Fwd: Keeping Sane: How to sustain being an Anglican Ordained Parish Priest through Contemplation
Gabrielle Dean
This is long, but well written and very important. Would be good if everyone read it, but especially Parish Council, Wardens and the Liturgical Group - what does it mean for our church and our priest? |
Keeping Sane: How to sustain being an Anglican Ordained Parish Priest through Contemplation
A personal reflection drawing on experience of being a Parish Anglican Priest in the UK & Diocesan Missioner in Canada
After a meeting with a contemplative Anglican Parish Priest last week, I have been reflecting on this issue also coming from my own experiences. So I hope this is helpful for the many ordained Anglican parish priests around the world.
To be an Anglican ordained priest today is to stand at the intersection of the sacred and the secular, between the ancient call of holy orders and the relentless demands of modern institutional life. It is, without exaggeration, one of the hardest vocations there is.
To be a parish ordained priest in this time is to carry the weight of many callings in one fragile human body — spiritual leader, teacher, counsellor, manager, fundraiser, change agent, pastor, liturgist, funeral guide, marriage mentor, community organiser, social worker, caretaker, building manager, and, perhaps most painfully, the one expected to hold everyone else’s faith together when your own feels threadbare. It is to live in a constant tension between vocation and exhaustion, between grace and responsibility.
It is no wonder that so many clergy today quietly confess a sense of depletion, loneliness, and loss of joy. Many find themselves running on empty - spiritually dry, emotionally fatigued, and physically worn-out. In some cases, the ordained priest becomes so consumed by the machinery of parish life that their spirituality and faith is quietly starved. The irony is cruel: the very calling that invited us to dwell in God’s presence can, if we are not careful, become the context in which we lose sight of that presence altogether. And yet, there is another way.
Rowan Williams once wrote that “to be contemplative is to be open to the truth that the world is held in being by the love of God.” If this is true, then the vocation of the ordained priest must begin not with doing, but with being held. The ordained priest is not first a manager, but a witness to this divine holding. The danger is that in the current cultural climate, we forget this. We live and minister within what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the immanent frame— a way of seeing the world that brackets out transcendence, that assumes everything of value must be measurable, controllable, and productive. It is a worldview that leaves little room for mystery, grace, or trust.
Taylor describes the immanent frame as the contemporary condition in which meaning and purpose are confined to human horizons. It is a world where God is no longer assumed, where transcendence has been pushed to the margins of consciousness. Within the Church, this mindset has taken deep root. We may still use the language of faith, but much of our day-to-day practice operates as if God’s presence were incidental rather than essential. This manifests in what some call functional atheism - the quiet, practical assumption that everything depends on us. It is rarely spoken aloud, but it governs how many of us lead. It shows up in the exhaustion of clergy who feel that if they don’t hold every string together, the parish will unravel. It appears in endless meetings about buildings, budgets, and risk, where conversation turns not on discernment but on fear. It thrives in diocesan cultures obsessed with metrics, growth charts, and financial survival - where mission becomes synonymous with management and non-liturgical prayer is treated as a luxury.
Functional atheism seeps into the bones. It can hollow out the Christian faith and spirituality of an ordained priest until ministry feels like a form of religious bureaucracy or just another social service agency. The parish becomes an organisation to be maintained, not a body to be loved. The focus shifts from the mystery of grace to the maintenance of systems. The Spirit is reduced to strategy. The Church begins to mirror the anxious logic of the marketplace: scarcity, competition, productivity, outcomes. This is not simply a managerial problem - it is a spiritual disease. It shrinks our imagination and drives us to act as if God were absent. It makes faith a theory rather than a lived relationship. It tempts us to rely on control rather than surrender, efficiency rather than trust. It makes the Church into an organisation rather than a living breathing social organism - as the Body of Christ - its true vocation.
What increasingly worries me, is the number purely activist parish clergy I have met who evaluate everything through doing - counting numbers as activity as some form of helpful spiritual outcome measure. For me too little focus is given to stories of spiritual transformation, and of spiritual growth - and too much on the maintenance of religious worship services and social justice activities. A religion over focused on doing with no spiritual depth or focus on being and growing in relationship with God has to be the epitome of functional atheism.
