an article by the ethicist and practical theologian Stephen Pattison, that can be found in a recent collection of his work, The Challenge of Practical Theology, published by Jessica Kingsley (London 2007).
One of Pattison's recurring themes is a critique of ideologies and methods that assume that there can be rational control of processes to fulfil certain desirable aims and objectives in contexts where human persons, their experience and relationships, are the matter with which the institution is concerned- as is clearly the case with the Church.
A managerial approach, Pattison argues, harnessing processes to the accomplishment of specified measurable aims in accordance with a mission statement, for example, tends to prize conformity and squeeze out awkward diversity. 'Clarity of purpose and exclusion of diversity may be accompanied by a kind of implicit dualism in which the managed organisation is self-perceived as good and legitimate, a realm of light, while other organisations and those around are thought of as being in a kind of darkness' (Challenge, p85).
In this climate 'not fitting in' and 'not playing the game' become problematic for the institution. If we can all 'sing from the same hymn sheet' (the rise of this particular metaphor is worth thinking about!) we can compete more effectively in a hostile world, with hope of gaining and consolidating our share in a possible dwindling market for the religion we have to offer. But Pattison questions whether this can possibly reflect the values of the Gospel: 'the Christian God seems to recognize that individuals and groups are not perfect, but that their imperfections, evil-doing and sin may not be the end of the world or of relationships in a community characterised by forgiveness rather than scapegoating and blame'.
The managerial approach, Pattison claims, requires high levels of control to ensure that as far as possible everyone remains true to the organisation's ideology and goals. It is, he argues, 'at odds with any kind of vision of a religious community that suggests thata it should exist principally for the benefit of outsiders' (p86)- interestingly for a 'mission shaped church', because those outsiders who might come in may well not toe the line when it comes to institutional beliefs and values. It 'contradicts any kind of notion thata authority given through the Spirit should be diverse and disseminated...it finds little space for the Christian incarnational kenotic inversion of power and authority whereby the meek inherit the earth and the ruler washes their feet'.
By contrast, the faith founded on Jesus of Nazareth is disturbing, non-conformist, unpredictable, a heartfelt denial of the myth of control: in Pattison's words, it offers 'an imaginative and symbolic space in which [we] can sing the songs of Zion and catch a glimpse of something more and something better figured by the Kingdom of God rather than having to murmur the mantras of quality, leadership, consumerism, standards, audit and excellence' (p88).