A Vital Ministry

John Caperon

Description

John Caperon highlights the nature and significance of the distinctive ministry of school chaplains and seeks to raise the profile of this key ministry in the Church

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 07 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334052210
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Vital Ministry
A Vital Ministry
Chaplaincy in Schools in the Post-Christian Era
John Caperon
© John Caperon 2015

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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved. And where indicated, from the New English Bible © Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press 1961, 1970.


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978 0 334 05219 7


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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Chaplaincy: A Model of Ministry for thePresent Time
2 The Cultural and Religious Context forSchool Chaplaincy
3 The Spiritual Dimension: The Response ofState and Church
4 A Ministry of Presence: What SchoolChaplains Offer
5 ‘A Sort of Mini-Jesus’: How StudentsUnderstand Chaplaincy
6 Being with People: Christian Pastoral Care in the School Context
7 Celebrating the Sacred: Accessing the Spiritual Dimension
8 School Chaplaincy: A ComplexProfessional Role
9 Time for Change: Action on School Chaplaincy
References
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Dr Helen Cameron, the director of the Oxford Centre for Ecclesiology and Practical Theology (OxCEPT) at Ripon College Cuddesdon during 2007−11, for the conversation in 2008 which first prompted my research into school chaplaincy. It was Helen, too, who suggested that I undertake the research in the context of the doctoral programme in Practical Theology rooted in the Cambridge Theological Federation under the direction of Dr Zoe Bennett. To both Helen and Zoe, who acted as my doctoral supervisors, I owe a great debt of gratitude for their warmth, supportiveness, occasional necessary astringency, and friendship. ‘Doctorateness’ was a concept – and an aspiration – helpfully clarified by Professor Vernon Trafford, who brought further warm encouragement, for which I thank him. Throughout the years in which the Bloxham Project was based at Ripon College Cuddesdon, I enjoyed not only the warm hospitality of the college’s staff and students, but also the support and friendship of the then Principal, the Very Revd Martyn Percy, whose generosity and kindness I gratefully acknowledge.
The trustees of the Bloxham Project, under the wise chairmanship of David Exham, offered unstinting support for the research, which was further financially supported by the Dulverton Trust, the Haberdashers’ Company, the Mercers’ Company, Woodard Schools and St Gabriel’s Trust. Without these resources, the research would simply not have been possible. The helpful guidance of the research reference group gave clarity and direction, so my thanks go to the Revd Professor Mark Chapman, Nick McKemey, the Revd Samantha Stayte and Professor Geoffrey Walford. The steady hand and eye of Keith Glenny, then the Bloxham Project administrator, were central to the compilation of our database of school chaplains, as indeed they were to the smooth running and sound financial management of the whole research enterprise.
My greatest debt, though, is to the extended community of all those working as chaplains in Church of England schools. Lay or ordained, of whatever ecclesial background and in whatever school context, school chaplains are at ‘the cutting edge of mission’. They are the Christian ministers most likely to have meaningful personal contact with school pupils at a particularly formative stage in their lives, in the course of what may be truly transformational ministry. So I warmly thank the very many school chaplains who over my years as director of the Bloxham Project and subsequently have allowed me to share their insights into ministry. They have been nothing short of inspirational. In particular, I want to thank the sometime chair and secretary of the School Chaplains’ Association, the Revd Dr Jan Goodair and the Revd Lindsay Collins, the subsequent chair, Fr John Thackray, and the senior provost of Woodard Schools, the Revd Canon Brendan Clover. My special thanks go also to Captain David Booker CA, Fr Richard Harrison, the Revd Rachael Knapp, the Revd Dr John Seymour, the Revd Dr David Lyall, and to the Revd David Jenkins, sometime school chaplain, who first introduced me to the original Bloxham Project research.
It goes without saying that anyone writing a book needs time, space and support. These have been unstintingly given by my wife Felicity, whom I thank for her understanding and encouragement, and to whom I dedicate this work: ‘a poor thing, but my own’.
John Caperon
January 2015
Introduction
Disconnected: the Church and young people
It is a truism that secondary school students in England generally don’t attend church. They go – frequently and obsessively – online;they go to the shopping mall and Costa; they frequent clubs and concerts; they go – often more for social than academic reasons – to school: but they do not go to church. The cultural world they inhabit is fast-paced and immediate to their interests; it is an all-pervasive context for their thinking and feeling, and it is what largely shapes their values. The values represented by the Church – let alone the salvation story the Christian faith lives within and seeks to share with others – find little resonance with them. The young are disconnected from the Church.
There are, of course, exceptions to this general picture. Some churches do appear to succeed in attracting the young – most notably, perhaps, those in the evangelical–charismatic tradition, and located in university cities. And some contexts where the Church has adopted the cultural forms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century – for instance the Greenbelt festival and Soul Survivor – also show a capacity to attract and keep the young on board. But broadly speaking the young and the Church are disconnected, inhabiting different worlds.
Does this matter? If the Church is content to admit that it is now a marginal social institution, increasingly of service mainly to an older and depleting population, then it doesn’t matter that much: the continuity of Christian faith among the young will be confined to the niche impact made by Soul Survivor and similar expressions – and Christianity in this country will probably not disappear but rather reduce to a tiny core of committed people, as suggested in some of the academic literature (see Collins-Mayo et al. 2010; Heelas and Woodhead 2005).
Nor does it matter that much if we are content to see the Christian story regarded as a clue to understanding the past rather than as a resource for the present and future. School and university teachers of English Literature now feel it essential to provide religious ‘background’ to the classics of the literary tradition for their students, since the imaginative and moral worlds of Chaucer, Shakespeare and even Dickens, distinctively shaped by Christian faith, are found to be increasingly foreign. The Christian past of our post-Christian society simply needs to be explained, if the young are to understand huge areas of our history, art, literature and law.
But if we want a good proportion of the young to have access to the full range of the living spiritual resources of Christian faith and tradition, as potential support for their current and future living rather than for their understanding of the past, then the major disconnect between the Church and the young matters considerably. So what can be done?
This book argues that within the increasing number of secondary schools and academies in the church sector – not just those formally sponsored by the Church but also those sponsored by church-linked organizations – a key potential resource for the Church’s mission to the young is a school chaplain embedded within the life of the school community. It also argues that the rapidly developing ministry of visiting ‘para-chaplains’ – mainly linked with local and national voluntary organizations such as Scripture Union, and providing spiritual support for pupils in schools mainly outside the church sector – is a dynamic further resource offering new energy in Christian mission.
Making the connection: school chaplaincy
Chaplaincy in schools, this book argues, offers the key point of interaction between the Church’s ministry and the young – a position the Church of England itself has not so far come to recognize. In the policy deliberation and report-writing of the early twenty-first century, there has been a strong emphasis on the significance of the Church’s stak