#coferandr

Dear Martyn

I have been following with interest your exchange of letters with Adrian Hilton about Renewal and Reform. I wouldn’t want to comment on all the issues raised; it’s good to have a debate like this going on.  But I would like to correct one point in your second letter published today.

You say there is a “proposed initiative of the ‘Reform and Renewal’ agenda: namely to divert funds away from needy and over-stretched rural parishes, and hand the money over to successful, ‘growing’ suburban parishes.” And you go on to call it “despicable” and “incomprehensible.”

That’s not quite the language I tend to use about ideas from other Christians. But I can see that you would have grounds to be upset if there were such a plan.  But there isn’t.

I infer that you are referring to the plan, approved by the General Synod, to replace the current (Darlow) formula for distributing income from the Church Commissioners’ endowment. Up to this year, dioceses have been free to spend it as they wish, whether on urban, rural or suburban ministry. From next year half of the available funding will be distributed to just over half of dioceses as money they can spend only in their Lowest Income Communities (so in the poorest parts of the country), and half will be available for all dioceses to apply to for investment in new growth opportunities.  

What the latter half of the money is spent on (some £24 million in 2017) depends what ideas dioceses come up with.  But in the pilot phases of this in the last couple of years, projects supported have included Exeter’s ‘Support for Rural Churches’ programme, which has received £1 million specifically aimed at engaging 100 rural churches, and creating four rural resource hubs.

Other examples include Southwell & Nottingham’s ‘Growing Disciples: Wider, Younger and Deeper’ which aims to establish 75 new worshipping communities reaching into all parts of the diocese: urban centre, outer estates, market towns and smaller rural communities; and Carlisle’s ‘God for All: Establishing New Mission Communities across Cumbria’ which involves establishing 35-40 new collaborative ‘Mission Communities’.  There is absolutely no bias either against rural areas, or in favour of suburban areas. And there is a very strong bias to ministry among the poorest, whether urban or rural.

Best wishes

William

William Nye’s recent blog on the aspiration to increase clergy numbers was answered by something of a chorus: “but what about the laity?” The answer is actually there’s quite a lot to tell about the laity.

Indeed, as concerns about the laity being ‘swallowed into some great C of E machine’ were being posted online the ‘machine’ was busy discussing lay discipleship and vocation. The live commentary on social media also provided excellent material with which to kick off a national consultation with trainers of licensed lay ministers about many of the issues being raised, e.g. ‘the processes of training and authorisation are too cumbersome’.

There are a number of Renewal & Reform groups currently collaborating on what a hopeful future for lay leadership and ministry may look like. Most obviously these include the Lay Leadership Task Group and the Lay Ministries Working Group but they’re not working in isolation. Rather their work is informing and being informed by groups giving attention to Developing Discipleship, Evangelism, Growing Vocations, and Simplification.

Each group has a particular focus and rationale but with a commonality in attending to the health of the laity in the life of the Church.

The Lay Ministries Working Group was set up by Ministry Council to provide a steer for the future support, management and resourcing of Ministries which held the bishop’s license or authorisation. The group is chaired by The Right Reverend Robert Paterson; Bishop of Sodor and Man.

The Lay Leadership Task Group was set up by the Archbishops’ Council with the ambitious and extensive task of looking at how the role of laity in leadership within and outside the Church, who are not formally licensed, can best be understood and realised in the 21st century. The group is chaired by Matthew Frost who is a member of the Archbishops’ Council and former CEO of Tearfund.

The two groups were very intentionally set up to complement one another. In the past when national conversations about the laity have taken place questions of licensing and authorisation have had the tendency to drown out more expansive thinking such as attending to leadership amongst the dispersed Church.

There are a number of particular issues relating to ministries, which hold a bishop’s licence or authorisation that warrant attention. These include such fundamental questions as what’s the purpose of the licence. There is an air of mystery around licences. There is also sometimes a suggestion that a licensed ministry is somehow more important than others. In fact it is not more important, it is just different. A licence is given to a minister (lay as well as ordained) by a bishop to enable them to carry out their responsibilities in a particular place. It is effectively permission to undertake tasks such as to preach, teach, lead worship and offer pastoral care. Ultimately it serves to protect the integrity of the gospel where it is being preached by ministers on behalf of the Church.

