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How I Came to Pause the Priesthood

I was ordained to the diaconate in 2009 and soon thereafter to the priesthood in 2010. This was in the Anglican Diocese of Rupert’s Land in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. George Sumner preached at my ordination. A few days after I was ordained, my family and I immigrated to New Zealand for me to take up a senior lectureship in systematic theology at the University of Otago. For ten years (2010-20), I served as an honorary associate priest at a parish in Dunedin. That parish was, by New Zealand’s standards anyhow, large. I recall that at some point in the mid-2010s, we had nearly 100 people at the 10 a.m. Eucharist.

When my children were younger, it was much easier to raise them in a church context wherein there were not many children. As my wife liked to say, “The kids have many grandparents.” But COVID hit in March 2020, the church went online, and we found ourselves asking — as we had been for quite a while — if we should stay in our parish or move to a big Baptist church close to our home where there were far more children, youth, and families. Once the first wave of COVID subsided in New Zealand in June 2020, we made the agonizingly difficult decision to leave our Anglican parish in favor of a congregational context wherein there were extraordinary — to us, anyhow — numbers of children, youth, and young adults. I would like to explain something of what that has been like.

Both then and now, I feel immensely conflicted. Our roots and connections in this big free-church congregation continue to grow deeper, even as we have many reservations about aspects of its life. Even so, I sometimes take comfort in knowing that at least a prayer book is not being used — no prayer book is used, of course — that openly embraces modalistic formulas for the triune name, as was fashionable in the heyday of liturgical revisionism in the 1980s. That comfort, however, is usually short-lived, and brings me face-to-face with the fact that I left the church of my ordination, the vows I undertook, and the Creeds, to say nothing of Cranmer’s prayers.

In this multigenerational Baptist church, the largest church of any kind in the lower South Island, I have made friends and offered adult Bible classes to sizable numbers. Both have been a blessing. I have also watched my children navigate life in a large church — about 300 or so congregants on a Sunday morning — wherein very few know their name and fewer still would notice if they weren’t there. That is not anyone’s fault — it is life in a large congregation — but I regret to say that what my wife and I had hoped for, their at least joining in congregational worship has not happened. I do not know why, and more than ever, I am unsure of how to pass on the faith that I love to the next generation.

It’s a truism to say that religious professionals are not very good at passing on the faith to their children. I could blame many factors, both personal and structural, but one thing I’ve learned — am learning — is that faith formation, to the extent that it happens at all, happens at home. This isn’t news to anyone, but it seems largely true. All of the big worship, high-octane camps, cool games, and whatever else seems to make little difference. But then again, I suppose I am waking up in middle age to what has been my vocation as a Christian all along. This is to simply receive the love of God in Christ through the Word and Spirit, and trust that such reception will bear fruit in unknown ways, even if only in the next life.

First lesson learned, then, in the context of the big church: programs seem to make little difference on whether the faith is passed on.

Second lesson: for better and for worse, people come to church wanting to worship, i.e., sing songs that encourage feeling and connection with God and others. Singing, and not preaching, is the center of the service. Again, there’s nothing new there; indeed, one might call this a local iteration of the megachurch phenomenon so well documented in the careful study High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America (OUP, 2020).

Third, people are wonderfully accepting of messages that trade on narrative portions of Scripture. Paul is a much harder sell, but Luke/Acts not so much. In nearly five years at this congregation, I have yet to hear a sermon from Romans, though I’ve lost track of how many I’ve heard from the synoptic Gospels.

Fourth and last, people want to feel a part of a community. I get that. I feel, ironically, far less lonely in a big church than I did in a comparatively small Anglican church.

I suppose this is part of inhabiting Cranmer’s vision of the Lord as “He whose property is always to have mercy.” I had visions as a young priest of encouraging diocesan renewal in the gospel in a province of the Anglican church that John Webster once referred to as “drastically liberal.” That renewal did not materialize, at least in ways that I envisioned.

I was a perfect instantiation of what Bonhoeffer called a dreamer: “He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial. God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious.”

For the foreseeable future, I’ve given up my vocation in an Anglican parish. I’m still a priest, albeit not a functioning one. I continue to believe there are merits to submitting myself and my family to a healthy and to varying degrees life-giving Christian community. Even so, I write with a view to commending God’s mercy in the face of vocational upheavals and personal failures.

The Rev. Dr. Christopher Holmes is professor of Systematic Theology in the Theology Programme at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

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