Lay Ministry in the English Reformation ∗
Introduction
A historical account of Lay Ministry in the English Reformation written with an audience in
mind that extends beyond the academy of professional historians must begin with an
explanation of current trends in historical scholarship about the religious changes that shook
sixteenth century England, as well as a broad introduction to the beliefs and priorities of men
and women at that time. Traditional accounts of the Reformation in England have given little
thought to the subject of lay ministry. 1 Prior to the 1960s, historians conceived of the
Reformation as a primarily political event: a series of royal decisions, parliamentary statutes,
key publications, and government diktats. The Reformation was a neat, chronologicallydefinable event: beginning in 1527 with Henry VIII’s campaign for an annulment of his
marriage to Katharine of Aragon, and ending with the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, as
enshrined in the twin Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity. In 1964 the historian A.G. Dickens
banished that narrow reductive view of the Reformation forever, by suggesting that the
progress of religious change in England may have had something to do with religion, through
the grassroots appeal of Protestantism and most particularly through the irresistible appeal of
vernacular scripture. For Dickens, the medieval Church was ‘pervaded with legalism and
∗
This paper was prepared at the invitation of the Ministry Division of the Church of England and the Central
Readers’ Council, and initially presented at the Church of England Symposium on ‘The Theology and Practice
of Lay Ministry and Discipleship’, St Cuthman’s Retreat House, West Sussex, 29 November-30 December
2011. My thanks go to the organisers of and participants at that Symposium. This revised version of the paper
is the richer for having been party to their comments and discussion, although all the views expressed below,
and any errors in the text, remain my own. 1
For example, of the proceedings of the 1988-9 Ecclesiastical History Conferences published in volume 26 of
Studies in Church History (SCH) as The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, only three of twenty-eight essays
specifically addressed topics related to practical lay ministry, focussing on thirteenth-century Europe,
fourteenth-century Byzantium, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australia. An exception to this trend is
Brett Usher’s essay ‘Expedient and Experiment: The Elizabethan Lay Reader’, in R.N. Swanson (ed.),
Continuity and Change in Christian Worship (SCH 35, Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), pp. 185-198, of which
more below. 1
denuded of missionary spirit’ 2 . The new Protestant faith, on the other hand, possessed an
inherent – almost magnetic – attraction, especially when viewed against the widespread
ecclesiastical corruption and latent anticlericalism of late-medieval Catholicism, which
Dickens and others took as axiomatic. In this narrative, it was the introduction of vernacular
scripture to parish churches and domestic households which ‘clinched the victory’ of the
Reformation in England, over ‘papal authority and over the saint-cults’. Since Dickens,
revisionist historians (writing from a variety of confessional stances) have made a convincing
case that the late medieval church, although not without its problems, was on the whole a
vibrant, flourishing and adaptive institution, particularly in England.
Far from being
inevitable, the eventual triumph of Protestantism occurred in spite of a substantial degree of
resistance and often outright hostility towards the new ways of thinking. Revisionists have
differed over their appraisal of the impact of sixteenth-century religious change.
For
Christopher Haigh, the Reformation was only grudgingly accepted, and did relatively little to
change the religious beliefs and practices of the majority of people. 3 But for Eamon Duffy it
was a cataclysmic event, which did great harm and violence to a rich world of hope, faith and
tradition. 4
Most scholarship currently taking place on the Reformation has moved beyond these
preoccupations with the rate, pace, and distribution of religious conversion. 5 Instead, ‘PostRevisionist’ works tend to focus more on the ways in which the inhabitants of early modern
England came to terms with the new religious world in which they found themselves, during
and after the changes brought about by the Reformation. How did acts of state, popular
evangelisation, changes in doctrine and altered religious practice impact on people’s beliefs,
2
A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (2nd edn. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania UP, 1993), p. 67. See, for example, Christopher Haigh, ‘Introduction’, to Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised
(Cambridge: CUP, 1987), pp. 1-17. 4
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (2nd Edn. London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. xiv. 5
Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 1999), p. 5. 3
2
behaviour, and religious identity? It is in the spirit of post-revisionist historical enquiry that
this paper will explore the subject of lay ministry and the Reformation in England, broken
down into five sections. Firstly I will outline the theological context to English Reformers’
view of lay ministry, both clerical and lay. I will then focus on discussions of clerical and lay
ministry in sixteenth-century England. Thirdly and fourthly I will investigate official and
then unofficial forms of lay ministry which existed in England during the period of the
Reformation. Finally, I will explore some of the ways in which elements of lay ministry can
be identified working informally in some of the doctrines and practices developed by English
Protestants in a variety of different contexts and communities.
I
In ecclesiastical terms, one of most significant effects of the Protestant Reformation was a
fundamental reconstruction of the nature and function of the clergy, and its relationship to
and interactions with the laity. This stemmed in the first instance from the theological
writings of Martin Luther, who spoke of the ‘miserable bondage’ of the sacraments under the
Papacy, and of a ‘Church despoiled of all her liberty’. 6
In the first of his three great
reforming treatises of 1520, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, Luther called
upon the princes of the Holy Roman Empire to reform religion, ‘in case it may please God to
help His Church by means of the laity, inasmuch as the clergy, whom this task rather befitted,
have become quite careless’. 7 In his treatise, Luther spoke of three walls erected by the
Romanists to protect themselves from interference and reform. The first of these was their
affirmation that the temporal power had no jurisdiction over the church, and that conversely
the spiritual power had authority and jurisdiction over and above the temporal. In attempting
6
Martin Luther, ‘The Babylonian Captivity of the Church’, in First Principles of the Reformation, ed. Henry
Wace and Charles Adolphus Buchleim (John Murray, 1883), p. 147. 7
Martin Luther, ‘Address to the Christian Nobility’, in First Principles of the Reformation, ed. Henry Wace and
Charles Adolphus Buchleim (John Murray, 1883), p. 17. 3
to demolish this first wall, Luther dismissed the division between a spiritual estate of ‘pope,
bishops, priests and monks’ and a temporal estate of ‘princes, lords, artificers and peasants’
as ‘a very fine, hypocritical device’. In reality, Luther wrote, ‘all Christians are truly of the
Spiritual Estate, and there is no difference among them, save of office alone’.8 Citing 1
Corinthians 12, Luther spoke of all Christians as complementary elements of a single body,
‘for baptism, gospel and faith, these alone make Spiritual and Christian people’.