In practice the license has accrued a wider range of expectations and understandings touching on status, identity and power. Some people want to make the license much more flexible so that it’s easier to recognise the wide variety of ministries that have emerged in the last 50 years. Others point out that there may be better ways of providing recognition than licensing everyone – and more than simply recognition, e.g. affirmation and accountability.

The purpose of the Lay Ministries Working Group is to liberate the Lay Leadership Task Group from such questions in order to attend to much bigger but not unrelated cultural questions affecting not only the gathered but also the scattered church. A key issue for the Lay Leadership Group is what more should we be doing to release, enable and equip lay people into their areas of vocation and calling, be this within the workplace, community, family or church structures? Alongside this, there is a real challenge to develop a compelling vision for resourcing lay Christians in roles of leadership and influence throughout society. This could include lay people in formal leadership roles such as heads of public sector organisations and charities or it could refer to lay Christians in positions of informal leadership or influence in their community, such as voluntary community leaders or campaigners.

All of this raises questions of theology and of the voice of lay people; issues around the sometimes fragile relationships between lay people and clergy and how the structures and ‘ways of working’ unintentionally marginalise lay people; and in particular why previous efforts by the Church of England to release and empower lay people have not resulted in the levels of anticipated change. The Lay Leadership Task Group is looking into how the church can do more to disciple, resource and empower lay people to live the Gospel, apply its wisdom and share its riches confidently, compassionately and creatively to the people they encounter in their daily lives.

Under Renewal & Reform there is now a real energy behind lay issues. Both these groups will be reporting in the Autumn and bringing their work to General Synod in February 2017.

Written by Dr Tim Ling and Dr Jacqui Philips

Dr Tim Ling, Head of Ministry Development - Lay Ministry Working Groupstaff staff lead

A Hopeful Future: Vision, Narrative, and Biblical hope, for Renewal & Reform Over recent weeks we have been working on a vision and narrative for Renewal & Reform. The main focus has been to try and bring into one short piece a sense of what it is and the challenges that lie ahead. Earlier drafts of the vision and narrative have received general support from Archbishops’ Council and the House of Bishops. This final version is now being presented to General Synod for approval.

The vision and narrative is rooted in an understanding of Luke 10:2:

The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.

God has called us afresh in our generation to be salt and light, to love our neighbours as ourselves, to have compassion on a lost and bewildered generation. And the Bible tells of the surprising work of God in calling the most unexpected people. Renewal & Reform therefore centres on Christ’s call to us to pray in hope that the Lord of the harvest will send labourers into his harvest field.

The vision and narrative is based on a set of (hopefully) unsurprising assumptions – that Renewal & Reform is about the kingdom of God rather than fixing the church; that it needs to be based on Biblical hope rather than sets of data; that it needs to be honest and real about what we face rather than myopic or delusional; that we need to be missionally ambitious rather than simply seeking to hold onto what we have; that an abundantly generous God gives us all we need and much more; that it is about the workers being sent out; that there is no single approach or solution; that growth, properly understood, is a good thing; and that Renewal & Reform is about all of us.

The vision and narrative talks of a plentiful harvest, a hopeful future, a realistic assessment and a growing church. Within this it also tries to lay out the ground for the kinds of things we might do in response. We can’t do everything. So if Synod endorses the document we will use the vision and narrative to discern current and future workstreams by asking the questions:

Will it help us to achieve the ambitions outlined in ‘A hopeful future’?

Will it help us to address the challenges identified through ‘A realistic assessment’?

If an idea doesn’t then it is highly unlikely to find its way into Renewal & Reform.

We are excited by the possibilities within Renewal & Reform. We are encouraged by the responses we have been getting. And most of all we are hopeful that the Lord of the harvest will send out many, many workers into his harvest field.

Mike Eastwood - Director of Renewal and Reform

One of the foundational texts for Renewal & Reform is Luke 10:2:

The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.

As a church we live in a time of challenge but also hope. At the centre of the challenge is how we fulfil God’s calling to us as a Church to play our role in God’s ecology of growth and harvest. At the centre of our hope is God’s promise to equip us for the task.

Hope has a biblical foundation. It comes out of the promises of God - his abundant, continuing generosity and his faithfulness throughout what has been and what is to come. Biblical hope underpins the work of Renewal & Reform in seeking a confident and hopeful future. This isn’t about institutional survival but rather responding to God’s call for His Church in this generation and for the generations to come. Renewal and Reform is not simply a response to some negative graphs and challenging demographics, although the graphs may be daunting and the demographics concerning. Rather it has to be about an understanding of God’s call and God’s promise into the future.