Rowan Williams has observed that “the root of all sin is refusing to be where you are, because you are afraid of not being enough.” Functional atheism, at its heart, is fear - the fear of scarcity, of irrelevance, of loss. We become driven by anxiety rather than animated by love. And when fear becomes the dominant note in the life of an ordained priest, the personal spirituality of the person beneath the role begins to suffocate. We can end up embodying the same culture we are called to resist - maintaining systems of control that prevent genuine encounter with the living God.
The Church, in such moments, ceases to breathe. It becomes stale - an institution focused on survival rather than transformation, on control rather than communion. The living body of Christ risks being reduced to a weary organisation. This is the tragedy of the immanent frame’s infiltration into the Church: we no longer trust or live as if God were real, as if the Spirit might move among us. We maintain the language of faith but often act from unbelief. We move in a scarcity mindset driven by fear, rather than in a spirituality of abundance grounded in trust. When the fear of loss and failure governs decision-making, the Church mirrors the world rather than witnessing to God’s Kin-dom.
Yet the call of Christ has always been the opposite of this. It is the call to step beyond fear into faith, beyond scarcity into abundance, beyond management into mystery. Contemplation is the means by which this shift becomes possible. Through silence, prayer, and the slow cultivation of attention, the ordained priest learns again how to see. Contemplation is not an escape from responsibility; it is a transformation of how we inhabit it. It reorders our vision so that we act not from compulsion but from deep relationship with God through a process of surrender not control.
A contemplative ordained priest is one who has learned, often through struggle, to live from a centre deeper than anxiety. They have come to know, through practice, that the Church does not depend solely on their competence, but on God’s faithfulness. They learn to act as if God is real - not merely as an idea or an ecclesial slogan, but as the animating reality of all life. This shift does not eliminate the pressures of ministry, but it changes their meaning. The same tasks remain — the budgets, the funerals, the crises, the disappointments 0 but they are carried differently. They are then not an end in and of themselves. They are borne in prayer rather than panic.
The contemplative life for an ordained parish priest does not require monastic withdrawal or hours of uninterrupted silence. It begins in small, faithful rhythms of attention. Ten minutes of silence before the morning office. A deep breath at the vestry door before entering a difficult meeting. The quiet stillness after the last parishioner has left the church, when the candles are still burning. Lighting a candle in the rectory at dusk and whispering the Jesus Prayer before bed. These small acts re-anchor us in the reality of God’s presence. They remind us that ministry is not ours to perform, but God’s to fulfil in and through us.
When prayer becomes the ground of our being, even the most ordinary tasks of parish life become sacramental. Budget meetings become opportunities to discern how to steward God’s gifts rather than manage scarcity. A Parish Council or Corporation conflict becomes an invitation to practice grace and patience. A funeral becomes not just an obligation but a moment of profound encounter with the mystery of resurrection. The contemplative stance turns every aspect of ministry into an act of prayer - a participation in God’s ongoing life in the parish.
When ordained priests live from this place, parishes begin to change. The energy of fear slowly loosens its grip. The community breathes more easily. The emphasis shifts from survival to transformation, from control to trust, surrender and obedience. Parishioners begin to sense something different - that the ordained priest is not operating from anxiety but from love. Meetings become gentler, worship deepens, and the space of the parish becomes one of grace rather than stress.
Rowan Williams has said that “in contemplation we find ourselves in the place where we belong - before the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit - where we see ourselves as loved, forgiven, and accepted.” This, ultimately, is what sustains ordained priestly life. It is the continual returning to that place of belonging, of being loved rather than performing. Without this return, ministry becomes performance and control; with it, ministry becomes participation and joy.
To live this way is costly. It requires letting go of the illusion of indispensability, saying no to certain demands, practising surrender and disappointing some expectations. It may mean disappointing the part of ourselves that wants to be needed, important, or praised. It may even mean embracing forms of simplicity that others misread as laziness or lack of ambition. But this is the narrow way that leads to life. It is how we recover a depth of faith and spirituality.