The
trappings of priestly office, including unction, tonsure, ordination, consecration and
vestments: these ‘may make a hypocrite or an anointed puppet, but never a Christian or a
spiritual man’. All men were consecrated as priests by baptism, as confirmed by 1 Peter 2:9
and Revelation 5:10.
And to put the matter even more plainly; If a little company of pious Christian laymen
were taken prisoners and carried away to a desert, and had not among them a priest
consecrated by a bishop, and were there to agree to elect one of them, married or
unmarried, and were to order him to baptise, to celebrate the mass, to absolve and to
preach; this man would as truly be a priest, as if all the bishops and all the Popes had
consecrated him. 9
This, in other words, was a ‘Priesthood of All Believers’ – not a phrase Luther used in the
Address, but the way in which his doctrine in this respect has been characterised since. 10
Luther’s aim was to overturn what he perceived as a clerical tyranny: if all men were priests,
then no man could put himself forward without the consent of the rest to do what all, in fact,
8
Luther, ‘Address to the Christian Nobility’, p. 21. Luther, ‘Address to the Christian Nobility’, p. 22. 10
On contemporary reactions to the doctrine, see David Bagchi, ‘“Eyn Mercklich Underscheyd”: Catholic
Reactions to Luther’s Doctrine of the Priesthood of All Believers, 1520-25’, in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood
(eds), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay (SCH 26, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 155-166. For Luther, scripture was the
ultimate authority for all matters of doctrine and faith, although a realm of ‘indifferent things’ (adiaphora)
existed incidental to faith and salvation, which the Church had the right to order. See Bernhard Lohse, Martin
Luther's theology: its historical and systematic development (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), pp. 187-195; 277305. 9
4
had the same power to do. Clerics and laymen were all of the same spiritual estate, and the
only difference between them was one of office and of function (Romans 12). As Luther put
it,
A cobbler, a smith, a peasant, every man has the office and function of his calling, and
yet all alike are consecrated priests and bishops, and every man in his office must be
useful and beneficial to the rest, that so many kinds of work may all be united into one
community: just as the members of the body all serve one another.
Part and parcel of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was a rejection of the
sacrificial priesthood, and a demolition of sacerdotal monopoly over the sacraments. As the
sacraments themselves were reduced in number from seven to two, holy orders were out
along with penance, marriage, confirmation and extreme unction. And in the second great
treatise of 1520, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther wrote of the bondage of the
sacrament of the altar in terms inextricably linked to the notion of the priesthood of all
believers. In denying the laity the right to communicate in both kinds, popish priests were
acting as lords, and forgetting that their true role was to be ‘servants, whose duty it is to give
both kinds to those who seek them, as often as they seek them’. 11 The doctrine of the
transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements was intolerable, not only for its enthusiastic
adoption of pagan Aristotelian metaphysics, but also for the way in which it elevated the
clergy as privileged enactors of a divine miracle: creators, not servants, of Christ. And the
most heinous abuse of the sacrament was the belief that it was a sacrifice: for Luther, the
medieval Church had completely inverted the meaning of the Eucharist, taking a gift given by
God to the faithful, and turning it into a work performed by the faithful for God.
Together with the central doctrines of justification by faith alone and sola scriptura,
this idea – of a priesthood of all believers, and of the rejection of a privileged priestly caste
11
Luther, ‘The Babylonian Captivity of the Church’, p. 154. 5
endowed with sacrificial and salvific agency – suffused the Reformation, in Germany, in
Switzerland, in France, and in England, where reformers took inspiration from the writings of
Luther, and from the developing doctrines of Swiss Reformed Protestantism, most notably
through the writings of Huldreich Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger, Martin Bucer, and eventually
Jean Calvin.
While Reformers differed on the finer points of soteriology, and the
Reformation movement fractured around the complexities of Eucharistic theology, there was
basic agreement on the core issues of sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura, infant baptism, the
reduction of the sacraments and the priesthood of all believers. By the end of the sixteenth
century, the Church of England was theologically much closer to Calvin than to Luther, but
in his Institutes Calvin expanded upon Luther’s earlier notion of a priesthood defined not
sacramentally, but by calling. 12 To be a bishop, a presbyter or a pastor (the terms themselves
were synonymous in scripture) was simply to ‘discharge the ministry of the word’. 13 The
permanent office of pastor or teacher encapsulated the temporary offices of Apostle and
Evangelist, and alongside it rested the other permanent office of Teacher. This Calvin linked
to the temporary office of Prophet, and he described the role of the teachers as individuals
who ‘preside not over discipline, or the administration of the sacraments, or admonitions, or
exhortations, but the interpretation of Scripture only, in order that pure and sound doctrine
may be maintained among believers’ 14 . The office of teacher, in other words, was that of
theologian. Implicit in Calvin’s subsequent description of the choosing of ministers, and of
the laying on of hands, is the idea that a teacher could indeed be a lay theologian, exercising a
separate but important ministry from the pastor focussing on the gifts of scriptural
12
For a description of the ‘Calvinist Consensus’ in the Elizabethan Church of England, see Nicholas Tyacke,
Anti-Calvinists. The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Tyacke described
the ‘unequivocally Calvinist’ Lambeth Articles of 1595 as ‘an accurate index of received Church of England
teaching’ (p. 5).
13
Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (3 vols. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Printing Company, 1845), vol. 3, p. 65. 14
Calvin, Institutes, p. 62. 6
interpretation and the expounding of pure doctrine.
The other offices in the fourfold
permanent ministry expounded by Calvin were those of deacon and elder, with responsibility
for alms and care for the sick, and government and discipline respectively. 15
These notions were picked up by native English reformers like William Tyndale,
evangelical 16 theologian, biblical translator and disciple of Luther.