I hope that as its work progresses Renewal & Reform will build upon and support the future work already taking place in parishes and dioceses across the country. In some cases it will involve new initiatives, in others supporting ongoing good work in others still nurturing planted seeds of hope to fruition and harvest. Some of this is about planning, some about releasing, some about surprise. In all the aim is to equip and invest in a confident, hopeful church by identifying the challenges and working to provide solutions to those things that would hinder growth..

For example, we need to think and plan for what ministries and leadership our churches, chaplaincies and fresh expressions need (including how to give effect to the decision to increase the number of ordinands by 50% by 2022). We need to take deliberate steps to ensure that dioceses have senior leadership which is more representative and better equipped for God’s mission. We need to work out how whole church can confidently communicate our faith in word and action in a digital age. We need to think intentionally about how we reach those groups missing from our churches, whilst affirming those whose lives and service are a faithful presence.

And we need to expect God to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine, that he will take us to places and people that we cannot yet conceive and in ways we may not yet understand. We hope that every diocese will seek to articulate their own narrative of hope, informed by their context, enriched by all that God has been doing and continues to do, and confident of God’s promises for the future. We hope that every parish will similarly look honestly and prayerfully at how and where God has been leading and where he may be taking us next. As the writer of Lamentations says:

Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness

Renewal & Reform is built on hope. And hope is a very, very good thing.

Warning!  This blog has numbers in it.  I know some people in the Church dislike numbers.  And some dislike talk of “growth”.  I mentioned the different styles of language we use in a previous blog.  But please don’t look away now.  For those of you who dislike numbers, please remember that every unit in a number refers to an individual human being, and the number is only shorthand.

One of the principal work streams in Renewal and Reform is the work on encouraging more vocations.  The General Synod has approved the aspiration to increase the rate of vocations to ordained ministry by 50% by 2020, with half of those being younger vocations, and a greater proportion being people of Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic background.  This is a challenging aspiration – not a target! – but one we can work towards with prayer, encouragement, and deliberate intention as part of becoming a growing Church.

We need to base this aspiration on a realistic assessment of where we are.  The Church published its “statistics for ministry” on 2 June.  They showed that the number of stipendiary clergy fell from 8,300 in 2012 to 8,000 in 2015. This continues a well-established trend.  We haven’t published an official projections of future numbers of clergy.  But the detailed figures show that a quarter of stipendiary clergy are over 60, and in some dioceses the proportion is as high as 40%.  

And for the last few years the age profile of stipendiary clergy has been getting older, especially among male clergy.  That doesn’t mean that older clergy aren’t valued, nor that the Church does not benefit hugely from the continuing ministry of retired clergy, of whom there are nearly six and a half thousand active with Permission or License to Officiate.  But the increasing age profile means that the total number of stipendiary clergy to lead parishes will go on falling, until the effect of more vocations comes through.

Thankfully, our aspiration to increase vocations is based on experience that change is possible.  Firstly, dioceses vary enormously in the rate of vocations, and in how they encourage them; the Vocations Working Group is looking at how to spread the best practice all around the country.  Secondly, ordinations have been increasing – up from 261 in 2012 to 315 in 2015 for stipendiary clergy.  But we need to try and encourage more people to come forward.

This isn’t just about replacing those retiring, and maintaining numbers.  The aim is to attract more younger and more BAME clergy, to give us better outreach to more of the population, especially those communities we are not reaching as effectively as we should.  It’s about strengthening our ability to be a church for the whole nation, in every community – and expressing every tradition in the church.  Attracting more younger vocations doesn’t mean discouraging older vocations, of course: in a growing church there will be plenty of scope for vocations at all ages.

Even assuming we achieve the aspiration to increase vocations by 50%, this means that the total number of stipendiaries will continue to fall for a number of years before starting to rise again.  Getting back up to the present 8,000, say, will depend not just on more vocations, but on the age profile of ordinands and of retirements.  Of course, having more clergy – or “enough” clergy – isn’t sufficient to turn us into a hopeful, growing church.  The last time we had 9,000 clergy, in 2004, we were on a path of decline.  There is no right number for how many clergy England needs. Though note that in 2004 the population of England was 50 million, whereas in 2030 it is projected to be over 60 million.  We will need enough clergy to maintain our mission of being available for all the people of England, in every place.  Obviously, the work of our existing parish clergy – together with laypeople – is what sustains the church now.  The church should honour and value all their work, and look to build on it and strengthen it.

