Formed for Faithfulness (11): A Vision of Renewed Anglican Clergy

Clergy, Formation, and the Renewal of the Church

Formation is a slow word for a fast age. It suggests time, patience, repetition—the steady reshaping of a life rather than a quick fix. And yet I’ve come to suspect that it’s precisely here that the deeper crisis in the Church lies. Are those who come to us being drawn, however gradually, into a different way of seeing and loving? Are their imaginations being reordered? Their desires reshaped? Their loyalties and affections directed towards God?

If renewal is to come, it won’t begin with better branding or more efficient structures. It will begin with people—specifically, with the kind of people who inhabit the Church’s common life well. And at the centre of that life, in a particular and visible way, stand those of us who are ordained.

To say this isn’t to elevate clergy above everyone else. It’s to recognise that their lives, rightly ordered, carry a particular responsibility within the common life of the Church. They’re called not only to share in the process of formation, but to take responsibility for it—to guard it, sustain it, and model it in ways that are publicly accountable. What we need, then, are clergy whose lives are being steadily reshaped within the same patterns they commend to others, and who can therefore both embody and articulate the faith they’ve received with clarity and conviction.

It’s to the shape of that life—to the habits, instincts, and commitments that might mark out a clergy formed for this work—that I now turn.

The Shape of a Formed Clergy

Before going further, I need to make one thing clear: the agent of formation in the Church is Christ. We’re not its architects. We’re participants in a work we don’t control.

The same Word that addresses the congregation addresses us. The same sacraments that nourish the laity sustain us. Our calling isn’t to stand apart as managers of religious life, but to dwell within the community as servants—given, in a particular way, to the ministry of Word and sacrament, and to the care of souls.

From that, certain habits begin to take shape—not so much techniques as ways of being.

We must continually learn to pray. Not occasionally, not when convenient, but as the steady foundation on which everything else rests. Prayer isn’t an addition to ministry; it’s the work beneath the work. We are, in the older language, to be diligent in prayer—not simply as a private discipline, but as a public trust.

That means the Daily Office, the Eucharist, and the often unseen work of interceding for those entrusted to our care. It also means praying when it feels dry, distracted, or hollow. Over time, we learn that faithfulness in prayer isn’t measured by intensity of feeling, but by the constancy of attention. And in ways we rarely notice at the time, that constancy begins to reshape us.

We must give ourselves to Scripture—not simply as a resource for sermons, but as a word that first addresses us. Before we speak it, we must listen. Before we teach, we must be taught. Before we conclude, we must ruminate. Before we feed, we must marinate. Without that patience, we risk offering second-hand insights rather than bearing witness to something that has actually worked upon us.

We’re also learning—slowly—to see before we act. The pressure, both internal and external, is always towards immediacy: to move quickly from text to application, from problem to solution. But the deeper tradition asks something else of us: first to behold what God has done, and only then to consider what might be asked in response.

When we resist that, our preaching becomes shallower, more reactive. When we attend to it, something else happens. We become less interested in extracting lessons and more concerned with helping others see—really see—the world as it’s disclosed within the story of God. And over time, that begins to reshape not just what people do, but how they perceive.

We’re called to remain—to be rooted. This is harder than it sounds. Everything in our culture pushes towards movement, optionality, the next opportunity. But there is something quietly demanding about staying with a particular people in a particular place.

Over time, that staying allows for a kind of knowledge that can’t be rushed: learning names, histories, patterns of life; walking with people through grief and joy, faith and doubt. What the tradition calls the cure of souls turns out to be less about solving problems and more about long, attentive presence.

And we must learn to receive. The people we serve aren’t simply recipients of ministry. They are, in ways we often overlook, our teachers. The active and open faith of some, the honesty of others, the patient endurance of those who suffer—these form us as much as anything we offer them. When we forget that, our ministry risks becoming arrogant. When we remember it, it becomes more truthful.