Of the word priest
(sacerdos, hiereus, cohan) he wrote that
Antichrist hath deceived us with unknown and strange terms, to bring us into
confusion and superstitious blindness. Of that manner is Christ a priest for ever ; and
all we priests through him, and need no more of any such priest on earth, to be a mean
for us unto God. 17
And the word elder (presbyter, senior) described ‘nothing but an officer to teach, and not to
be a mediator between God and us. This needeth no anointing of man.’ 18 Not only was the
calling to priesthood therefore one of office or function, rather than a special spiritual
privilege, lay people had their own important ministry which could be effected without
recourse to ordination. ‘By a priest then, in the new Testament,’ Tyndale wrote in The
Obedience of a Christian Man, ‘understand nothing but an elder to teach the younger, and to
bring them unto the full knowledge and understanding of Christ, and to minister the
sacraments which Christ ordained, which is also nothing but to preach Christ’s promises.’ 19
It was faith which mattered, not the trappings of office, and ‘the blessing of a baker that
knoweth the truth’ was as good as – better than ‘the blessing of our most holy father the
15
Calvin, Institutes, pp. 65-6. N.B. Historians use the word evangelical to describe early English reformers. The label is preferential to a
confessional description such as ‘Lutheran’, ‘Zwinglian’, or even ‘Protestant’, as beliefs at this time were in a
state of rapid development and profound flux. 17
William Tyndale, ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’, in Doctrinal treatises, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge:
CUP, 1848), p. 255. 18
Tyndale, ‘Obedience’, p. 256. 19
Tyndale, ‘Obedience’, pp. 256-7. 16
7
pope.’ 20
All Christians, in fact, irrespective of office and by virtue of their baptism
discipleship and calling as Christians, had a responsibility to minister to their brethren in
furtherance of the true faith. As the master in Alexander Nowell’s Catechism explained to
his student,
Forasmuch as the master ought to be to his scholars a second parent and father, not of
their bodies, but of their minds, I see it belongeth to the order of my duty, my dear
child, not so much to instruct thee civilly in learning and good manners, as to furnish
thy mind, and that in thy tender years, with good opinions and true religion. For this
age of childhood ought no less, yea, also much more, to be trained with good lessons
to godliness, than with good arts to humanity: wherefore I thought meet to examine
thee by certain short questions, that I may surely know whether thou have well
bestowed thy study and labour therein, or no. 21
II
But in spite of the general drift of some evangelical rhetoric, a number of factors mitigated
strongly against the magisterial dissolution of the formal priesthood, in the manner adopted
by some radical and Anabaptist groups. First was the notion of office or calling that we have
already come across. Second, and related to this, was the desire to avoid the perceived moral
and intellectual failings of the clerics of the late-medieval church, and to create a clergy who
in training, education and behaviour were exemplary and beyond reproach. And third, was
the recognition and acceptance that the church militant was an imperfect body, composed of
both wheat and tares. The Church of England was a universal community, ministering to a
flock composed both of the elect and the reprobate, and with no true way of telling which was
20
Tyndale, ‘Obedience’, p. 258. Alexander Nowell, Nowell’s Catechism, trans. Thomas Norton, ed. G.E. Corrie (Cambridge: CUP, 1853), p.
113. 21
8
which. For reasons of practical convenience, administration, discipline and order, it was
therefore necessary to have educated and trained ministers (most reformers rejected the
appellation ‘priest’ as having Roman and sacrificial overtones) who were wholly devoted to
their calling, and who could preach, conduct services, and oversee the proper use of the
sacraments.
Let us examine these factors in more detail. Following Luther et al, English reformers
held that the clergy and the laity were distinct from one another not by estate, but by office or
calling. In the context of Luther’s revolt against the Papacy this was an important distinction
to make: it overturned papal claims to immunity from and authority over the temporal power.
But in pragmatic and pastoral terms, the clergy still had to function as a group apart from the
rest of society. After all, a baker and a king also differed only in their office, but while both
offices were equally valid, and both individuals had a duty to execute their office to the glory
of God and the benefit of the Christian community, there could be no question that they were,
in any practical sense, equals. Furthermore, one of the main criticisms of the late-medieval
church had been its blurring of the temporal and spiritual jurisdictions. Prelates who were
also princes; abbots who acted as landlords; clergy who combined their responsibility for
cure of souls with royal office or some other bureaucratic or administrative servitude; all
were guilty at best of neglecting their true calling, and at worst of trying to extract temporal
profit from spiritual office. The precedent for this separation of office lay in Christ’s calling
of Peter, Andrew, James and John, as Hugh Latimer explained in his sermon on Matthew
4:18-20, preached on St Andrew’s Day in 1552:
All were fishers by their occupation. This was their general vocation; but now Christ
our Saviour called them to a more special vocation. They were fishers still, but they
9
fished no more for fish in the water, but they must fish now for men, with the net
which was prepared to the same purpose, namely, with the gospel... 22
It was likely, Latimer continued, that they were called more than one time: first to come to
acquaintance with Christ, then to be his disciples, ‘and so at the last to be his apostles, and
teachers of the whole world’. Luke 6 described how Christ ‘continued a whole night in
prayer’, asking God to send him worthy men whom he might send forth as teachers. This
example was ‘a good monition, how careful they should be that ought to choose men and set
them in offices’. There should be no officers, Latimer wrote, ‘but such as be called thereunto
lawfully ... we should tarry over our vocation till God call us; we should have a calling of
God’. Once given a calling, men should be ‘content to live in our calling, and not to gape
further!’ 23
In his vitriolic anti-Catholic treatise on the Ten Commandments of 1540, the Lordis
flayle, the Protestant divine Thomas Solme rounded on the ‘Sir Anthony Lacklatins’ and ‘Sir
John Single Souls’ of the Romish priesthood, whom he alleged had spent more time hawking
and hunting than discharging their office in preaching and teaching the gospel: who would
pluck a soul out of purgatory for a penny, and read out passages from the Scripture and
liturgy in Latin of which they did not understand the true meaning. 24 The word of God was
the ‘instrument and fountain of all good things’,25 and it was the duty of all to pray to God for
the continuance of his word, ‘that he will send godly and well learned men amongst us, which
may be able to declare us his will and pleasure’. The office of preaching was perhaps the
most important of all men’s vocations, because it was by this instrument that mankind was
22