What can the Church do in the meantime?  First, as noted above, we can pray, encourage and work for vocations.  Secondly, we can endeavour to make the most of lay gifts as well.  That is why there is also work in Renewal and Reform on lay leadership generally (inside and outside the Church), and more specifically on licensed lay ministries.  This is not about filling gaps, but about valuing and developing the gifts of all Christians.

Third, we need to look for the right kind of people for the right kind of roles for the challenges of the 2020s, 2030s and beyond: not one size fits all, but recognising the diversity of our country, of our people, and of our ministers, and the diversity of challenges.

Fourth, we need to be realistic about what this means for the next few years – in terms of ministry and in terms of paying for it. Many dioceses have been saying that they intend to maintain clergy numbers.  Some are saying very specifically that after a period of cutting clergy numbers – which has not proved helpful – they intend to stop cutting. This aspiration is entirely understandable and admirable.  Unfortunately it is not always realistic.  There is a problem of arithmetic.  Individual dioceses cannot all maintain their numbers of stipendiary clergy – while the total national number goes on falling.  If some dioceses do maintain or increase numbers, then for others the fall in numbers will end up being much faster.  Realism means that the laudable aspiration to keep numbers up may not be feasible everywhere.  But this doesn’t mean more cutting for financial reasons, nor more “managing decline”. It means being realistic about the need to reduce clergy posts in the short term, while praying, working and planning to get the number of posts back up again in the medium term.

Just to make this a bit harder….  We also need to recognise what this means for paying for ministry.  During the next few years, we can expect to see further decline in clergy in stipendiary posts, accompanied by – we pray – a big increase in clergy in training, first in college or course training, and then in curacies.  So we have to go on asking parishioners to give money to pay for clergy – but with less of the money going towards paying for today’s clergy (who will be fewer), and more for tomorrow’s (who will be in greater numbers, in training).  It’s not necessarily an easy message – for Diocesan Boards of Finance, for PCC Treasurers, or for the Church as a whole.  But it’s an inevitable consequence of moving from a shrinking church to a growing one.

The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.  Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.

William Nye - Secretary General to the Archbishops’ Council

Six months in, Dave Male, National Advisor for Pioneer Development, reflects on his role.

I started six months ago asking myself if there was still an important place in the Church for innovative, creative, risk taking, entrepreneurial leaders?  It was clear that by creating my post the C of E was demonstrating its commitment to pioneer ministers but it’s also an acknowledgement that we still have a journey to go in order to maximise their gifts. 

Pioneers have been recognised as a specific category by the Church since 2006. The last ten years has been a period of finding our way forward with and for Pioneers. It hasn’t always been easy working out how pioneers fit into our Church structures. There have been valid criticisms and questions about the effectiveness of support for pioneers. But I have discovered there is a real commitment to pioneers and pioneering in the central structures of the Church. Much of my initial work has been listening so we can learn how to make progress on what we are doing.

The Archbishops setting out the Renewal and Reform agenda emphasised that, ‘The Church’s vocation is to proclaim the good news afresh in every generation.’ If we are serious about wanting dramatically to increase the reach of our churches, I believe that the role of pioneering is vital to the future of the Church of England.

Recent research makes clear pioneers are particularly gifted as leaders and agents of change in the re-evangelisation of England. They have a unique vocation and gifts for a missionary Church, say two Ministry Division studies, researched for us by King’s College, London. This has been my experience of the pioneers over the last ten years who I have been involved in helping to train and support. People like Sue who rang to tell me she was worried she had planted a church. She and a few friends began gathering with some other parents at a local school on a Friday morning and soon discovered a church was forming. They have now planted a second congregation.

The creation of an agreed working definition for pioneers is crucial for our future work. The Ministry Council has just endorsed this working definition, ‘Pioneers are people called by God who are the first to see and creatively respond to the Holy Spirit’s initiatives with those outside the church;  gathering others around them as they seek to establish new contextual, ecclesial Christian community.’ The Church understands their importance and the more we understand who pioneers are the more likely we will be able to utilise them fully for the mission of God.

