George Pitcher

This essay is edited from a sermon by The Revd George Pitcher at St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, on 17th September, 2006

David Smith, better known as Dave or Smithie to his colleagues, is the verger of St Bride's. He's also been licensed as a lay reader in the Diocese of London. He greets visitors to the church and is a man of not a few words; a man for whom conversation is not so much an art as an obsession. Perhaps that's how they make them in Derbyshire. Why tell an anecdote when an entire history of Derbyshire will do?

I was happy to bump into him on my train into work, because I knew I could ask him about his impending readership and he would talk about it from Herne Hill to City Thameslink, suspending my need to talk. Dave was characteristically exhaustive. He told me that readers were first licensed in the 19th century, so-called to read the morning and evening offices in those secular locations - schools or factories - where (hard to credit now) priests couldn't be expected to go in those days; that sometimes they were given little homilies from the priest to read out; that his view is that they are a kind of lay diaconate, an exemplar of how to conduct lay ministry.

This set me thinking about the difference between lay and ordained ministry. Those of us who are ordained to the priesthood rarely have a clear idea why. I have some sympathy with our rector David Meara's view that being ordained is the only thing that gets me into church on Sundays. And I'm not sure who it was who said: "God calls to ordained ministry those he doesn't trust in the laity" but I can see some truth in that too.

A slightly more serious analysis relates to the sacramental side of our priestly ministry and how that relates to our pastoral work - and Dave went into that too. But it seemed to me, as I dwelt on what Dave had been saying, that there is something essentially authentic about the lay ministry of readership - like the first Christians in Rome or Asia Minor. I say that because I think the church all too often gets in the way of Christian ministry.

When readers were first licensed by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol in 1866, the churches were full, but Christian service and witness among the laity was altogether less organized. Some 140 years later, I suspect it's the other way around. Our churches are emptying, but the Christian experience is much more vibrant and alive in the street, in workplaces and, yes, even in our schools. I don't mean faith schools - I mean the apparently secular ones. We may not beat the catechism into our children with the cane, but I would venture that the love and leadership of Christ is more apparent in our universal and inclusive education of today than it was in the Victorian model. And that speaks of authentic Christian witness.

This is to imply that priests are redundant. I'm not about to throw in my collar so soon. But at some levels the whole clobber of the church gets in the way of that authentic witness. I'll give just two examples. I'm always meeting people - mostly media people - who tell me they're "atheists". We recently held a one-day conference at St Bride's on Xenophobia and Disinformation in the Media, with the Next Century Foundation - I lost count of the number of times I heard the phrase "Speaking as an atheist". And I went on BBC Radio the other day and both my fellow guests, one a Jew, one a lapsed catholic, claimed atheist credentials. But all these people also happen to be into love and hope and self-sacrifice and joy and celebration of the human spirit - even faith ("I don't know if I would put my life on the line for my children, but I hope I would"). It strikes me that they're not atheists in the sense that they don't believe in God - they just don't believe in me, or rather in my priesthood or my church. They're not atheists, in my view, they're church anarchists. And there's a respectable tradition in that. It was that great social-reformist Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, who said: "It would be a mistake to believe that God is exclusively, or even principally, interested in Religion."

Secondly, a member of my family recently saw a woman in her village, striding out with her dog in a sweatshirt and slacks, with a broad smile on her face. Nothing terribly odd about that, perhaps, except that on Sundays in church she was a little old lady who could barely hobble to her place. So many of us have personas that we adopt for church, because it's a different life we have there.

It seems to me that Dave's kind of ministry can cut through those pretences and prejudices and expectations of church life, in an authentic Christian way. Not I hope as a replacement for ordained ministry, but as part of a vibrant and living faith that should reach every part of the society in which we live.

And one final thought: Dave promised in his readership vows to endeavour to promote peace and unity, to conduct himself as a worker for Christ. He will be an exemplar of Christian lay ministry. Unless and until the body of Christians takes back the gospel from the bishops and the popes and lives it out in the presence of those of other faiths, such as Islam, who have similarly re-claimed their ideologies from the self-appointed leaders who don't speak for them, we will be bound for hell in a handcart. Dave can't solve that on his own; none of us can - but his promises are at least a signal of hope in a wounded world, the authentic ministry of the living Christ among the mass of loving people, proof positive that our handcart isn't necessarily bound for hell.