Hugh Latimer, ‘The sermon preached upon St Andrew’s Day, 1552’, in Sermons and Remains of Hugh
Latimer, ed. George Corrie (Cambridge: CUP, 1845), p. 23. 23
Latimer, ‘The sermon preached upon St Andrew’s Day’, p. 35. 24
Thomas So[l]me, Here begynnyth a traetys callyde the Lordis flayle (Basel [Antwerp], 1540), sig. Cviir. 25
Hugh Latimer, ‘Certain sermons … before the right virtuous and honourable lady, Katharine, Duchess of
Suffolk, in the year of our Lord 1552’, in Sermons by Hugh Latimer, sometime bishop of Worcester, ed. George
Corrie (Cambridge: CUP, 1844), p. 354. 10
called to the kingdom of God. 26 For the first generation of English Reformers, preaching sat
at the very core of ministry. As Bishop Hooper described the requirements of a preacher in
his Declaration of the Ten holy Commandments of Almighty God (1548): ‘such as will
occupy the office of a preacher, first must be well learned in the things that appertain unto the
gospel, then [must] free [himself] from all such affections as rather seeketh himself and the
world, [rather] than the furtherance of the doctrine he preacheth.’ 27
While English Protestant divines therefore rejected wholeheartedly the notion of a
separate priestly caste, set apart by their sacrificial, sacramental and salvific agency, they had
a strong conception of a godly clerical ministry marked out by their education and preaching
ability; servants of but also separate and in some ways distinct from the laity. The general
office of a Christian man as described in the third part of the 1547 ‘Homily of Salvation’
involved nothing more than believing in the holy scripture and the articles of the Christian
faith; trusting in God’s promises of salvation; and striving to obey His Commandments –
quite enough to keep most people occupied! 28 The requirement of the fifth commandment
for the laity to be obedient to God’s magistrates and ministers alike put further distance
between the man in the street and those ordained (figuratively and literally) to govern and
minister over them in temporal and spiritual affairs.. 29
The degree to which even
comparatively radical evangelicals such as Hooper possessed a highly-developed clericalist
instinct, in terms of both ministry and episcopacy, is striking. The key to understanding this
contradiction lies in the reality of the situation in which Reformers found themselves, on the
ground. They were faced with the overwhelming imperative to surpass what they saw as the
26
Latimer, ‘Certain sermons’, p. 358. John Hooper, ‘A declaration of the Ten holy Commandments of Almighty God, 1548’, in Early Writings of
John Hooper, ed. Samuel Carr (Cambridge: CUP, 1843), p. 326. 28
‘The third part of the sermon of the salvation’, in Sermons, or Homilies, appointed to be read in churches, in
the time of Queen Elizabeth, of famous memory… (Dublin: Printed for Anne Watson and B. Dugdale, 1821), p.
25. 29
‘The second part of the homily of fasting’, in in Sermons, or Homilies, p. 239. 27
11
lacklustre and harmful efforts of their medieval predecessors: to establish a model ministry,
unimpeachable in its theological education, pastoral effectiveness and moral integrity. Their
task was also an urgent one. Antichrist was not an abstract threat: he was active in the world,
fighting to overthrow true religion. Lives and, more importantly, immortal souls were on the
line. Only a properly trained and equipped ministry of godly preachers stood a chance of
stemming the tide of darkness that threatened to engulf the English Church.
III
So much for the theory, what about the practice? A case could certainly be made that,
through the first Act of Supremacy, the Church of England was in fact forged in the flames of
lay ministry. The act stated that King Henry VIII was already head of the Church (and
recognised as such by the clergy of the realm), and that it was therefore convenient for
Parliament to confirm
that the Kyng our Soveraign Lorde his heires and successours Kynges of this Realme
shalbe takyn acceptyd & reputed the onely supreme heed in erthe of the Churche of
England callyd Anglicana Ecclesia, and shall have & enjoye annexed and unyted to
the Ymperyall Crowne of this realme aswell the title and style thereof, as all Honours
Dignyties prehemynences jurisdiccions prvilileges auctorities ymunyties profitis and
commodities to the said digytie of supreme heed of the same Churche belongyng and
apperteynyng. 30
Although under Elizabeth the language would be modified somewhat – she became ‘Supreme
Governor’, amidst discomfort that anybody other than Christ should be named head of the
Church – the Royal Supremacy sat at the heart of the reformed Church of England, 31 and
30
26 Hen. 8 c.1. See, for example, Alec Ryrie, ‘Divine Kingship and Royal Theology in Henry VIII’s Reformation’,
Reformation 7 (2002), pp. 49-77. 31
12
reformers proved willing to embrace a doctrine that was in actual fact neither Catholic nor
Protestant for their own theological ends. 32 As Thomas Solme put it, ‘kyngs trule er his [i.e.
God’s] mynisters yn this cherch mylitante, and ther is none that supplith nexte to Christe but
only thei’. 33 The office of a Christian king was to provide not only for a political order, but
also a spiritual order, ‘wherfore he hathe powre to ynstytute gydis of divers vocacions, whych
gydis then er bownd to use them selves accordynge to theyr vocacion’. In line with their
shared anti-papal agenda, it was important both to Henry VIII and early English Evangelicals
ardently to deny that the clergy formed a distinct spiritual estate with divinely instituted
authority over the temporal. All (elect) men were of the spiritual estate, Solme argued, ‘and
chyfly owre Prince in his vocacion’. 34 As a Christian monarch, Henry and his successors was
the head of his entire kingdom under Christ, spirituality and laity alike. But the status, office
and vocation of the monarch were necessarily unique: it is difficult to take the Royal
Supremacy as a precedent for a more widespread application of lay ministry in any
meaningful sense. And support for the Royal Supremacy was often treated as contingent, by
both conservatives and evangelicals, upon its close correspondence with a particular doctrinal
agenda, or: ‘insofar as the word of God allows’.
At first glance, the most direct precedent for modern forms of lay ministry to be found
during the Reformation period lies in the modest Elizabethan experiment with the office of
Lay Reader. Following Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 1558, the new Protestant
ecclesiastical authorities faced a serious logistical problem in supplying godly clergy to
minister parochial cures. This can be seen in John Strype uncomfortable acknowledement
that, ‘the church now being so slenderly provided of curates and persons to officiate in the
parishes’, the Bishops had no choice but ‘to allow of many who had been popish priests, but
32
Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), p. 58. So[l]me, the Lordis flayle, sig. Cviiir. 34
So[l]me, the Lordis flayle, sig. Dviir. 33
13
now complying with the present proceedings. 35 Another ‘inconvenience’ brought about by
‘the want of clergymen’, as reported by Strype in his Annals of the Reformation, was ‘the
ordination of illiterate men to be readers: which likewise many were offended at’. This was
evidently a grudging move, in which the need to provide regular preaching and services
trumped the aspiration towards a godly clergy, but only just.
