Practically Priests Privileging the Lived in Ministerial Training (original) (raw)

2018, Reasonable Radical? Reading the Writings of Martyn Percy

How does one become a priest? For that matter, who gets to decide what being a priest really means, let alone what it would take to train someone towards this particular end? Is it merely a career choice made by the more holy (or pious) amongst us, or does it instead require the type of decision only possible in submission to being "called"? More specifically, what determines the training of clergy, and, to what extent does this take into account the lives from which people are called? This paper seeks to explore Martyn Percy's pedagogy in the context of vocations within the Anglican Communion as it relates to adult-led education. Given the significant developments of a theologically informed anthropology within Percy's work, which takes seriously the context and concrete experience of the church, this paper argues that continued use of the term pedagogy (child-leading) can generate something of a "blind-spot" (or at worst an infantilization) limiting the rich life experiences that adult learners offer through potential educational reciprocity. By reading Percy in view of recent developments of andragogy (adult-leading), we will explore how these insights might better shape future clergy towards the kind of collegiality that sustains unity in the face of disagreements and the ensuing ecclesial dispositions. When considering their vocation, it is worth remembering that priests are trained for the church. Whilst this may seem like an obvious statement, it begs the more searching question: what type of church are they trained for? Far from being normative, or developed from a distinct ecclesial blueprint, the church is multifarious, with as many variants as it has locations. Paying attention to the particular people, context, and grounded reality of the local church reveals that training priests is subsequently far from a simple transferal of skills and knowledge. Further to this is the need for what Percy highlights (through the work of Dan Hardy) as an a posteriori understanding of the church and ministry in real-time. Rather than devise generic training courses to output clergy, attention should be given from the outset to the