With my colleagues in Ministry Division  we are working on improving how we identify, train, select and support pioneers, both lay and ordained. Here are just some of the things we are doing:

• The selection of Ordained Pioneers through the Pioneer Panel is being extensively redesigned to increase the number of Pioneers coming forward.   • I have met with people from various training institutions to discuss how we develop Regional Centres for Pioneer Training, lay and ordained, to build on and develop the present experiences of initial and ongoing training. • We are beginning to work with Diocesan Vocation Teams to help them clearly to identify and support Pioneers.   • The newly formed Lay Ministry Working Group will be looking at the key role of Lay Pioneers. • We are aiming to create a Pioneer Intern scheme for young people. These are just a few of the steps we are taking to invest in and build on the place of pioneers in the Church.

The General Synod is due to debate Resourcing Ministerial Education on Wednesday 17th February.  The preparatory paper for the debate, GS2020, can be found here  Over the last week, as part of the preparation for the debate, various comments have been posted on social media and in the Church press and some briefing papers have been circulated to General Synod members, in particular by a group of Principals of residential training institutions.   We have done our best to gather these comments and to reflect on them.  It seems helpful to the debate to issue this detailed response in advance of the General Synod’s reflections next week.   The primary aim of this response is to clarify some misunderstandings, challenge misconceptions and give detailed reassurance where this is required. It is intended to be helpful and constructive. This response should be read with GS2020.   In all this debate, we must not forget the fundamental point of what RME does is  - it gives dioceses the ability to plan how best to use the £10s of millions of parishioners’ money which is currently spent on training – where currently there is no planning for the best use of that money, either nationally,  in dioceses or locally. The present moment represents a very significant opportunity for increased investment in theological education across the Church of England. The proposals in GS2020 are not in any way shaped by a desire to reduce costs.  The overall financial investment in initial training through Vote 1 will remain the same.  GS2020 envisages that this investment will increase pro rata as vocations to ordained ministry grow (by God’s grace) over the next five years.  Dioceses will be able to increase their own investment in initial training in real terms over and above the pooled funding and many will do so.  Lay formation, the second phase of initial ministerial education after licensing or ordination (IME2) and continuing ministerial development (CMD) will all benefit from the £24 million per annum of strategic development funding through the Church Commissioners.   The House of Bishops and the Archbishops Council have both approved the proposals which are coming before the General Synod. Both bodies have recognized that the current funding arrangements do not provide a secure and transparent basis for the growth the Church wants and needs to see.   The Principals of residential colleges have raised a series of concerns about resourcing ministerial education through the last two years.  In all cases, their concerns have been carefully attended to.  In most cases the proposals have been amended in the light of those concerns.  There continues to be scope for some further refinement as the proposals are implemented. However it is important for the General Synod to remember that the Theological Education Institutions exist to serve the mission of God in and through the Church of England and to offer the formation the Church needs at this moment in our common life.  The purpose of the new arrangements is not to ensure that particular institutions survive (though there is no reason to suppose that they will not thrive and flourish).  It is to ensure that the right kind of formation and training is made available across the whole Church to the next generation of lay and ordained ministers. In relation to residential training, some of the key issues in detail are:

There will be sufficient money for students to train at residential colleges: the RME funding arrangements are geared to provide a higher level of resources for the cohort of younger candidates (up to age 40) who are broadly more likely to train residentially. Consideration is being given to an extension of the first age band from 30 to 32 in order to increase this further.  In some cases these candidates will not need higher funding (currently over 30% of this cohort) which will give a diocese scope to allocate more funding to older candidates.

Numbers in residential training are not “certain to drop”:  the diocesan consultations showed a strong commitment to residential training and a recognition that training choices need to continue to take account of the preference of the candidate.  Better partnership between colleges and dioceses will help to cement this commitment.

RME will not make the finances of the residential colleges more fragile: planning for transition and finding a mutually beneficial way to manage the financial flows from dioceses to TEIs under RME are major aspects of the implementation discussions from April to September in order to protect colleges from financial shocks. It is recognised that some colleges have major overheads and limited reserves. RME cannot redress these issues other than by providing for growth in numbers and revenue.

RME does not place in jeopardy the continuation of the residential colleges:  the objectives agreed by the Archbishops’ Council include the support of a mixed economy of TEIs, including the colleges.  RME assumes that support for higher cost college pathways and higher degrees will continue.  More flexible arrangements for training and funding mean that colleges have a new opportunity to offer dioceses pathways for different kinds of students.

