Worker-priests: a short guide to the species
and its variants
First identified in the first century AD (cf. Paul, tent maker, self-supporting). Habitat badly damaged by the Constantine Accommodation and the bureaucratisation of ministry. Thought extinct in Western Christendom. Small colonies spotted in France in the 1950s. Environment remained hostile to expansion. Cross-breeding of necessity and theology resulted in various sub-strains within the Church of England, from the 1970s, including unpaid, self-supporting clergy whose focus is the altar on a Sunday ('hobbyist" clergy as one bishop likes to describe them) to the more rare em-ess-cees (MSEs) who seek to embody the office of priest, and to serve the Church, by a ministry expressed within the so-called 'secular' world of the working man and woman.
Definitions from NASSAM
A tentmaker is one who, by virtue of employment outside the church, is a proclaimer of the gospel without the monopoly of attention to church business that full-time parish clergy experience. A tentmaker is one with a voice that is both within and outside the ecclesiastical community.
A tentmaker is an ordained person who is actively engaged in a ministry that brings the church to the world and the world to the church by means of a career or job that not only provides a primary source of livelihood but also reaches beyond the institutional church to include a more diverse array of people.
And, more seriously...<to follow>
MSE-ery is experienced as an adventure by many of its exponents; fresher than many 'fresh expressions' and riskier than roles exclusively within the church-as-institution. Though often tiring and sometimes lonely, it is never boring.
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See also stories of individual priests working beyond the institution
"The dilemma of the church in this transitional time is that the shells of the old structures still surround us even though many of them no longer work. Some of the structures are institutions, some are roles, some are mind-sets and expectations. At one moment they mediate grace to us and at the next they block and confuse us. Sometimes some of them actually support and nourish us, while others get in the way of the new structures we need."
Loren Mead, in The Once and Future Church
"All of life is spiritual, for all is part of God's creation. There is no division between sacred and secular, work and worship, religion and politics. Spirituality is not apart from our daily life; it is our daily lives. But it is a life with a cutting edge not avoiding the pain and fear." Alan Ecclestone, Priest (Church of England; b1904, d1992)