Looking Back: Specialist Ministries 

From 1983

Specialist Ministries

Reflections by Ronald Falconer

“Times are a-changin,’” says the folk song, and nowhere more certainly than in the ministry, its style, its duties, even its sense of vocation.

“We expect our assistants to wear the clerical collar, dark grey suits and black hats”, said my ‘bishop’, the late Dr John Wilson Baird. That was standard dress for assistant ministers before World War II.

Today, not only assistant minsters but also some well-established parish ministers too, reject the dog collar, even on Sundays. About 25% of my fellow-students entered the ministry from other vocations: today the figure is nearer 60%. Then the minimum stipend was about twice the national average wage: now it scarcely equals it. In 1935 there was one university chaplain, now there are at least ten. The only specialist ministries of the ‘thirties’ were in 121 George Street (a very few at that), the Theological Faculties and the Armed Forces. Now you can add industrial chaplains, hospital chaplains, wardens of Church Houses and University Halls of Residence, religious instruction teachers, religious broadcasting staff, community ministers and various types of welfare workers, to the tune of over two hundred – one tenth of the Church’s ordained workforce.

A majority of church folk – and of ministers too – tend to look upon these non-parish ministries as not quite the right thing. The questions I was most asked all over Scotland during twenty-six years of specialist ministry, was: “Don’t you miss a parish?”

This, despite an ever-increasing ministry with BBC staff, especially the non-church ones, as well as all Scotland for a parish, in the broadcasting sense. I’ll wager 90 percent of the ‘specialist ministers’ would share the same experience.

On The March

In a memorable phrase, the late Field Marshal Jan Smuts said before he died, “Mankind is on the march again.” We are indeed at one of those great thrusting forward points in human history with our whole race poised for new types of living which will make anything that has happened in the past seem to be almost childish. Who can tell what opportunities this advance will bring to Christ’s Church? It was this challenge of the future which made Archbishop William Temple of Canterbury say that he wanted to put a thousand ordained people into industry.

The whole range and nature of the ministry will be forced to change by the pressures of what is happening in society. The Kirk must be large enough, imaginative enough, and charitable enough to welcome all that is happening as a splendid stimulus to her to show forth the Living Word beyond her walls, out there in that world her Lord has commissioned her to save.

We are going to need one another’s help and insights in this task, whether we be normal parish minister or witnessing layman. So let us be together, not only in our aims but in our organisation too. And may the great majority of the Kirk’s ordained members, who serve as their predecessors have served for generations, be generous to the rising new minority who serve in often difficult, but vital modern ways.

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