‘These readers’, Strype
explained,
had been tradesmen, or other honest, well-disposed men; and they were admitted into
inferior orders, to serve the church in the present necessity, by reading the common
prayer and the homilies, and orders unto the people... 36
The necessity to appoint readers was clearly at odds with the aspirations laid out in the
Queen’s 1559 injunctions which spelled out in detail the manner in which ‘Ecclesiasticall
persons’ were expected to behave. They were not to ‘haunt or resort to any Tavernes or
Alehouses’, or indulge in games of ‘dyse, cardes, or tables’, but
at all tymes as they shal have leysure, they shal heare or reade somewhat of holy
scripture, or shall occupye them selves with some other honest studye or exercyse ...
havyng alwayes in mynde that they ought to excell all other in puritie of lyfe, and
shoulde be examples to the people, to lyve well and Chrystianly. 37
That reference, ‘to the people’, again betrays an ecclesiastical sensibility which
unmistakeably perceived the clergy as in some sense separate from the rest of the laity. But
the Elizabethan Church of England was a practical creature. The ideal was the godly and
learned preaching minister: if he wasn’t available, then a decent non-preaching minister could
read from the homilies and administer the sacraments, and if such a one could not be found,
then a lay person might do what he could (or at least what he was permitted to do within strict
35
John Strype, Annals of the Reformation (Vol. 1 Part 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1824), p. 264. Strype, Annals, p. 265. 37
Church of England, Iniunctions geven by the Quenes Maiestie (1559), Sig. Aiiiv. 36
14
boundaries). 38 As Article 23 of the Thirty-Nine Articles put it, ‘it is not lawful for any man
to take upon him the office of public preaching, or ministering the sacraments in the
congregation, before he be lawfully called and sent to execute the same.’ Preaching and
ministering were two sides of the same coin, and the language of office reinforced the
impression that the Church’s ideal rested in a man who was able to devote himself entirely to
clerical ministry, not in a balancing act of two offices or callings against one another.
However, it is perhaps worth noting that although ordination was spoken of elsewhere in the
Articles, it was not one of the criteria outlined for ministry in Article 23. Rather, the article
explained how ‘those we ought to judge lawfully called and sent, which be chosen, and called
to this work by men, who have public authority given unto them in the congregation, to call
and send ministers into the Lord’s vineyard’. 39
How then were Lay Readers to operate in the Church, and how widespread was their
ministry? Item 12 of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s manuscript ‘Resolutions concerning the
[1559] Injunctions’, on catechesis, included the proviso ‘that Readers neither serve in any
great cure, nor where there is any incumbents’, 40 on the one hand indicating that Readers may
have been involved in catechising, but on the other that they were only to be employed in
smaller and less significant parishes, where no incumbent was resident. Item 26 of the same
‘Resolutions’, in the section ‘Concerning Burial’, cautioned that ‘the ministers or readers out
of service, remove not from the diocese or cure, where they first began, and were admitted by
the ordinary, except they bring letters testimonial of their removing, allowed by the
ordinary’. 41
Reader ‘ministry’ was therefore geographically circumscribed to a specific
38
Church of England, Iniunctions, Sigs. Cir, Diir. Articles of Religion, taken from Documents of the English Reformation, ed. Gerald Bray (Cambridge: James
Clarke & Co Ltd., 2004), pp. 297-298. 40
Matthew Parker, ‘Resolutions concerning the Injunctions’, in The “Interpretations” of the Bishops, ed. W.M.
Kennedy (Alcuin Club Tracts VIII. London: Longmans, 1908), pp. 30-31. This document exists as a draft with
annotations in Parker’s own hand, and a fair copy written up in a single hand. See also Petyt MSS (Inner Temp.
Lib.), vol. 538, 38, f. 223, and vol. 538, 47, f. 545. 41
Parker, ‘Resolutions concerning the Injunctions’, p. 33. 39
15
parish, but they had an important role in administering burial. At the end of Parker’s
‘Resolutions’ was appended a list of ‘Injunctions to be confessed and subscribed by them that
shall be admitted Readers’. For their interest and relevance to the present topic, these are
listed in full below (the numbering is my own):
1. I shall not preach nor interpret, but only read that which is appointed by public
authority
2. I shall read the service appointed plainly, distinctly and audibly, that all the people
may hear and understand.
3. I shall not minister the Sacraments, nor other rites of the church, but bury the dead,
and purify women after their childbirth.
4. I shall keep the register book according to the Injunctions.
5. I shall use sobriety in apparel, and specially in the church at common prayer.
6. I shall move men to quiet and concord, and not give them cause of offence.
7. I shall bring in to mine ordinary a testimony of my behaviour from the honest of the
parish where I dwell, within one half year next following.
8. I shall give place upon convenient warning, so thought by the ordinary, if any learned
minister shall be placed there at the suit of the patron of the parish.
9. I shall claim no more of the fruits sequestered of such cure where I shall serve, but as
it shall be thought meet to the wisdom of the ordinary.
10. I shall daily at the least read one chapter of the Old Testament and another of the
New, with good advisement to the increase of my knowledge.
11. I shall not appoint in my room by reason of mine absence or sickness any other man,
but shall leave it to the suit of the parish to the ordinary for assigning some other able
man.
12. I shall not read but in poorer parishes destitute of incumbents, except in time of
sickness, or for other good considerations to be allowed by the ordinary. 42
The main duty of the Reader was therefore to read: what was appointed, audibly and plainly,
and without any comment, gloss, addition or initiative. He was forbidden from ministering
the sacraments, but had an important duty in the burial of the dead and the churching of
42
Parker, ‘Resolutions concerning the Injunctions’, p. 36-37. 16
women after childbirth. He had an administrative duty in keeping the registers of baptisms,
marriages and burials in the parish. He also had a moral duty to be honest, literate, and
educated in the gospel; and to prove the same to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He had a
responsibility to set an example to others in the community: through his dress, his behaviour,
his financial dealings, and his learning. And finally: he was only to be employed when
absolutely necessary, in poor (probably rural) parishes. He was also expendable: he had no
say in appointing a stand-in, and when a ‘learned minister’ became available he had to step
aside. A shorter statement of ‘Resolutions and orders taken by common consent of the
bishops’ simply noted:
That readers be by every Ordinary reviewed, and their ability and manners examined
and by discretion of the Ordinaries to remain in their office or to be removed and their
wage to be ordered, and the abstinence of mechanical sciences to be also enjoined by
the discretion of the said ordinaries as well to ministers as to Readers. 43
Reader ministry was therefore strictly regulated by the bishops, and Readers were also to be
discouraged from being craftsmen or labourers, or taking part in other forms of manual or
practical work. It is plain that in the minds of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the spiritual duties
and office of a Reader sat uneasily with the secular vocation which such men might also
realistically profess.
