Description: All in one guide for clergy looking to make a difference from the small things through to major pastoral challenges
Brief description: Revd Dr Emma Percy is Chaplain, Welfare Dean and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.
Review Quotes:
Lucid and concise, What Clergy Do introduces us to a rich store of work on
motherhood, inviting us to enjoy a satisfying many layered metaphor for ministry
which opens up well-defended areas of embattled priestly hearts.
Each chapter states its aim, says it well, then summarizes it. That apparent
tidiness, though, sets free all sorts of imagery. Motherhood's ordinariness is,
of course, pricelessly rich. A priest wouldn't hesitate to encourage a mother
who feels undervalued. The more Emma Percy compares it with the ordinariness
of parish ministry, the more we are reminded how rich and moving is our
calling.
action' in motherhood, she traces our shifting roles between completed tangible
tasks, those sustaining, nurturing and impossible to measure, and those involving
professional skill. We are offered a way of describing this odd combination that
makes enough sense for us to carry on. Emma Percy hopes to move us away from
'the rather empty language of leadership into richer metaphorical language which
connects to what people do' (p. 160). More than analysing what we 'do', in fact, she
uncovers who we might crave being. Understated feeling allows us to charge these images with our own emotional
experience. Sometimes I felt I had read a series of truisms about ministry, then
realized that I had been faced with some very challenging realities. Rather than
solutions to particular predicaments, Emma Percy offers a way of tuning the heart.
Infused with Sara Ruddick's study of Maternal Thinking (1995) and workaday
experience, pairs of qualities or risks mark out spaces in which we can take responsibility,
finding our own place between 'dependence and maturity', 'transitional
dependency and generous inequality', or, best of all, 'the art of comforting and
virtue of delight'. There is a challenging chorus line about not treating people as
types (which I needed to hear) and an encouraging one, quoting Winnicott, about
being 'good enough' mothers and priests. It would be their real loss if some found relatively few biblical references in this
work an excuse not to take it seriously. It rings with biblical chords: the section on
weaning enriched my feeling for 1 Corinthians 3.2; Isaiah 49.15; 66.13. The powerful
passage on body image (p. 155), exposing neuroses about church growth, gave 1
Corinthians 12 a new resonance. With the habits of mothering Emma Percy points
us toward a virtue ethic which I found timely, providing an oblique critique of
consequentialist tendencies in clergy selection. Unqualified, such a powerful metaphor could develop unhealthy priestly superiority.
We might egotistically conspire with a congregation's desire to project group
inadequacies onto an emotionally absorbent parent-priest, but Emma Percy knows
this (Chapter 4). I would like her to explore more explicitly the most attractive,
subversive word in the title: 'nothing'. I wonder if the key theme of motherhood
was omitted from the title in case defensive male clergy wouldn't pick it up. Who is it for? A hard-pressed archdeacon; a bullish chair of board of finance;
DDOs lending it to enquirers before giving them grids of competencies that suck
the Spirit out of discernment; the newly ordained; PCCs in interregnum tempted to
pepper a Church Times advert with words like 'energetic . . . communication
skills . . . [and] . . . successful'. It is a gift for people who have slogged in parishes
for a couple of decades and feel on a cusp of disappointment. Just when you
wonder if anyone's noticed, asking, 'Is this it, then?'; when you're tired, but still
sure you are doing something good; when you're unsure if your favourite metaphors
for ministry can hold up for another decade, and you've finally admitted that
no one else will organize your sabbatical: just then, this could be a wonderful read. It is never hectoring, very encouraging and, as a male priest, it gave me permission
to explore feminine imagery without a hint of pretence or awkwardness. Those
of us who are not mothers should feel refreshed, not marginalized, by this exploration.
If we use it to recalibrate priorities and retune our pastoral heart, noble but
frustrated ministries may rediscover their calm integrity, offering our neighbours
what they need in their priest. I have a hunch this book is written by a priest who is
rather more than 'good enough'.--David Warbrick