Anglican Taonga

St John’s College is caught between a rock and hard place. ‘Reviewed’ to the point of distraction, it still struggles against chronic dissatisfaction in the wider church. Jim White, the new Dean of the College of the Southern Cross, knows that decisions made in the next few years may well determine whether the college survives as a national residential training institution for the Anglican Church.

Lloyd Ashton spoke to him, and found a man who is chaffing against a presumption that St John’s should churn out ‘Godly mechanics’ – and has been inspired by the sustained scholarly discipline he witnessed in a New York rabbi. Only such disciplined study and prayer, he says, will enable future Anglican clergy to bring a much-needed ‘word from otherwise’…

Two months into the job, how do you read the challenges?

The challenges facing St John’s are the challenges facing the church. The big picture is that the church is statistically in decline – and yet there are patches where things are going really well.

St John’s parallels that. We’re an institution that is struggling with fewer numbers overall but there are some really bright spots.
Maybe we need to attend to those places which do seem to be doing it right, and having successful, vibrant ministries, and ask questions about what actually makes them work.
What’s on your plate now?

We have a relationship with Trinity Methodist that goes back a long way, and that’s an ecumenical relationship that has added a great deal. But it’s a constraint as well.

The Methodists are reworking the delivery of all their theological education and are clearly setting their own course. Now that may not be exactly our desired course, so we have to work with them in that.

Equally, we have both the joy and responsibility of being the place where the three tikanga engage… what Archbishop David calls “a lab experiment,” where we pour the ingredients together, stand back and watch. That’s a real challenge.

My personal strategy has been to start with each and every individual student, and to ask what do they need? And then, in a wider sense, my task is to care about the institution.

One of the biggest challenges facing St John’s is: What place does a residential college have in the life of our church? But in a way it’s not my challenge; it’s the church’s.
Given that you’re operating on a micro level, what requires the most attention?

The task of this institution is to encourage people ‘to understand God truly.’

Now, I like that phrase for two reasons. One, it fits with St Anselm’s dictum about ‘faith seeking understanding.’ But it’s actually a phrase that arises from a book called To Understand God Truly by David Kelsey, who was one of my professors at Yale.

The question then is how does that happen? Well, a standard answer would be through regular and deep experience of worship, and a retreat programme, and so forth.

A second model of ‘understanding God truly’ says we come to that experience through our teachers. The God stuff, the leadership stuff, just oozes out of some people. So a theological college or seminary gets the very best people together and the students, just by being around them, ‘catch’ God in the same way that they catch a cold.

Another model says there are some things that the tradition says about God, and we need to study those. To ‘understand God truly’ by this process, you engage all the best practices of the university and the highest levels of reading and writing.
Of course, every seminary operates with all of those models, but it’s a question of where the emphasis lies.

In fact, there’s a fourth model which says we ‘understand God truly’ through the redeeming and creative processes in our world – that is, through the liberating experiences of God.

We take the proclamation in Luke about the captives being made free, and we engage students in the very best political and psychological studies of what it means to be free.

That’s actually the model which prevails in this place.
Why that model?

Because we want ‘Godly mechanics.’ I think that’s a legacy of the first CMS missionaries. We want people who are useful – hands-on people who will get in there and muck-in.

There’s a good biblical warrant for that. There’s every reason to think that God favours carpenters. But are they the only kind of clergy the world really needs?

While I was at Yale I became close friends with a young orthodox rabbi, Meir Soloveichik. He was extraordinarily gracious, and I had Shabbat with him a couple of times down in New York and listened to him preach in his synagogue.
Rabbis are very scholarly souls. ‘Solly’ was part of a Talmud study group, lay and ordained, that met between 5 and 7am every single morning.

There were doctors, lawyers and so forth… and they read Talmud for two hours before they went to work. Then Solly spent the rest of the morning studying Talmud because he was a rabbi.
He was also studying fulltime at Yale University, which meant that on a few occasions I ran a tape recorder for him. We’d meet and have coffee, and I’d talk about the lecture… it was fabulous.

But what that gave me was a real insight into another kind of clergyperson. Walter Brueggeman, the OT scholar, talks about how today’s clergy are good at all these other things but are no longer steeped in what we would call priestly stuff – study of scripture and prayer and so forth. So these clergy are unable to bring a word from what he calls ‘otherwise’ – and yet that’s precisely what our world needs.