Much work remains to be done on the extent of lay ministry by Readers during the
reformation, but research by the historian Brett Usher has unearthed interesting evidence for
several dioceses in the south east in the period immediately after the accession of Elizabeth.
In 1561 in the diocese of London, visitation records listed a total of 52 men who were or had
recently been engaged as readers. But the Queen’s fury at the ‘undiscreet’ and ‘slender’
43
‘Resolutions and orders taken by common consent of the bishops’, in The “Interpretations” of the Bishops,
ed. W.M. Kennedy (Alcuin Club Tracts VIII. London: Longmans, 1908), p. 42. See also Parker MSS (Corpus
Christi Coll. Lib., Camb.), vol. CVI, p. 423. 17
character of many of the clergy she encountered while on progress in East Anglia forced
something of a crackdown. 44 By 1574, visitation records showed only 11 readers in the
diocese of London, of whom 3 were serving in Colchester. By 1583 Usher has suggested
that, in London at least, the handful of readers left in the diocese had become ecclesiastical
personae non gratae. 45 Usher also has some interesting observations on the sorts of people
who became lay readers.
They were not failed or aspiring clerics, or illiterate ‘rude
mechanicals’, but often substantial and prosperous figures within the local community:
‘in
other words, there is no reason to assume that men such as these were either poor or ignorant,
let alone only formally committed to Protestant courses. It is more likely that they are
representatives of a deliberate policy of appointing a species of ecclesiastical JP.’ 46 That
said, the majority of individuals identified by Usher as readers did eventually go on to be
ordained.
A slightly fuller picture can be established by considering data from the diocese of
Lincoln, available for the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign. In this diocese, as in others,
Readers were not ‘licensed’ (the term used in relation to curates), but ‘tolerated’: the
document a Reader received upon being commissioned was called a toleratio. 47 This was a
form of bond entered into with diocesan officials, which read:
That if he the above-bounded N.N. being tolerated and admitted to read prayers in the
church or chapel of N., in the county of Lincoln, according to the Book of Common
Prayer, together with the chapters and suffrages, appointed by the same, do not in any
thing or things touching his said office contrary or otherwise than is in the said book
44
Usher, ‘Expedient and Experiment’, p. 189. Usher, ‘Expedient and Experiment’, pp. 193-194. 46
Usher, ‘Expedient and Experiment’, pp. 195. On the question of vesture, there is no evidence that readers
wore any form of clerical dress, and it seems likely that they remained in lay dress to perform their duties. 47
The State of the Church Volume I, ed. C.W. Foster (Lincoln Record Society vol. 23. W.K. Morton & Sons:
Horncastle, 1926), p. xxxii. 45
18
specified and allowed, then this present obligation to be void and of none effect, or
else to stand and remain in full force, strength, power, and virtue. 48
If the individual Reader violated the terms of the bond, then he was obliged to pay to the
diocese the sum of (for example) 20 pounds, an extremely significant amount of money.
Statistics for Readers are available for the Lincoln and Stow archdeaconries of the diocese of
Lincoln (equivalent to the geographical county of Lincolnshire) for seven individual years
between 1585 and 1614. The figures are imprecise, because readers are occasionally referred
to as curates or schoolmasters elsewhere, or as ‘curates, not in Holy orders’. Table 1 (below)
shows the reader data for the archdeaconries of Lincoln and Stow, together with the number
of ordained clergy (incumbents, curates and preachers) where data for the same years exists:
Table 1. Readers and Ordained Clergy in the Archdeaconries of Lincoln and Stow 49
1585
1594
1603
1604
1607
1611
1614
Readers
28
13
4
6
5
13
5
Clergy
573
589
560
--
560
--
--
The relative paucity of the data does not allow us to make any definitive conclusions, but on
the basis of the years for which it does survive we can make several tentative observations.
The first is that even for 1585, the year (for which we have data) with the highest recorded
number of readers, the lay office represented just under five per cent of the total of ordained
and unordained clergy at that time. The figure for 1603/1607, likely the norm for the period
1603-1614, is 0.7 per cent. It must be borne in mind that this run of data covers the later part
of Elizabeth’s reign and the first decade of James’s, and so we cannot speculate on the figures
48
The State of the Church, p. xxxii. The figures assembled in Table 1 have been mined from two separate tables contained in The State of the
Church, pp. 446-447. 49
19
for 1558-1585 (Usher’s data for London provides a useful counterpoint). But the prevailing
trend appears to be that, as increasing numbers of suitable ministers were trained, the number
of readers tailed away to a bare handful, and that by the seventeenth century the few
remaining readers were relics of a bygone age, a temporary solution designed to fulfil a need
which no longer existed. These figures must also be borne against the fact that there were
around 608 parishes in the archdeaconries of Lincoln and Stow in 1603. Some of these
parishes may have been ‘between ministers’, but with only 560 clergy recorded in the same
year, and a mere 4 readers, it is hard to escape the conclusion that it was preferable to have
ordained ministers and preachers ministering to more than one cure, rather than to appoint
scores of readers to fill in the gaps. Readers were sometimes also licensed as schoolmasters,
and of 28 readers in the archdeaconry of Lincoln in 1585, ten were afterwards ordained. 50
Data for other dioceses could well tell a different story, and the role of the reader, often
overlooked by historians, should clearly not be underestimated or ignored. But it seems clear
that lay ministry was only ever envisioned as a stopgap, a transitional measure to hold back
the tide until enough trained, educated and ordained ministers could be brought in to serve
parochial cures.
