A bias against poor people applying for ordination is undermining the Church’s crucial work in urban areas, according to the outgoing Bishop of Urban Life and Faith.In a presentation at the General Synod in York, the last Bishop of Hulme, the Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, said: “The selection process is often biased against people coming out of the poorest communities. Their opportunities to be articulate in the way which selectors are articulate, their opportunities to have the sort of religious background which many of the selectors are expecting, are often just not the same as those coming from middle-class communities.
“I really do think we need to address this, just as we have seen it a priority to find people of different racial backgrounds.”
The Bishop of Dudley, the Rt Rev David Walker, said: “Increasingly the people who are prepared to go and work in the inner city are people who have come from the inner city. The very diversity of our culture makes it very difficult for people who have not had experience, who have not grown up in that background, to feel comfortable there.
“Nonetheless, it seems the case that much of our process of identifying candidates for the ministry still seems to come up disproportionately with people from middle-class suburban backgrounds.”
Consequentially, disaster now looms in “uncomfortable Britain”, said Bishop Lowe, as a dearth of clergy meant those involved in the Church’s urban mission were being overwhelmed. He said: “It is a recipe for disaster to continue to add more parishes into benefices in urban contexts. The lack of articulate, literate and numerate lay leaders in many of these parishes means more clergy dependency.
“There is clear evidence of more clergy mental and physical illness in these parishes and growing recruitment problems.”
“I am not convinced at the moment that we are providing enough opportunities for the men and women who are training, certainly in our theological colleges and to some extent in our courses, to experience the joys of urban life and faith. We're not giving them enough opportunities to go and spend time there. Far too many of the placements which ordinands are going on are based on a nice fit churchmanship-wise rather than a proper discovery of new contexts for the Church's ministry.”
The Director of the Ministry Division, the Ven Christopher Lowson, said: “I don’t accept there is a systematic bias against people from poor backgrounds, but we do need to do more to encourage people from those backgrounds into ministry.
“Selection panels judge people very fairly,” said Archdeacon Lowson, who rejected calls for positive discrimination, while admitting that people from less privileged backgrounds found it harder to demonstrate their “quality of mind”. He emphasised the need for Diocesan Directors of Ordinands (DDOs) to do more to encourage a variety of people towards ordination.
Canon Dr Christina Baxter of the Archbishops’ Council, said: “I don’t think the bias is conscious. I think [Bishop Lowe] was right to say that in the same type of way that we are trying to encourage more young vocations and vocations from ethnic minorities, we ought to be working hard to create vocations from the more deprived areas of the country. I’m not sure we consciously work at that enough, and I think that’s a great pity.”
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