As in all ministry, the efficaciousness of university chaplaincy depends to a very large extent on the quality of relationships one can grow and maintain. Why? Because the good news of the Gospel, which in essence concerns the gift of being caught up the Son\u2019s relationship to the Father in the Spirit (c.f. Rom 8:22f, 28-30; Gal 4:4-7), is best portrayed and communicated in like manner. Through our relationships we are called to witness to a different order of being in which love has the priority, not as an alien imposition on the present, but in anticipation of the present\u2019s consummation in God. Developing and nurturing such relationships calls for a tricky negotiation of university structures, neither by-passing them completely, nor being absorbed into them.<\/p>\n
Over the past twenty years or so there has been a decisive shift in university culture. During this period there has been a clear migration from informal to more formal modes of working. As universities have expanded, and as the multiple audits they are subject to have increased both in number and intensity, so communication which once relied upon personal acquaintance and good will has been increasingly replaced by bureaucratic systems of control. Discretionary freedom to by-pass clumsy processes has eroded as hard-shaped systems come to govern the flow of information and working. This poses a dilemma for chaplains. On the one hand the growth in numbers, with its attendant dispersal of community and multiple centres of decision-making , mean that if chaplaincy is located outside such university systems it can be almost impossible to know or contribute to what is going on. On the other hand, the distinctive witness of Chaplaincy to a relational order of being (sketched above) means one\u2019s work cannot be subsumed within such structures without serious remainder. More, and thinking now pragmatically, an organisation that functions through the tight strictures of systems has all the more need for complementary forms of working that can operate between the inevitable gaps. As John Sullivan, then Professor of Education at Liverpool Hope University, observes:<\/p>\n
\u201c…university chaplains can do much good work in the crevices and gaps [interstitial spaces] that can be found in any large organisation (2007, p.89).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And Richard Spalding, commentating now from a North American context, broadens out this same point with considerable poise:<\/p>\n
\u201c[Chaplains] have an extraordinary privilege of movement across boundaries in realms that are often marked \u2018\u2019closed\u2019 or that are off the map altogether: areas of people\u2019s lives that are off-limits to standard academic processes but of the essence of education; realms of towering questions that don\u2019t fit on syllabi; vantage points from which one might glimpse, fleetingly, a sense of some whole that might possibly encompass all the parts. Chaplaincy can slip through permeable membranes to get at these places and gain swift passage between opposite poles \u2013 inside and outside, depth and surface, here and there, now and then.\u201d ( 2013, p.206) c.f. \u201cbetween full and empty, between sacred and secular\u201d (p.221)).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Just as significant, however, is Spalding\u2019s rueful addition: \u201cNone of this, of course, is easy to explain to the people I work for.\u201d (p. 207). Each university, church foundation institutions notwithstanding, will seek in different ways to accord meaning to chaplaincy by connecting it to its pre-existing structures and systems. While sometimes these will fit well, for example often in policies to do with crises and sudden\u00a0death, at other times \u201cthe institutional doors to the spaces in which we are supposed to do our work are hung with mixed messages \u2013 or mined with ambivalence, if not with…overt antipathy.\u201d (Spalding, 2013, p.207). If we are doing our job properly we will not fit perfectly or even easily because our theological <\/em>identity cannot be commandeered to serve, without question, the ideological interests of the University. We point to \u2018the something more\u2019 in every situation (Moody, 1999, p.19).<\/p>\n
There is thus great\u00a0value in leaving much chaplaincy functioning essentially unspoken and undefined. We need to rely on the goodwill of personal relations. This works especially well when there is both access to, and understanding of the nature of our work on the part of, the Vice-Chancellor and Senior Managers. But there is an inevitable downside. First, reliance on key persons carries\u00a0the potential for challenging disruptions to the work of chaplaincy when there is a change of personnel (C.f. McGrail & Sullivan, 2007, pp. 37-39). But then the task of working at relationship must simply begin again. Secondly, in an era of \u2018key performance targets\u2019 and an evaluation of service based on the presentation of hard data chaplaincy can look vulnerable if it refuses to \u2018play this game\u2019 (c.f. Aynsley-Smith, 2007, p.147). Finding ways of defending oneself against inappropriately reductionist form of appraisal means, as far as the initiative can lie with us, thinking very carefully about to whom and in what form one makes an annual report. Of help here may be remembering that our authority to function, while sanctioned by the university, ultimately comes from without the institution, from our status as authorised ministers of our church community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As in all ministry, the efficaciousness of university chaplaincy depends to a very large extent on the quality of relationships one can grow and maintain. Why? Because the good news of the Gospel, which in essence concerns the gift of being caught up the Son\u2019s relationship to the Father in the Spirit (c.f. Rom 8:22f, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":845,"parent":161,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-167","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincyresource.canterbury.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincyresource.canterbury.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincyresource.canterbury.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincyresource.canterbury.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincyresource.canterbury.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincyresource.canterbury.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1002,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincyresource.canterbury.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/167\/revisions\/1002"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincyresource.canterbury.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincyresource.canterbury.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincyresource.canterbury.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}