Benjamin Crosby: Tom, thank you so much for being willing to have this conversation with me about ministry in contemporary Anglicanism, its challenges and hope for renewal. I thought it might be interesting to start with the story of your call to ministry and entry into ordained ministry. What was that like for you?

Thomas Pelham: I was born in a Christian family, brought up going to a Church of England church. I had a sense of wanting to get to know God from a very young age. I was always the annoying child who put their hand up and answered every single question. I burned very brightly at one point in my teenage years, but then went to university and discovered beer and sleeping in. I did play music, though, which is what called me back to church. I was offered an honorarium to be a director of music at a little parish church, and that re-engaged my faith.

My faith gradually fanned into flame again and I started getting a sense that I was called into ministry. At first, I ignored it, but it kept coming back again. In the end, I recognized that it was God talking to me. And so I said, “Look, if this is something you want me to do, Lord, make this go away and then make it come back again, and I promise you, if it comes back again, I will go and speak to someone about it.” It’s dangerous to make bargains with God, because he keeps them. Lo and behold, the sense disappeared and came back again, and so I thought, “Alright, fine, I’ll go to speak to my priest.” I walked in through the door and said, “I think I’ve been called to ministry in the Church of England.” The first thing she said was, “I’m not surprised.”

Benjamin Crosby: This really rhymes with my own story. I grew up in a conservative Lutheran denomination in the United States. I was also an absolutely insufferable kid in Sunday school and confirmation class, and then after a period of relative disengagement had a sort of reconversion. I was struck in late high school and early college by the fact that Christianity wasn’t something that was intellectually or morally honest to be lukewarm about – I needed to be in or out. And this led by the grace of God to a re-engagement with my faith. I got involved with a campus ministry, which was the first moment I began to see myself as a potential leader in the church. And my pastor started asking, “Is this something you think you might be called to do?” And gradually I came to believe that the answer was yes. I eventually found a home in the Anglican church, drawn especially by the liturgy, but combining that with a strong Protestant sense that salvation is through divine agency, through God’s grace alone. The daily office in particular has been such a gift, a way of being steeped in the psalms and scripture. It started me praying on my own again outside of Sunday worship after some years of not really doing so.

Thomas Pelham: I wish more people were interested in using resources like the daily office to move deeper in prayer outside of Sunday church services. So few people explore what faith looks like if you take it out of the church building and take responsibility for it. And then they wonder why their children aren’t faithful. If you asked a Christian in England 150 years ago about praying and reading the Bible together as a family, they would take it for granted that this was something to do, every night. But then a generation of people suddenly lost that, and we haven’t recovered from it.

Benjamin Crosby: I think this is right. There’s a sort of downward spiral in a lot of mainline churches in North America, where there is so much anxiety about scaring people off that there is an unwillingness to offer a thicker version of Christian discipleship. The result is that the people who want that leave for somewhere else. And then you’re left with a couple of generations of people for whom the idea that church is more than what you do on one Sunday a month or so is just foreign; they haven’t been introduced to it.

Thomas Pelham: Yes, it’s foreign. I think this is genuinely the fault of the churches of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. There was a sort of skepticism about the Christian project that invaded theology and liturgy. One of my bugbears is that the Church of England has its beautiful reformed liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer, which I try to use as much as possible. In this service, the challenges of being a Christian are put right in front of you. It is a challenging book. We’ve turned away from this heritage in an attempt to become more, I guess, ecumenical, but have left behind a solid foundation of Anglican formation. And yet this is something we can offer. And this is what people want, actually.

Benjamin Crosby: I’d love to hear about what it has been like to re-introduce more Book of Common Prayer services, but before we get there, I was wondering what the context is where you’re serving right now. What is it like?

Thomas Pelham: I have three rural parishes in East Sussex, in an area of England called the Weald. For England, it’s quite off the beaten track. I’ve got three medieval parishes; we have three church buildings within three miles and each one has a congregation of between twenty and sixty. So keeping these buildings going is one challenge. It’s a drain on our resources, actually, which would probably be better used growing the church and doing mission and evangelism. But the buildings are a resource as well. And also, of course, it’s not a trendy place to minister, though I find it very rewarding. There are signs of hope and growth, but ministry is very lonely here. I’m the only minister in these three parishes. And between keeping the buildings standing, preaching and leading Sunday worship, and taking a funeral every two weeks, I need to try to develop a strategic idea about how to get God known on the streets.

Benjamin Crosby: Yes, this is something I’ve struggled with too. So amidst all of these demands, how have you thought and acted strategically, starting with evangelism?

Thomas Pelham: For me, it’s been about a sort of incarnational ministry. It’s a very old-fashioned model, more akin to George Herbert than Billy Graham, going alongside people and gently showing them the truth. I go out to play at the local cricket club and go to the pub afterwards and just mingle. It’s about trying to find people where they are and gradually bringing them in. When you look at Jesus as a model – which we always ought to – he is generally relational. He starts by calling someone and then they gradually get to know who he is. For every person who has a dramatic, momentous conversion experience, there are lots of people who have been gradually nursed into faith.

Benjamin Crosby: And what about discipleship? How have you thought about raising the temperature in the places where you’re ministering, and inviting people into a deeper and more demanding form of Christian discipleship?

Thomas Pelham: I start with the assumption – and it might be the wrong assumption, but it hasn’t worked out poorly thus far – that people want to know the truth, and they want to know their Bible, and actually encountering the Bible will be fun, enjoyable, and a profound experience. I like to show my work in my sermon, explaining how I am drawing the conclusions from the text, because I want people to understand how and why they might start reading scripture.

