David Hoyle, The Pattern of our Calling

David Hoyle, The Pattern of our Calling: Ministry Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (London: SCM Press, 2016)

This is the first book on ministry that I read before my Bishops’ Advisory Panel that I’ve come back to and re-read afterwards.  As with the Cottrell book on priesthood that a read a couple of weeks ago, it’s an interesting to note the differences in reading about ministry knowing that I’ll be starting my formal training in the next few months than it was before I went to the selection panel.  This is a book that I read with interest a couple of years ago, and I remember sitting in the gardens of Temple Church reading a chapter or two.  But I came away from the first reading strangely indifferent about this book. It starts well and I’m sympathetic to the deep, spiritual vision of priesthood that Hoyle is trying to achieve.  But it fades somewhat, and the whole is a little less than the sum of its parts.  Despite really wanting to like this book, my impression after reading it a second time was very similar. 

It’s difficult to identify exactly why this book doesn’t quite work for me.  Hoyle is a historian, and he draws on historical examples throughout.  All of the priests and theologians discussed in the book have written something on the meaning of ministry, but other than that they’re an incredibly diverse group.  There is a lot of chronological jumping around, which sometimes makes the context difficult to follow.  Just when you’re starting to appreciate the fourth century world of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, for example, we’re catapulted 300 years forward to the papacy/episcopate of Gregory the Great, who was made Bishop of Rome in 590, and then we immediately find ourselves in the presence of Bishop J.B. Lightfoot in late nineteenth century Durham.  All three are calling for moderation, and the meaning of moderation is different in each context.  That is the point that Hoyle is making, but it raises the question that if ‘Keeping Your Balance’ means something different in each example does it have universal value as a concept.  Some chapters take examples in reverse chronological order: Chapter 3, for example, gives us Wesley Carr, a DDO in Chelmsford in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then jumps back to Bishop John Fisher in Tudor England.  The challenge with introducing such a diverse range of historical characters (perhaps inevitably almost all men) is that the book ends up assuming knowledge about who they were and the context they worked in, and this gives it something of an exclusive, academic character. 

If the book has a central argument, it is an argument against the contemporary focus of the church on growth and leadership summed up in the word ‘managerialism’.  Growth and leadership, of course, are important, but they are only one aspect of priesthood.  The various examples we’re presented with through the book do come together to give a much more rounded vision of priesthood.  But the patterns of this calling are not entirely obvious.  For a book that calls on several occasions for a more united and more communal vision of priesthood, a case could be made that the underlying patterns need to be set out a little more clearly.