IV
If Elizabethan provisions for readers seem to have been more focussed on setting limits on
lay ministry than on exploring its potential, there is perhaps a more interesting precedent in
certain unofficial practices which existed outside the bounds of what was sanctioned by the
state. In other words, we must briefly enter the murky world of puritan voluntarism. 51 The
50
The State of the Church, p. xxxiii. It is important to note that, in the last twenty years or so, historians have come to a general agreement that
puritanism should not be treated as synonymous with presbyterianism or viewed as a movement outside of or in
opposition to the established Church: rather, most puritanism existed as a tendency within the official Church.
Puritans, the self-styled ‘godly’, agitated for further reformation, but they were not separatists. Patrick
51
20
Elizabethan puritan rector of Eastwell in Kent, Josias Nichols, characterised lay puritans as
‘the people [who] do hear sermons, talk of the scriptures, [and] sing Psalms together in
private houses, etc’. 52 Lay puritans often ‘gadded’ out of their parish of residence to seek out
sermons delivered by the best preachers, sometimes hearing two or more in a single day.
They would then discuss these sermons in small groups in the home, chewing over the matter
preached while thumbing through their bibles. The model puritan strived for a life of sobriety
and asceticism, and laboured to turn their household into a puritan church in microcosm. 53
Recent scholarship has stressed the extent to which puritanism was a social activity which
placed a strong emphasis on ‘the communal aspects of the Christian experience’.54 This went
much further than sermon gadding, and included the singing of metrical psalms (the
popularity of which spread far beyond puritans 55 ), public fasting, and strict sabbatarianism.
In some communities, puritan alliances between magistracy and ministry might lead to the
formation of a mini godly commonwealth bent upon moral and social reformation, such as
that described by Patrick Collinson at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, where a 1578 penal code
stipulated that fornicators were to be tied to a post for Sunday day and night, and then
whipped (thirty times or so) on Monday, or until blood was drawn. 56 But there had to be
limits to lay initiative and religious voluntarism, and these were reached in the mid-1570s,
amidst the Crown’s opposition to the popular (puritan) practice of ‘prophesying’. Also
known as ‘conferences’, these were occasions when the preaching ministers of an area would
come together in the principal church of a town or city, and under a moderator would preach
Collinson, pace Percival Wiburn, memorably referred to puritans as simply ‘the hotter sort of Protestants’.
Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 27. 52
Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, ‘The Puritan Ethos, 1560-1700’, in Christopher Durston and
Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism 1560-1700 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996), p. 13. 53
Durston and Eales, ‘The Puritan Ethos’, p. 15. 54
Durston and Eales, ‘The Puritan Ethos’, p. 20. 55
See Jonathan Willis, Church Music and Protestantism in Post Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and
Identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), Chapters 2, 3 and 5, passim. 56
Patrick Collinson, , ‘Magistracy and Ministry’, in Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church
in English Society, 1559-1625 (Oxford: OUP, 1998), pp. 158-159. 21
on one of the formal divisions of the biblical text appointed for that day. 57
After the
preachers were done, the moderator would invite learned men from the audience to ‘confirm
or confute’ what he had heard. In 1576, Elizabeth I ordered that the prophesyings taking
place in the province of Canterbury, which to her eyes appeared quasi-presbyterian, should
cease. When Archbishop Grindal wrote a letter to the queen refusing to comply, he was
suspended from his responsibilities, and came within a whisker of being deprived by the
indignant monarch. 58 The experiment with puritan archbishops was over, and Grindal’s
successor, John Whitgift, was a staunch conformist and anti-puritan scourge.
V
Searching for formal lay ministry in the official and unofficial practices of the Reformation
Church of England, while an interesting intellectual exercise and by no means entirely
fruitless, nevertheless produces a rather limited yield. And yet informally, it can be argued,
the principle of lay ministry suffused Reformers’ universal vision of what it meant to be a
Christian. As Luther had said, ‘all Christians are truly of the Spiritual Estate, and there is no
difference among them, save of office alone’.59 In his Declaration of the Decalogue, Hooper
wrote of the third commandment that there were four works that were commended unto
everybody by the bible, ‘as well unto the princes and magistrates of the world and every
private person, as unto such as be appointed unto the ministry and office of the church’.
57
For this description of prophesying I am drawing heavily on Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement,
pp. 168-179. 58
Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 191-196. See also Patrick Collinson, ‘The downfall of
Archbishop Grindal and its place in Elizabethan political and ecclesiastical history’, in Peter Clark, Alan Gordon
Rae Smith and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), The English Commonwealth 1547-1640 : essays in politics and society
presented to Joel Hurstfield (Leicester, 1979) , pp. 39-57, 219-27; Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal 15191583 : the struggle for a reformed Church (1980); Patrick Collinson (ed.), ‘The prophesyings and the downfall
and sequestration of Archbishop Edmund Grindal 1576-1583’, in Melanie Barber, Stephen Taylor and Gabriel
Sewell (eds), From the Reformation to the permissive society : a miscellany in celebration of the 400th
anniversary of Lambeth Palace Library (Church of England Record Society, 18) (Woodbridge: Boydell Press,
2010) , pp. 1-41. 59
See above, note 7. 22
These were to ‘preach Almighty God as he commandeth in his word ... pray unto him ... give
him thanks for adversity and prosperity ... [and] confess him before the world’. 60 Preaching,
prayer, thanksgiving and profession were the responsibility of every Christian: prince,
magistrate, minister or private person. Every Christian had a duty to
learn the word of God, teach it unto other, to promote it with example of honest and
godly life ... and to confirm the same ... the which can be done of no man, but of such
as first know God in Jesu Christ, and for his merits be reconciled, and hath his sins
forgiven. 61
The fourth commandment (’Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy’) was also designed
to call man away from ‘the lusts, pleasures, vanities, and concupiscence of the world, unto
the meditations of God and his works, the study of scripture, hearing of the word of God’,
etc. 62 Powerful exhortations towards informal lay ministry also came under the aegis of the
fifth commandment, to ‘honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the
land’. 63 Thomas Solme was a lone voice in warning his readers to note ‘this commaudement
is a particulere commaundement for the carnall father & sone, and by nomens can suffere an
allegory or popysche morall’. 64 For many reformers, from Luther onwards, ‘father and