The potential changes in family maintenance arrangements will not lead to a reduction in the number of students at residential colleges:  the dioceses are committed to maintain pooling of family maintenance but many wish to target it better to areas of need.  This has the potential to increase the range of candidates who might go to a college.  The review of family maintenance will be carried out in consultation with the TEIs as well as dioceses.  

..and in relation to all forms of training

Dioceses will not make training decisions based entirely on cost: while dioceses will under the RME arrangements be more conscious of the costs, the personal learning plan for the candidate developed through the discernment process and the diocese’s strategic plans for ministry will be equally important.  There is a growing level of professionalism amongst diocesan staff, and especially DDOs and Directors of Ministry, who are committed to education and formation and not looking to squeeze finance.  There will be national monitoring of diocesan choices and peer review in the interests of transparency over the use of what is a resource of both money and people shared in common by the dioceses. Cheap decisions will be revealed!

There will not be a reduction in the amount of investment in IME1.   The standard grant mechanism will initially allocate funds available for IME1 to dioceses to spend on IME1. Over time the intention is to broaden the range of pathway choices to enable funds to be spent flexibly on all forms of accredited training. At the same time the manner in which the costs of these non IME1 pathways will be incorporated in the overall funding arrangements will need to be determined. There is no intent that funds from IME1 should be diverted to replace funds that dioceses currently separately spend on local IME2 initiatives.

Dioceses and TEIs will not enter into price competition: tariffs for pathways will continue to be centrally set and the tariffs charged will be monitored along with diocesan choices.

RME is not discriminatory against any group, including older candidates or women: dioceses receive a block grant to spend as they see fit in relation to the requirements of each candidate.  The age-related grants which make up the block grant are not allocated to an individual.  Bishops will have greater flexibility than in the present system to direct a higher level of funding for individual older candidates and women to promote equal opportunity.

The administrative burden on TEIs of the funding arrangements will be addressed: initial scoping of the added responsibility suggest that it is not substantial once the systems are set up.  Models for how the system might work were part of the consultation and in the implementation stage TEIs, dioceses and Ministry Division will agree which to adopt.

TEIs will not turn into “diocesan seminaries”: while some regional courses have close institutional links to dioceses, all TEIs and especially colleges are independent bodies responsible for providing training according to their foundation.  It is axiomatic that the Church of England needs a range of types of institution of differing traditions in order to serve the needs of the range of ordinands and dioceses. RME does not dictate any choices to dioceses or individuals within what is provided by TEIs accredited by the House of Bishops.  

     Two broader issues

Is there a sufficiently robust theological rationale to underpin the changes being proposed?   Emphatically yes.  The debate and consultation leading to these proposals on resourcing ministerial education has been theologically informed at every stage (and continues to be so). Other theological work has been undertaken as part of the Renewal and Reform process, including a major piece of work to develop a common theological statement on formation for ministry. This has been led by Professor Mike Higton of the University of Durham.  Over 30 theologians and theological educators took part in a 24 hour consultation with the whole College of Bishops in September 2015.  There was a broad consensus around the draft document and this is now being revised with a view to being adopted as a key part of the Common Awards and as a common statement of the endeavour of forming disciples and ministers in the Church of England.  GS2020 is primarily about the resourcing of ministerial education not our overall understanding of ministry or formation.  There is a limit to the amount of theological reflection which can reasonably be undertaken on the flow of funds through institutions.  

Will Diocesan variation mean that there are “significant ecclesiological implications in terms of our identity as a national (catholic) church”? There is already significant and legitimate variation between the ministry needs of, say, a rural diocese and an urban or metropolitan area.  These differences are reflected in the differences in training offered by regional courses and to some extent by residential colleges, where context determines the placement experiences available and informs theological study.  The RME proposals encourage much deeper engagement between dioceses and training institutions in the design and delivery of training to the great benefit of the candidates and the Church.  However, national standards and benchmarks remain, those who train for ministry are potentially deployable anywhere in England (or beyond) and all preparation for ordination is preparation for episcopal ordination as deacon and priest in the Church of God.  

I realise that the changes being proposed create challenges for those who already feel challenged enough by the realities of our situation. The proposals in GS2020 will encourage exactly the kind of renewal of ministerial education which we need to look to the future with hope. Over time,  these proposals will enable a growing church with a flourishing ministry, better equipped to serve God’s world and proclaim God’s kingdom.