We’re more inclined to teach ministry as though it’s a trade. At St John’s there’s more angst spent preparing people to be useful in their curacy than setting them up for a lifetime of disciplines and habits.
You’ve sketched different roads, so maybe one road is not enough…

Absolutely. But it’s where the emphasis lies.

Our clergy, as a whole, are strong in the liberative processes – mucking-in and getting engaged with people’s lives – but they’re weak on the Heidleberg German model of ‘the learning’.

In Presbyterianism, of course, the minister is the teaching elder. Now, without teaching elders – that is, people deeply steeped in the tradition – our church is significantly weaker and more vulnerable..
Has anything you’ve seen since you arrived here changed your perception? Or sharpened it?

The thing that has impressed me is the quality of some of our students. Some are really outstanding.
So the challenge is: how do we nurture that talent?

It’s a wider church challenge too. I know one young guy who left college to enter a parish, and to all intents and purposes he’s doing a good job. His congregation likes him – but he’s actually caring for his grandparents’ generation, he’s caring for his elders. Is that what we most need from young clergy?

They’ve been through some tough times as they try and mesh in with each other. But what’s happening is that he’s doing a really good job of bending his will to theirs. That’s why they like him.

Instead, we should be releasing him to do some cool and creative things for the under 40s.
Your strategy for meeting the challenges?

I’ve already put a lot of pressure on attendance at worship and questions such as ‘what courses are you taking – could you be taking more?’ Pushing, pushing…

Next, I want to put in more effort with the staff.

Over the years, St John’s has been reviewed more times that New Zealand has changed government, and that’s taken quite a toll on the staff here.

I have a lot of energy for appointing a theologian. There are also questions about who will replace Allan Davidson and Keith Carley. They’re both Presbyterians who have made a massive contribution.

Other strategies? Well, I’d like to work on ways in which the institution can move from being passive to being active.

We don’t have to raise our funds, so that means our life is assured – and that’s a great grace and a tremendous gift.But it also means we’re a business that doesn’t have to be particularly light on its feet. We can just passively wait for the money, honey.
Now the college trust is, quite rightly, being more demanding – but it’s setting the terms of our business.

The second area of concern is that we just receive the raw ingredients. Students come here on scholarships, sponsored by the bishops. We simply wait… and that’s fundamentally unhealthy.

In contrast, other theological institutions worldwide are much more active, setting their own directions...

Do you have the power to change that?

Very little. I can simply lobby for it. It seems to me St John’s has to move from being one kind of organization to another kind. That’s where hope lies.

Otherwise, we’re just going to be battered by the winds. We get reviewed – and then we wait for the next review.
Have the reviews achieved anything?

On one level, they’ve achieved the Anglican Studies Programme. But the church still seems to have a high level of dissatisfaction with what St John’s does and is. That’s a matter of tremendous concern because it means the reviews haven’t really addressed the issues or brought about the changes that the church wants.
The dioceses are looking increasingly to develop their own colleges…

I don’t think as a church we’re big enough to warrant too much duplication or reiteration. We have to decide: do we want a residential programme? There’s probably space for only one in NZ.
Should it be at St John’s? Well, the church can work that out. I think there are good reasons why it should be here. For instance, Knox College are now developing a programme in Auckland because they’ve recognized that to have a meaningful national programme they need to engage with Auckland.

And that’s not just national, it’s international. Auckland is the largest Polynesian city in the world.
But maybe we should buy something in the sticks again… and take everybody away. These are decisions for the church to make.
This is a decentralized outfit, and the dioceses are sovereign. If they want a distinctly evangelical flavour to their training, for example, what’s to stop them?

My view is that the church is too small for the exercise of diocesan sovereignty over such things.
And when so much of what we do here depends on the buy-in of the purple shirts, that makes us really vulnerable.
What’s the value of a centralized training college?

We are a small church and it makes sense to gather the key resources together to feed and nourish the next generation.
There’s also the fact that a generation of people who train together build collegiality. There’s something great about knowing each other’s stories, and just knowing where others come from.
What skills are vital for the stipendiary priest in today’s church?

That they take a vow of poverty...

But seriously, I think it’s essential that clergy, stipendiary or not, can convey a sense of knowing God truly.
It’s essential for clergy to be able to give meaningful answers to the question of what they mean by ‘God’?

That connects to the tradition and it connects to people’s lives. And, in some perceptible way, it connects to their own life. Because if it doesn’t… it lacks integrity.