mother’ was a cipher for all hierarchical relationships, and for discussing in a much wider
sense the duties owed by inferiors to their superiors, and vice versa. Luther, in his Ten
Sermons on the Catechism, wrote that the commandment (number four in the Lutheran
ordering) referred to natural parents, and also ‘bishops and preachers’, ‘masters’ and
‘mistress’, ‘government’ and ‘prince’, and the ‘burgomaster’. These individuals all had a
paternal office to execute towards those in their care. As ‘parents’ learnt from preachers, so
60
Hooper, ‘declaration of the Ten holy Commandments’, p. 323. Hooper, ‘declaration of the Ten holy Commandments’, pp. 323-324. 62
Hooper, ‘declaration of the Ten holy Commandments’, p. 337. 63
Exodus 20:12, KJV. 64
So[l]me, the Lordis flayle, sig. Dviir. 61
23
their ‘children’ should in turn learn from them, and Luther had a warning for the lazy: ‘if you
are not diligently concerned that your children and servants learn piety, then it serves you
right if your children are disobedient and your servants unfaithful’. 65
For Hooper, as
previously mentioned, the third commandment exhorted all men to the external profession of
God’s name and works. But the fifth also spoke in detail of the duties of father, prince,
magistrate, tutors, doctors and teachers of the church, kinsfolk and elders. The father’s office
was ‘to teach and bring up their children in the knowledge and discipline of God, to know
him aright, and keep them from wantonness and ungodly life ... not to provoke them to ire,
but gently win them to virtue and love’. The ‘first cure and charge of the magistrate or
prince’ was ‘to see their subjects instructed in the first table and the precepts thereof’ (albeit
primarily though the appointment of a learned ministry). 66 As William Perkins had it in his
theological compendium of 1592, A Golden Chaine, ‘father’ was a figure for parents,
magistrates, ministers, elders, and ‘those that doe excell us in any gifts whatsoever’.67
Furthermore, the affirmative part of the sixth commandment (‘Thou shalt not kill’) required
the believer to ‘preserve the life of thy neighbour’. 68 This included concern for his soul: ‘we
must seeke all meanes to winne him to the profession of Christian religion’, Perkins wrote.
The Christian man, by virtue of his baptism, justifying faith and love of the works of the law,
was therefore bound to minister to his brother, both physically and spiritually.
Conclusions
Formal lay ministry, both official and unofficial, had its limits in the reformation-era Church
of England. Sixteenth-century society was conservative, rigid and hierarchical: individuals
65
Martin Luther, ‘Ten Sermons on the Catechism (November 30 to December 18, 1528), in Luther’s Works,
Volume 51: Sermons I, ed. and trans. John W Doberstein (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), pp. 145-151. 66
Hooper, ‘declaration of the Ten holy Commandments’, pp. 355-364. 67
William Perkins, A golden chaine: or The description of theologie (1600), p. 66. 68
Perkins, A golden chaine: or The description of theologie (1600), p. 77. 24
from all parts of the social spectrum were possessed of a strong sense of their own role and
obligations, and by and large they did not seek to deviate far from the path which they
accepted had been ordained for them. In one respect, Protestant conceptions of a priesthood
of all believers broke down the walls which had marked the clergy off as a privileged ‘estate’,
but they also advocated a strong belief in the notion of an office or calling, to which
individuals should devote themselves wholeheartedly. The godly Protestant minister was not
marked off by sacramental ordination, but by his devotion to learning, his preaching ability,
and his pastoral care: and by the morality he demonstrated both through his religious
teachings and his public and private behaviour. By common consent, the spiritual estate had
no claim over the temporal – popes had no authority over kings! – but neither should lay
people interfere in religion, or allow spiritual matters to be compromised by earthly
preoccupations. In the eyes of most reformers, formal ‘lay ministry’, would have appeared
to be something of an oxymoron, although it is important to remember that Calvin’s fourfold
ministry of pastor, deacon, elder and teacher allowed for the possibility of (possibly lay)
theologians playing an important role.
As provisions for Readers make clear, such a
provision might take be made out of necessity or expediency, but it was not a desirable state
of affairs, and had no intrinsic merit or virtue. But if we turn our attention from formal
structures and doctrines to broader conceptions of faith, and the duties entailed in pursuing
the love of God and neighbour, it is not difficult to see leading reformers advocating modes
of religious belief and pious practice profoundly informed by principles of lay ministry. The
duties owed by parents to their children, rulers to their subjects, masters to their servants, and
all men to their neighbours, included a moral and spiritual obligation to instruct them in
Scripture and the Christian religion. In large part this was conceived of in hierarchical terms,
and was to take place either by ecclesiastical proxy (in the case of rulers), or in the home (in
the case of parents, masters and neighbours). This latter obligation was not a public church
25
ministry, but a separate and equally vital private ministry which operated in the informal,
secular or domestic sphere. The reformers’ conception of the Church was not of a building of
dead stone, but a community of lively stones, whose duty was to seek and ensure edification
in God’s word and the true Christian faith. This was as true for the laity as for the ordained
clergy: it was not the office of a minister, but of a Christian.
The aim of this paper has been to explore the theme of lay ministry in historical
context, not to present a particular argument or advance a particular opinion. Yet given the
context of the Symposium for which the paper was written, it does seems appropriate to
suggest how lessons learned from the messy historical reality outlined above might contribute
to ongoing discussions about the role of lay (and particularly Reader) ministry in the Church
today. In some ways the historical precedent of Reader ministry is an unhelpful one for the
present day: it shows us a form of lay ministry which was limited, grudging and motivated by
expediency.
Elizabethan Reader ministry was unmistakeably a product of the rigidly
hierarchal society from which it derived. But in another way the precedent is an extremely
helpful one, in that it demonstrates how the historical Church of England was capable of
practical, adaptive and original thinking when faced with a pressing need to solve a particular
problem. Furthermore, in the direction for readers to ‘daily at the least read one chapter of
the Old Testament and another of the New, with good advisement to the increase of my
knowledge’; in Calvin’s description of the duties of a teacher to interpret Scripture and
maintain sound doctrine amongst believers; in Tyndale’s description of an un-ordained elder
as ‘an officer to teach’; and in the universally acknowledged general office of a Christian to
further true religion amongst his brethren, it could be argued that there is useful historical and
theological precedent for a group of educated lay theologians to be actively engaged in
ministry within their community.
Jonathan Willis, University of Birmingham
26