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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!
updated June 2008
Visit the articles section to find new additions
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).