We must also resist the pull to be placed on a pedestal. It’s tempting—both for us and for those we serve—to confuse ministry with a kind of elevated status, as though the work gains its authority from being admired. But the authority of our calling lies elsewhere. Much of what matters most is, and remains, ordinary and often hidden: prayers offered silently, conversations held in confidence, acts of care known only to those who receive them. Accepting this is a kind of discipline: to be among rather than above, to serve without needing to be praised.

We are, in the end, catechists—but not those who fashion people by our own skill. Our task is to speak and live in such a way that Christ may form his people through us: shaping their loves, teaching them to pray, drawing them into a life that accords with the truth. That work attends not only to clarity of thought, but to the movement of the heart—so that people might come to see what is true, delight in what is good, and be stirred to live it.

Finally, we must make peace with smallness. This doesn’t come naturally. But the life we’ve been given is local, relational, largely unnoticed. And yet, in that humble ministry, something extraordinary is happening: a people gathered around Word and sacrament, are learning—week by week, year by year—what it means to belong to God.

Tending What Only God Can Grow

St Paul perhaps put this best in 1 Corinthians 3 when he compared ministry to farm work. One person plants, another waters, but the growth itself belongs to God. It arrives—or doesn’t—on terms beyond the farmer’s control.

To take this seriously is to reimagine the work. It frees us from the burden of producing outcomes we can’t control. But it also strips away any claim to ownership when things do seem to flourish.

This, in turn, shifts the question we ask ourselves from What can I make happen? to What have I been given to do? Our calling isn’t to generate growth, but to be faithful—in prayer, in teaching, in administering the sacraments, and in tending the people entrusted to our care. It is less like forcing a result and more like working the soil: attending patiently to its condition, trusting that what is slow and organic will prove more lasting than anything we might try to accelerate. The temptation, of course, is to reach for the equivalent of chemical fertilisers—quick interventions that promise visible results—but the deeper work is humbler and more demanding: to cultivate, to nourish, and to wait for a life we can’t manufacture.

In practice, this often means protecting what appears, from the outside, unproductive. Prayer, teaching, pastoral presence—these don’t lend themselves to easy measurement. And yet they are the work.

It means keeping the Eucharist, however frequently celebrated, at the centre—not as one activity among many, but as the place where the Church most fully becomes itself: gathered, instructed, forgiven, nourished, and sent. It means giving time to Scripture, allowing it to dwell richly among us. It means praying in ways that draw others into the rhythm and pattern of divine life.

Formation can’t be hurried. People need time to acclimatise to the strangeness of the gospel, to have their assumptions reshaped. And this requires a disciplined patience—a willingness to labour faithfully and then to relinquish control. We plant. We water. And then we wait—not passively, but attentively, prayerfully, trusting that the field isn’t ours to manage into fruitfulness.

If growth comes, it will be because God has given it.

A Word to the Faithful

At this point, it becomes clear that the vision described isn’t primarily about clergy at all. It’s about the kind of community within which such clergy can live faithfully—and the kind of community that, in turn, we help to sustain.

But we also need to face the practical realities. Many clergy now serve multiple congregations. The older model—a single priest at the centre of a single parish—has, in many places, given way to something far more demanding. No one person can carry the full weight of formation across several communities. The challenge isn’t simply one of workload, but also of isolation and discouragement.

This is where the responsibility shifts decisively, to the whole community. A church ordered towards formation can’t be sustained by clergy alone. It depends on people who take their own formation seriously—who pray, who remain, who show up, who allow themselves to be shaped over time.

The consolation is that this isn’t a solitary endeavour. The forms of the Church’s life carry us when our own energy falters. The community sustains us when our confidence wanes. The story holds us, even when the world around us seems increasingly senseless.

In the end, renewal won’t arrive as a strategy successfully implemented. It’ll be given—quietly, gradually—to a people who’ve chosen to inhabit a certain way of life together.

Clergy and laity, not as separate classes, but as participants in the same slow work: learning, over time, what it means to be formed into something deeper than ourselves.

That work isn’t dramatic or easily measured. But it’s how a Church, in the most enduring sense, becomes alive again.

A renewed Anglican way of life will be given by God to those people—lay and ordained together—who have decided that it’s worth inhabiting. What that asks of the laity in particular is the subject of the next instalment.