‘The world has now adopted a vicarage model of working’:
COVID-19 and the domestication of Anglican urban ministry

Friday 7th May, 2021

By Alastair Owens and David Geiringer

When the government told people to ‘stay home’ at the start of the first coronavirus lockdown it was easier for some to adapt their lives than for others. Anglican clergy formed one group who were already quite familiar with working from home. For many priests, the vicarage is the hub of both their personal and professional life, where the boundaries between public and private, the religious and the secular, and the family and parish are far from sharply drawn (Page 2016, Payton and Gatrell 2014). Reflecting on this model of parochial ministry, a senior Church of England clergyman we interviewed commented that ‘it feels as if the world has now adopted a vicarage model of working, in the last year ... everybody now is wanting houses like vicarages, which have always got an extra room to have as a study downstairs ... we’re all working from vicarages now!’ Such a comment underscores the relatively privileged position of most Anglican clergy in having large and comfortable spaces in which to live and work during the pandemic. Often conscious of their privilege, in this post we explore how Anglican priests have responded to challenges posed by COVID-19, reflecting on the domestication of their professional as well as personal lives. Our argument is that the pandemic has brought into sharper focus how the vicarage has become a key site of contemporary urban Anglicanism.

Anglican ministry is founded on what we are terming ‘parochial domesticity’: a commitment to having priests living in a parish amongst their flock, and where every inch of the country is part of a parish (cf Rumsey 2017). As another senior clergyman put it to us: “I think the vicarage is a theological sign above all else – at the heart of the Gospel is that God is born and locates himself amongst us. God moves into our street and neighbourhood – that’s something the Church, through its local life, tries to replicate, so the local vicarage is a sign of incarnate Christ”. As a centre of family and parochial life, in normal times vicarages are outward facing domestic spaces where parish meetings take place or study groups get together; where people call in to book baptisms, weddings and funerals; where others might visit at times of personal crisis, perhaps in search of hospitality, counselling and refuge. Their significance as local sites of ministry, charity and social action is often not sufficiently appreciated alongside the more obviously sacred spaces of Anglican life, such as churches and chapels. The pandemic has amplified this function of clergy homes in local communities.

While the coronavirus pandemic might have forced many in the population to reconfigure their homes to accommodate their work in ways that superficially resemble vicarages, religious leaders (such as Anglican clergy), have rethought their own domestic lives as they have been challenged to minister differently. One of our interviewees described this as a process of ‘dislocation’ and ‘relocation’: ‘the question has been: what is the Church or who is the Church now? What is the Church if we cannot have a church?’

A matter of some controversy, places of worship were either forced to shut their doors or did so voluntarily during lockdown periods. ‘The building is closed but the Church is open’ is a slogan that quickly gained traction across different Christian denominations and congregations. A rapid pivot online spared many congregations from immediate dislocation – early in the UK’s first lockdown the Easter Eucharist was celebrated on YouTube and Zoom direct from the vicarage study, the rectory garden or, in the memorable example of the Archbishop of Canterbury, from a clerical kitchen. With considerable ease, it seemed, the vicarage doubled, not only as a practical base for parochial ministry, but as a new sacred space (for parallel experiences in the Jewish faith see Lawrence 2021)

Not all clergy found this pivot easy. While technical challenges were an issue for some, many questioned whether a spiritual experience that was normally centred around collective witness and fellowship in a physical building could translate into an online space where people watched and participated from their own homes. As one of our respondents explained, the issue was partly a matter of differing theological standpoints and church traditions: ‘Generally speaking, those of a more Catholic persuasion find it harder – the domestication of sacred space is far harder for those for whom sacred space, the church building and the ceremonial aspects of priesthood … [are] … more important … Those of what we call a lower church persuasion, evangelical clergy ... they did not really celebrate Communion that much anyway, they didn’t mind! They tended to wear jeans and a t-shirt, they tended to lead with a guitar; they are up for the unhoused church!” For those who wanted to, the question of how to celebrate Communion raised practical as well as and theological concerns (for more on differing practices see Village and Francis 2021). As the respondent explained, there were ‘lots of slightly esoteric but important discussions around how do you take communion, can you take Communion online ... so for priests to be, er, breaking a wafer here [points to computer screen] does that work for you sat at home? How do you bless someone remotely?’ (for further discussion see Filby 2021) A number of clergy who were troubled by the relocation of Communion online even planned to send out Communion wafers to congregation members in jiffy bags!

