AOCM

To be a Chaplain

Mark Greenstock is General Secretary of The Independent Schools Christian Alliance (TISCA).

My dear Theophilus,

I was so delighted to hear that you have been selected to be a chaplain to an independent school. I am so encouraged that you have had the nerve to buck the trend. Please forgive me if I try to share a few thoughts with you on the topic.

Hundreds of schools are crying out for chaplains - for men and women who have discovered that God’s call for them is to go into schools rather than parishes, at least for the time being. Yet the emphasis at the training institutions is so firmly on parish or chaplaincy work (in prisons, hospitals, stores etc.) that anyone wrestling with a vocation to schools’ work could be considered rather odd.

You have chosen to apply to a boarding school where there is a chapel and a worship tradition. There are tremendous advantages in such a set-up, but of course there are also many vacancies at the present time in day schools where the daily assembly is (though it may not remain so for much longer) the point of delivery for the Christian message.

Schools are a missionary situation where there is still an open door for the gospel. Government, local communities, teachers and parents alike are desperate (and it’s not too strong a word) for some kind of values structure to be given to our young people in the UK. There are great encouragements for youth workers to be invited into primary and secondary schools and to take with them an unequivocal Christian voice. The trustees and governors of many independent schools still look for evidence of a firm personal faith in their appointment of Heads, Chaplains and Chairs of Boards.

You can therefore expect strong institutional support for your work. What you will encounter on the ground may be another matter. The combination of natural human scepticism, moral permissiveness, material affluence, religious pluralism and postmodern smorgasbord thinking makes it heavy going for anyone seeking to deliver a faithful, Biblical, distinctively Christian life-view. There is also a creeping intolerance and legalism which may prove in time to tbe the decisive factor in closing the door to a gospel ministry, though I hope I’m wrong!

What kind of gospel, though? Brits tend to respond more easily to a cool gospel than to a hot one. Maybe it’s the British weather. Teenagers in the UK don’t warm naturally to strong, intense, take-it-or-leave-it, heavy Scripture gospelling. I dare say this is true of American teenagers, too, these days. They like low-key, funny, imaginative, self-mocking teaching which slips the message of salvation past their guard while they’re still clinging to their pet delusions. They would have been delighted with the parables of Jesus, or with the sermon of Paul at Athens. They love their music, their football, their pin-ups and pop idols. They are incredibly gregarious, have a wicked sense of humour and acknowledge almost no taboos. They watch dozens of films over and over again, and they know the horror stories and the sad cases better than any adult who presumes to advise them. Yet they are children on the way to being adults: they have acute inner turmoils and doubts, feel friendship and jealousy very intensely, give way impulsively to physical and verbal violence, are very confused about what being a Christian involves - and have most time for those who have most time for them.

Your ministry, of course, will not only be to students. There is a whole community in a school, and a whole community outside it too. I cannot understand those who say that a parish ministry offers a wider slice of life. You will be pastor to class teachers, house staff, ancillary staff, gardeners, secretaries, maintenance workers. You will minister to people of other faiths who feel excluded, agnostic colleagues whose partner has left them, highly respected men and women who have agonising moral dilemmas. You will be called in to the medical centre, you will co-operate with professional psychiatrists, you will get booked up by parents who may be responsible for hundreds of employees but who are at their wits’ end about their child. You may not be part of the senior management team, in fact it is probably better that you should not be, but you will be consulted by it frequently and urgently. You will be available to the whole community (and this is a particular strength of the boarding school) morning, noon and night.

At the same time you will be a key link between the school and the local community. You will meet town mayors, sit on charity committees, attend concerts and fundraising events. You will be closely involved with neighbourhood churches, exchanging pulpits, befriending clergy and their spouses and members of their congregations. You will take assemblies in schools and may well be invited to sit on governing bodies. It may be the tradition for the chaplain to run the school’s community service programme, which will put you in touch with dozens of secular agencies. You will be well known at the local hospital as you support pupils through injury or major ill-health.

Do you still have a lingering feeling that your gifts might be better used in parish work? That you will never be able to preach a full expository sermon, or teach the Bible to all ages? That you will never minister to the really old or the really young? I have heard you preach and I know that you possess that most precious gift, a spiritual perception of what is appropriate to a given audience or congregation, and an ability to interweave Scripture with illustrations drawn from life. You will need these for the two-minute vignette at an assembly or house gathering, the ten-minute sermon in chapel, the Bible study with a group of fifteen-year-olds, the free-for-all discussion in a General Studies lesson or a staffroom debate, the term-long confirmation preparation course. Robust apologetics, cutting-edge morality teaching, non-cringemaking homily, quickfire question-and-answer will all be part of your stock-in-trade.

Will you miss being involved in the machinery of the Church of England, the PCCs, the synods, the clergy chapters, the spate of marriages and funerals, the doorstep visiting, the fundraising for the church(es)? Are you apprehensive about teaching a half-timetable in the classroom, about being asked to organise the annual fun-run, to referee football, to be a timekeeper at athletics matches? Do you feel your wings will be clipped by a strong Chairman of Governors, Head, Director of Music? Or are you nagged by the feeling that you don’t actually like young people all that much?

Or - and I think a sence of social justice and service must be a major part of every ordinand’s character - are you worried by the idea of working in a fee-paying school? Of your direct influence being limited to a thousand souls (give or take) rather than a whole parish or series of parishes, with the different implications of class and need and responsibilibity? Of receiving a teacher’s salary rather than a clergy stipend? Of getting twelve to fifteen weeks of holiday a year, not to mention half-terms and other exeats? Of working in what is essentially an academic arena with university-educated colleagues? Of being able to see your spouse and children as often as you like, and having relatively free weekends (though not perhaps in a boarding school, and not if you play or coach cricket)?

Being a man of prayer and blessed with more than ordinary insight, few of these thoughts will be strange to you. I imagine too that you will have felt, with the great apostle, “Who is sufficient for these things?” And that you will have drawn hope from his response, “Our sufficiency is from God” (2 Corinthians 2:16; 3:5).

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

And from your friend,

Luke.