Through the practice of silence, attention, and presence, we rediscover that God is not absent from our parishes. God is already there - in the grief of a funeral, in the laughter of a toddler group, in the quiet beauty of an empty sanctuary at dusk. The contemplative ordained priest does not bring God to the people; they help the people notice the God who is already among them. And perhaps that is the deepest gift of the contemplative life in ordained priestly ministry - to stand as a witness that, in a world obsessed with control, there is another way to live.
In an age governed by the immanent frame, where transcendence seems implausible and faith feels fragile, the contemplative ordained priest becomes a kind of subversive presence - someone who lives as if God is real, and in doing so, reopens the horizon of the transcendent for others. Through stillness, trust, and love, we hold open a space where God can be encountered again. That, finally, is the heart of the priestly vocation: to keep the window to heaven open, and to help the Church breathe again.
Some Simple Contemplative Practices
1. The Prayer of Stillness (Micro-Silences):
Take 2–3 minutes between meetings, pastoral visits, or before entering the church to sit or stand in silence. Gently breathe in the awareness of God’s presence and breathe out whatever burdens or anxieties you’re carrying. Repeat a simple phrase like “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).2. The Jesus Prayer:
Use this short prayer throughout the day:“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Let it become a rhythm with your breath - inhale on “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God”, exhale on “have mercy on me, a sinner.”
It can be prayed quietly while driving, walking, or preparing for worship. Over time, it cultivates a constant awareness of God’s compassionate presence.3. Centering Prayer:
Set aside 10–20 minutes once or twice a day to sit quietly before God. Choose a sacred word (e.g., peace, grace, love) as a symbol of your consent to God’s presence and action within. When distractions arise, gently return to your word.
It is less about doing and more about being—allowing yourself to rest in God beyond words and thoughts.4. Lectio Divina in Miniature:
When sermon preparation feels purely functional, reclaim Scripture as prayer.
Read a verse or short passage slowly, pause to notice a word or phrase that stands out, and rest with it in silence. Let it speak to your heart before you turn to exegesis or planning. This keeps your engagement with Scripture spiritually nourishing rather than merely professional.5. Walking Prayer:
When overwhelmed, take a slow, mindful walk—around the churchyard, neighbourhood, or even the parish hall. With each step, repeat a phrase like “Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me.”
Let the rhythm of your walking align with your breathing. It’s prayer through movement, reconnecting body, mind, and spirit.6. The Examen:
At the end of the day, take five minutes to review your day before God.
This practice helps integrate the sacred into the ordinary and prevents burnout through gentle self-awareness and gratitude.7. The Breath Prayer:
Use breath itself as prayer. Breathe in the name of God (“Abba,” “Spirit,” “Jesus”) and breathe out your need (“help me,” “guide me,” “hold me”).
It is a way to pray without ceasing, grounding your body in God’s sustaining presence even in the middle of pastoral crises.8. The Contemplative Pause Before Action:
Before you answer a difficult email, lead a meeting, or preach, pause briefly and pray:“Come, Holy Spirit. May all I do be done in you.”
This habit turns ordinary work into sacrament, rooting leadership in spiritual attentiveness rather than anxiety.9. The Sacrament of the Present Moment:
Practice seeing daily interruptions - someone at the door, a phone call, a crying parishioner - not as distractions from God but as moments in which God is already at work. As Jean-Pierre de Caussade taught, “Everything is sacrament when accepted in faith.”
This mindset transforms parish busyness into contemplative attentiveness.10. Short Offices of Presence:
Reclaim short forms of the Daily Office. Even if you cannot say Morning or Evening Prayer fully, pause at midday for a brief collect, Psalm, or the Lord’s Prayer. Build in at least 3 to 5 minutes of silence.
This rhythm consecrates time and reminds you that the heart of ministry is not productivity but communion.Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash
Contemplative Christian in a PostSecular Culture of Collapse is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
You're currently a free subscriber to Contemplative Christian in a PostSecular Culture of Collapse. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
LIKE
COMMENT
RESTACK
