Place and Christian Ministry today: Being a Parish Priest

One of the most distinctive features of the Church of England is its parish system. Every inch of England is part of a Church of England parish, giving legal rights – to marriage, baptism and burial – in the parish church to everyone who lives within its boundaries. The parish system developed during the Middle Ages, and at some points those who ran the parish ran not only the religious but also the secular business of their “patch”, organising Poor Relief and the mending of roads, and providing what education and health care they could, funded from the Tithes paid by parishioners. While these functions are long gone, parochialism, in its best sense, is still part of the DNA of the Church of England, and many of its clergy and the communities they serve place a high value  on the sense that the parish church is there for everyone, whether they regularly, or ever, set foot within it.

The Parish system is increasingly under strain however, as small numbers of worshippers are expected to bear the cost and effort of maintaining listed historic buildings out of dwindling funds. There are also, as there have always been, tensions and resentments around the sense that these limited stores of time, energy and money are being spent to keep churches going for the sake of people who are not “members” of the church. Many churches have factions within them who grumble when a baptism takes place for a family who don’t come to church. “Why should we put ourselves out for them, when they will never darken the doors again?” is the cry.

In a society in which people do not necessarily have the same close bond with the land in which they live as they once did, where they may work far from where they live, and where virtual networks have often replaced flesh and blood encounters, it is also tempting to say that the parish has had its day, a quaint remnant of a bygone age. But if we do this, we are playing into the same process of homogenisation of place as McDonalds, “displacing” people, and calling into question the specific holiness of the place where they are, the specific holiness of the matter which surrounds them.

 And yet, for many others, myself included, the parochial system is one of the most attractive things about the Church of England, forcing us to pay attention to the place where we are, and the people we share it with, to declare that, wherever we are, “Surely God is in this place, and I did not know it.”


The parish system is, in this sense, a direct expression of our faith in an incarnate God, a God who, in becoming flesh and blood, declared afresh that matter mattered, and if matter matters, then place matters too, because matter cannot exist except in place.  In being born in Bethlehem, Jesus did not just declare that Bethlehem was holy, but that all places were holy. Saint Jerome , who lived for many years in a cave adjacent to the traditional site of the nativity, said  “how I admire the Lord, the Creator of the world! He wanted to be born not surrounded by gold and silver, but just on a piece of this earth.”  It was the fact that Bethlehem was a “piece of this earth” which was significant, affirming that any “piece of this earth” could be a place in which God was found.  While there are, of course, many other ways in which ministry can be exercised, parish ministry is a powerful statement of this fundamental belief.