Competence, Part 1

When the Book of Common Prayer and the Homilies were first mandated for use in English parish churches, they served several functions. Perhaps they're most famously known for aiding in the establishment of uniformity in corporate worship and therefore in public belief. But in addition, they also helped to overcome the problem of widespread clerical incompetence.

Although largely financially motivated, the dissolution of the monasteries through the 1530s and the abolition of chantries in the 1540s effectively changed the job descriptions of a large number of English clergy. Those whose roles had mostly been the saying of private masses now found themselves unemployed and re-designated as preachers and congregational leaders. But then even if they were able to secure a new post in a parish church, many would arrive without any of the skills required for their position. Therefore one great benefit of the BCP and the Homilies was that they allowed a minister in this situation to effectively 'paint by numbers'. If they could read, they could lead. With two books they could feed their flocks a steady diet of Protestant doctrine, administer the sacraments and conduct corporate worship and it would all be as sound as their congregations would have gotten from any other local church in the country.

What's the modern equivalent? Is there any way to bridge the competence gaps for today's church leaders?

First of all, we need to note that church leaders today need a much broader set of competences than their early-modern English predecessors. While running good services and preaching good sermons is absolutely critical, more is needed at a time when there are far more options for church and spirituality and when our culture has high expectations of quality. So our generation of church leaders also need to be competent at things that are potentially as diverse as management and governance, advertising, leading teams, training, recruiting lay leaders, property development and much more too. Clearly, for all this, there is no quick, one-size-fits-all solution. There is no pair of books that a diocese can distribute that will allow incompetent ministers to pull it all off. So what to do? I think two things are critical.

First is theological formation. The years that are spent in ministry traineeships, Bible college courses and curacies provide the major opportunities for key competencies to be developed. Fortunately, lots of ministry training programs, theological schools and diocesan administrations are already well aware of this. In fact, I think it would probably be quite hard these days to find an organisation involved in ministry formation that hadn't already thought a lot about how to ensure a wide spread of key competencies are being taught.

But the second thing is to actually set some real standards for those competencies because the fact is that not everyone who undergoes training will have the capacity to develop them all. We mustn't make the all-too-common mistake of thinking that just because someone has done a course on something, they're now gifted in that area. This is like the mistake of thinking that just because someone had a certain job for a number of years that they were necessarily good at it. If that were the case, you could think that any minister who ran a church for 20 years was competent even if they oversaw a decline in attendance, were repeatedly unable to meet budget or never baptised anyone into the faith. Time spent shouldn't trump results achieved.

This might sound tough, but anyone who's worked in church ministry knows how much more there is to it than just preaching sermons and leading Sunday services. And the reality is that not everyone who shows interest, does a theology degree or even feels called to the ministry will actually be gifted with all the competencies necessary for the task. There must be proper evaluation.

I'm very conscious that this line of thinking could go very sour if pushed too hard. We don't want the church to become coldly performance based. We don't want a wholesale import of marketplace ideas into our recruitment processes. We certainly don't want to overlook questions of character and integrity while focussing on skill sets. But nonetheless, we do have a mission and we do want to see tangible results. Ensuring that we don't put people into jobs beyond their competencies is one important factor.

There's more to say on this. I might add to it in a future post...