In other ways too, the role of the vicarage as a site of local ministry has changed.  An East London priest we interviewed explained that the number of people calling at his vicarage in need of help had fallen, but that those who did come were facing particularly difficult challenges and dealing with them had become more intense: ‘I had one person who is unbelievably needy and chaotic, and in the first few weeks I gave quite a lot of money to him, because he was in the most ridiculous situations … he seemed to get somewhere to stay – the phone rings a lot from him.’ The difficulty of fulfilling these roles and offering help to those most in need troubled a number of clergy. The East London priest’s spouse had become quite anxious about one caller in particular: ‘At the beginning of the lockdown, he would come to the door at any time, and he’d be quite aggressive, he’d be banging, I don’t think he really understood what was happening. He didn’t get it. And so, he wouldn’t keep a distance. I found that quite threatening. I realised that if we lived in a normal house, we wouldn’t have all these people coming to the door. It’s an outside door handle, so what do you do? Wipe it down every time someone’s come, or try not to touch it? So I just found that quite unsettling.’ Balancing a vicarage tradition of providing hospitality and support with the need to maintain personal health and safety became a challenge for the entire clerical family in the context of what another interviewee described as ‘the injection of a new kind of aspect of danger.’

While one respondent spoke positively about vicarage gardens becoming a new threshold and space of encounter for priests and visitors, the need to ensure safety felt dislocating for some clergy wanting to support their parishioners.  The lockdowns sometimes brought a more inward-looking form of parochial domesticity. As another of our interviews explained, ‘the Rectory has felt more like a refuge.  I’ve spent a lot more time here, shifted the location of services to the study, made the study much more liveable and prayable in.’ Several spoke of the privilege of having a large space to reside in, often with a garden to enjoy fresh air and sunshine. Reflecting experiences of the wider population, clergy interviewees also described how parsonage spaces were reconfigured to accommodate other household members working from home, and how their days began to be shaped by new routines: ‘We have a very, very different pattern which is not just about working relations. We’ve adopted a very different way of life – it’s work until 5 o’clock then [Spouse] cleans the kitchen and does some gardening. We have dinner, watch the news and then stay up for a bit and then go to bed. And it’s the same everyday, and involves a bit of drink, which comes out about 5 o’clock!’

For some clergy the pandemic has also been spiritually testing and a moment for deeper theological reflection. While putting out the refuse bins for collection from his front garden, a neighbour asked one of our clergy respondents: where is God in all this? A semi-retired priest based in London mused on this question from his own home ‘So, when I sit here and see the various images and icons I have in this room of a crucified Christ I can offer no clever explanation, either for that or for the latest horrors of a global pandemic appearing even now on my TV screen. It doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation but just that it is vastly beyond my comprehension.’ Another argued that ‘the heart of our faith is a God who meets us in a space of suffering, so this is not a new situation for Christians to be reckoning with.’ For him, the pandemic presented an opportunity and moment for renewal, where congregations, dislocated from their normal spaces of worship, have frequently taken on the role of being ‘brokers, the hosts of community and civic partnership and welfare support in community responses to COVID-19 … Churches are on the spot, which is where the vicarages come in – they’ve got the networks, they know the people, they can host and facilitate stuff.’ Parish life has been recentred around domestic spaces and domestic connections embedded within local communities providing opportunities for religious responses to the crisis that coronavirus has brought. The model of parochial domesticity signified by the vicarage has never been more relevant to Anglican urban ministry.

Alastair Owens is a Co-Investigator on the AHRC Stay Home project and Professor of Historical Geography at Queen Mary University of London. David Geiringer is a Postdoctoral Researcher also at Queen Mary working with Alastair Owens on a project examining the role of Anglican clergy and ‘parochial domesticity’ in responding to the changing British inner city since the 1970s.

References

Miri Lawrence ‘From the Synagogue to the Sofa’ Stay Home Stories Blog, 8 February 2021 https://www.stayhomestories.co.uk/from-the-synagogue-to-the-sofa [accessed 26 April 2021].

Sarah-Jane Page, ‘Double Scrutiny at the Vicarage: Clergy Mothers, Expectations and the Public Gaze’, in Vanessa Reimer (ed.) Angels on Earth: Mothering, Religion and Spirituality (Demeter Press: Bradford ON, 2016), 17–38.

Nigel Peyton and Caroline Gatrell, ‘The Sacrificial Embrace: Exploring Contemporary English Parish Clergy Lives’, The Expository Times, 126:8 (2014), 378–388.

Andrew Rumsey, Parish: An Anglican Theology of Place (SCM Press: London, 2017).

Angela Tilby, ‘Virtual Bread-Sharing is not the Eucharist’, Church Times, 24 April 2020.

Andrew Village and Leslie Francis, ‘Eucharist in a time of lockdown,’ Church Times, 19 March 2021.