A Thinking Man

Senior clerics within the Church of England are protesting that trainee priests will be brought to their knees because of UK government plans to reform university funding and raise tuition fees for second degrees.

Three quarters of the 1,500 students training to become Church of England clergy at any one time are taking second university degrees because many are coming into the priesthood later in life. I have two friends who are Anglican vicars. (I call them Baba and Mama - BA English plus BA theology, and MA History plus MA theology.)

The Church of England is warning that plans to remove £100 million for students wishing to take a second degree could have a catastrophic effect on the quality of training for clergy and leave a huge black hole in church finances. Trainee nurses, teachers, and scientists have won exemptions, arguing that they are pursuing strategically important and socially desirable subjects. But the Government has resisted intensive lobbying from the Church to add theology to the list of exemptions.

Those taking a second degree in theology pay tuition fees of £3,000 a year but these could rise to levels paid by overseas students of about £11,000 a year. As the Church pays the tuition fees for ordinands, it would have to meet the extra costs in full. The government intends to mitigate the blow of the cuts by increasing funding for part-time students from £20 million to £30 million.

I agree with the decision to remove theology from the list of exempted subjects, and would encourage the government to resist further intensive lobbying from the Anglican church to change its mind.

The main argument against supporting such vocational learning has to be to do with priorities. Why should government money go to fund such an esoteric curriculum for people who already have a qualification? Don’t misunderstand me. I would support the study of esoteric subjects, believing that knowledge, however arcane, can be valuable in it’s own right. I wouldn’t want all university education to be functional or relevant. However, while I would support funding for learning theology for people without a first degree, I wouldn’t want my money to support learning such a subject for people who already have a degree and who wish to study as part of a vocational qualification.

It is easy to see that as a society we need to train teachers, scientists, and nurses. It is difficult to see why already educated people should be paid by a secular society to learn about the ontological proofs for the existence of god. And although I am sure that there are many good courses out there, my experience of mixing with clergy over thirty years, has convinced me that many ministerial courses would benefit from less theology and more vocational elements such as social-psychology, communication theory and practice, leadership and management training, and counselling training (including grief counselling, and the ability to recognise signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, signs of psychosis, and signs of personality disorder).

Against a background of limited funding and a desire to support more people gaining first degrees, giving financial support to help graduates learn an esoteric, and largely irrelevant curriculum (even for their chosen profession), cannot be justified.

The second argument against supporting such training is to do with secularisation. Why should the State support the Church? The job of a clergy is to strengthen the existing flock and add new sheep. Their work is to promote faith. If the church wants to do that, let them do so: and let them pay for it themselves. My taxes are already being used to fund a school which promotes a faith that discourages eating eggs, and to fund schools which teach a woman was beamed up to heaven at the end of her life. Please don’t expect me to enthusiastically fund the continuance and expansion of an organisation that exists to promote equally irrational, unscientific, divisive, and psychologically unhelpful views.

With less than 14 per cent of people in the UK identifying with a Christian denomination, and with less than 7 per cent of people attending church (see Religion in Britain) it is difficult to argue that the secular population would support funding on religious aims.

The third argument against such funding is to do with equality. If you support the training of one religious group, why not do it for others? There are already those who argue that because there are Anglican bishops in the House of Lords, there should be seats for figures from other denominations and religions. Because the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church receive funding to run faith schools, it has been difficult to resist requests from Muslim and schools for such funding. It would be bad enough if my money were to go to train Anglican priests, but if you then throw in every Christian denomination and every other faith, I really, really would object.

Of course, one obvious solution to the problem exists. The government is increasing subsidies to part-time degree courses. If more priesthood training courses were to become part-time rather than full-time, it may suit the mature entrants better, and would ensure that the young entrants were not able to go immediately from one degree to another and then to a church without any significant work experience in between. Having to have one foot in the workplace as well as one in a theological ivory tower may actually do a lot to help improve the quality of Anglican clergy training.

______________________

Update: 25/05/08 The government caved in, agreed to hold the new arrangements for a year, effectively giving the Anglican Church £1.5 million towards the costs of training its clergy.

(Source: The Times)

See also: Not With My Money! and State Funded Isolation

Tags: Church of England, clergy, clerics, degree, degree courses, higher education, ontological, priests, theology, training