Work and you will earn a living

We have all been suffering increasing disruption over the past couple of years as coronavirus has invaded our hospitals, schools and work places and our Government has been forced to print or borrow billions of pounds to shore up the incomes of those working in businesses that have been forced to close.  We have already seen the harm caused to the mental health of some of our young people and the continuing loss of life caused by the virus itself.  The economic cost will be enormous and probably more damaging to ordinary people’s lives than could ever have been imagined.
 
But the coronavirus crisis has also exposed a serious policy mistake made by all Governments over the past twenty five years.  Tony Blair’s “Education, education, education” mantra has come home to roost.  Teachers have created students in their own academic image.  This has inspired a Gadarene rush into university education, where institutions have been railroaded into providing a plethora of social science, media and drama courses to accommodate many of those who wanted higher education, but did not possess strong enough maths, science or language knowledge.  This has in turn led to a situation where a large proportion of graduating students can only be employed at various levels within our already bloated national bureaucracy.  The unintended consequence has been a chronic shortage of candidates to work in essential services, such as doctors, nurses, lorry drivers, farm workers, chefs and many other sectors that involve practical or physical work.
 
The situation within the Church of England has evolved along very similar lines.  Ordination training for full time priests is overburdened by academic subjects and this trend is now invading post-ordination training as well.  Far too many are now leaving theological college ill-equipped for the important pastoral tasks of the parish priest, which must surely come a close second to communicating the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the imperatives of the Christian life.  All too often we find men of impeccable academic ability completely lost when it comes to ministering to the sick, the unemployed or the bereaved, but capable of amazingly complex sermons which soar blissfully over ordinary people’s heads and do nothing to fill the pews.
 
However, at the same time we have seen a parallel growth in Church bureaucracy, as those with a penchant for office work and telling the parish priest how to do his job, vie for cathedral canonries, comfy directorships and advisory posts with grand titles in warm diocesan offices, generally at considerable expense to the poor old parishes, who face ever-increasing diocesan share payments at a time of serious financial stringency.
 
Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was a carpenter as well as a rabbi, making and mending furniture and timberwork for the houses of his neighbours.  St. Paul was a tent maker as well as a scholar and evangelist, a trade to which he returned whenever the financial going got tough.  And of course, St. Peter and most of the other apostles were fishermen.  Perhaps we need to ponder God’s words to Adam:  “You will have to work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything until you go back to the soil from which you were formed.” (Genesis 1, v.19 GNB)
 
Physical and practical work are vital to both our secular communities and our beloved Church and should be properly valued, rewarded and praised by both, a lesson which is particularly hard to learn in a nation that has for so long devalued and despised these vital activities.