The people in my congregations sometimes have very deep faith, but often very unformed faith. I remember I taught a course titled “Christianity Explored,” and we were discussing grace. An eighty-year-old who had been going to church since she was a baby turned to me and asked, “So it’s all for free, grace is for free?” This idea that you can’t earn grace was clearly a completely new concept to her. I was thinking, “Really, have they never preached grace in this church?” And the answer is that in the last twenty years, maybe longer, they haven’t. People can go their whole life in an Anglican church without understanding that grace is offered freely, that they’re not there just to bank up some sort of equivalent of a social credit score with God. This was a real eye-opener.

Benjamin Crosby: I’ve had an almost identical experience. I was teaching a Lenten course on the creeds and we were discussing Christ’s return to judge the living and the dead. And a lovely, deeply pious lifelong Anglican said that this idea of Christ’s return in judgment had always troubled her. She thought that her good and bad deeds were going to be tallied up and if she was found wanting, well, to hell she would go. It was a precious moment to get to preach the gospel to her, but it was also just heartbreaking to realize that this woman had been a faithful churchgoer for so many decades and had never had grace preached in a way she could hear.

Thomas Pelham: It just makes me so glad to be here, because I’m sure they’ve had faithful ministers here, but they’ve just not prioritized preaching the gospel and discipling. As a result, for decades, the churches were full of the same eighty people – a good congregation in a village church – but now the congregation has all gotten to the same age and started dying, and the ones who are left are asking, “Why is the church emptying?” And the answer is that new people just weren’t recruited, because for the last thirty years, getting new people in here wasn’t seen as a pressing need. And so of course the church is emptying. But we’re getting there. The happiest I’ve ever been in church is after a churchwarden said to me, “You know, Tom, ever since you’ve come, I just feel like we’ve really been getting to know Jesus.” I thought, “Perfect, thank you. That’s all I want you to say.”

Often new converts are better at inviting people to church than people who’ve been there for thirty, forty, or fifty years. There’s this one lad who started coming. I did some discipleship with him and the next thing I know he’s bringing his friend along. I nearly fell out of my pulpit when I saw that he brought someone along to church with him. But of course, the assumption that he had was something like, “This is good, I’m enjoying it and getting spiritual growth out of it, and I want this to be something that my friends experience.” Whereas the main congregation who have been there for years just don’t think like that. It’s a cultural thing that will require a big change.

Benjamin Crosby: One of the challenges for me is how to relate to a broader church structure that often seems to be unconcerned with supporting this sort of cultural change, orienting our churches more clearly around discipleship and evangelism. Is this something that you’ve dealt with too?

Thomas Pelham: There are problems. One of them is that the Church of England has spent fifteen years tearing itself up about sexuality and getting nowhere. And, of course, money is another frustrating thing. Another challenge has to do with ordained ministry. One of the challenges of this long dispute about sexuality is that both liberal and conservative ordinands have been put off going into the church. In addition, theological colleges have begun moving away from the inherited model [of formation] where you do at least two years of proper residential training with time to form a prayer life, do some really serious study, and form the relationships that will sustain you in ministry. This is a very sad thing.

Benjamin Crosby: We see similar patterns with theological education in Canada and the United States. There’s also a move away from a model of full-time ministry positions toward half-time, quarter-time, or even wholly non-stipendiary positions. And when you only have quarter-time positions, you end up with people who are essentially Sunday priests, not because they aren’t taking it seriously, but because they have to work a day job to support themselves. And this makes it very hard for congregations to grow.

Thomas Pelham: Yes, I think it’s very difficult to grow parishes when they’re under-resourced with clergy. Not because clergy are particularly special – I don’t believe in any accounts of ontological change, that sort of stuff – but because priests are trained and set apart to send, to teach, to minister, to encourage. It’s not surprising that churches who have people set apart to do these things are more likely to flourish. Some churches without full-time clergy do flourish as well, but on the whole, having a full-time minister is one of the biggest predictors of growth. For us, I think three parishes is sustainable for one minister, but sometimes lack of money or clergy means you end up with a minister with fourteen or fifteen parishes, which is completely unsustainable and just leads to burnout.

Benjamin Crosby: In this context, where do you find hope, and what are you hoping to see from your churches?

Thomas Pelham: For me, Anglicanism is reformed Catholicism, a good biblical way of doing church, and if allowed to do so, it will grow. I refuse to spend my career – or rather, my calling – doing palliative care to a dying church. There’s no need to. We can be bold and say, “Anglicanism has something really quite special.” But only if we are prepared to lean into it, resource it, and do it. What do I want to see from my churches? I want to see confident Christians proclaiming and worshiping Christ. I’m not overly worried about numbers, that’s up to God; if I’ve got ten people proclaiming God wholeheartedly in ten years’ time, that won’t be a complete failure. Now obviously I want to see far more than that, but at the moment it requires sustained effort – prayer certainly, the Spirit, but sustained work.

I remember, about a year ago I did a family service at one of my parishes and was a bit upset when I saw that there were only twenty-seven people there. I thought, “This isn’t good; they normally get forty. What’s happened here?” But then I got a sense that I should look again. So I counted them again, and again there were twenty-seven. And I thought, “Well, that hasn’t really helped me, God.” He says, “No, count again.” So I actually looked at who was there, and I realized that of those twenty-seven, seventeen were new. So even though we were only twenty-seven, about two-thirds of that number were new Christians. And I realized that if we can sustain that, then we could be on a trajectory to quite sustained growth. We’re going to need to get through the next few years and keep hope alive, because the demographics say that our numbers are going to go down first – down, say, to seventeen at a low service and twenty-five at a big one. But if those seventeen are all new Christians, then we can start edging up again.

At the end of the day, I want to be here. I love it here. I want to see this place flourish and I think God will work here. Obviously, he works wherever he wants to, but I believe his promises. And so I do think that when the church is faithful, it will see fruit – and we are starting to see fruit here.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.