Rev. W. H. Vanstone in the Suburbs

The church is like a “swimming pool in which all the noise comes from the shallow end.” (W. H. Vanstone, b. 9^th May 1923; d. 4^th March 1999)

Paul writes – [Warning, long post]. I recently read Sarah Coakley’s excellent essay Deepening Practices: Perspectives from Ascetical and Mystical Theology. Another standout benefit of reading her essay was discovering the Rev. William (‘Bill’) Vanstone, an Anglican Priest who despite “a brilliant undergraduate and graduate career, chose thereafter to labour entirely unnoticed for decades in a dreary housing-estate parish of Rochdale [in England].”

Now it needs to be understood that “the parish was not in the sort of housing estate where there was great physical poverty…but rather a suburban development that manifested the more devastating spiritual poverty of a world “come of age” – without roots, traditions, or obvious hungers of the soul…” Vanstone embodied the gospel in the suburbs.

I come across so few examples of creative and faithful missional ministry in the suburbs; in the parochial sense of the suburbs as my parish. There are no examples within my town, of churches that understand themselves as missional in the richest and deepest sense of that term (for a sense of what I’m talking about, see the work of The Gospel and Our Culture Network, and their excellent publications).

Now these are broad statements, but often, in my experience, the inner city is held up as the place par excellence where God is most at work – amongst the physically poor, the marginalized, and downtrodden, and the disenfranchised. Now I’m not denying the importance of serving amongst this group, nor am I suggesting that God doesn’t call people to cruciformly serve in those places within our Western cities. What I am saying is that often the suburbs only serve as the location of a church building – they’re not the place where God is at work; there are no obvious needs. I’d love to see more creativity around a suburban ecclesiology, missiology, and spirituality.

So why am I writing about the suburbs? What I am doing is acknowledging my place in the suburbs, in a small, mostly well-off (financially etc) predominantly white middle to upper-class town. I don’t live in an urban environment. I don’t live in the inner city. I live in a place without obvious needs, without obvious “hungers of the soul;” I live with the mundane and ordinary stuff of people lives (mowing their lawns, tending their gardens, walking the footpaths etc etc]. So, the challenge, as long as I’m here is to discover where is God in this context?

For me it has been all too easy to prefix my imaginings about church by prefixing them with, “If only I was… [In Melbourne, or London, or Brighton, or Cincinnati, or Christchurch, or Wellington, or Auckland, or…you get the picture!] I guess a part of that is that my conversation and exploration partners; my stimulus for imagining church and mission is in those places; not here in Cambridge! Cambridge (as reflected in its churches) is a generally a lonely, conservative, uncreative, unimaginative place within which to ask the kinds of questions I’m asking; the kinds of questions many of you are asking and seeking to live out of. But, it’s still the context within which I live; it’s the place where God is at work, and maybe, it’s these very conditions that most usefully serve as the soil from within which something new can grow. Perhaps, who I am requires this kind of context and I need to be more grateful for it.

Vanstone affirms that God is present; God is active, even when we struggle to see.

During the suburban “…’phase of his career’… Vanstone struggled on…He spent a good deal of time simply walking around the streets of his parish and talking to passers-by. Otherwise he was visiting parishioners at home or was in church saying his office. He baptised, married, and buried people; on Sunday’s he broke bread with his congregation…These were his repetitive, faithful practices as a priest. But it was a period of depression for him, and it was not obvious at the time that many of his efforts were bearing fruit. During this phase of his career he was repeatedly offered attractive academic positions, but he turned them all down; and when he was made an honorary canon of Manchester Cathedral, he never mentioned it to his flock. 

Late in life…after his first major heart attack, he wrote three short monographs into which he poured the condensed theological wisdom gleaned from him practices in the parish. The first, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, a meditation on his work in the [suburbs] and its many difficulties, is about the costliness of love (the costliness of Christian practice, we might say) when it meets no apparent response. The Christian vision of love is held up before the gaze of secular indifference and goes unrecognized: ‘Hidden in love’s agony, Loves endeavour, love’s expense.’ The second book is entitled The Stature of Waiting. It is about the progressive, albeit slow, identification of the self with the ‘handing over’ of Christ to his death that is so distinctive a mark of the passion narratives. The third, Farewell in Christ, written not long before Vanstone’s own death, charts his acceptance of his own mortality, but is otherwise largely given over to an extended exposition of a Christic theology of grace…

…It is [Vanstone’s] contemplative heart that is seen, at the end of Vanstone’s career, to have been beating through it all along…through [his] painfully purgative faithfulness to practices that had only hidden efficacy…”

Vanstone serves to counter my tendency to serve only on the basis of there being “fruit,” evidences of my service making a difference. This is the Jesus-way. The quiet way of faithfulness. This is what Vanstone would call the “deep end” of life, church, and mission. Vanstone encourages me in the slow and lonely work of imagining something different; of seeing this place and the missio Dei within it, differently. Vanstone encourages me to persevere, to trust God; for this is God’s work.

Finally, I also liked the following, written by Andrew Brown on the 6^th March 1999 in The Independent online. It adds more ‘paint’ to the picture of William Hubert Vanstone.

“Canon William Vanstone, who died last week. After a career of staggering brilliance at Oxford and Cambridge, in which he picked up three first class degrees, and followed them with another in America, he spent his working life in the decent obscurity of the Anglican parish ministry on the nasty edges of unpleasant places like Manchester. Other, less talented, contemporaries rose to become Christian leaders. Vanstone did not want the jobs. "He had this conviction that bishops were either stupid or vain, and in some instances both," said one Cambridge friend, Robert Runcie.

As a priest, he was too busy to write. His contribution to ecclesiastical economics was to sell the vicarage furniture to patch the church roof. Eventually he retired to Chester, and there wrote three little books, Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; The Stature of Waiting; and Farewell in Christ. Very occasionally, he would write for this column, Faith & Reason. He was not a terribly easy man to deal with; perhaps he would have written more if I had not been so frightened of ringing him up, but the combination of being extremely clever and extremely deaf made him hard work for someone as vague as I am on the telephone. No one I respect who knew him did not love him. "He had a gracious goodness and simplicity," says Runcie.

It's difficult to think of a figure more old-fashioned than such a scholar-priest. It's difficult to think of a greater affront to British principles than that he should spend his gifts as he did. I doubt very much that as a parish priest he converted many people. But I'm not sure that a church is meant to be a model to business organisations. There's something to be said for making it a school for saints instead, and Bill Vanstone's life says it…”

Comments

[A]

The opening quote is priceless. I wish it weren't often so true.... Great article. Thanks mate.

[Sheila Wrigley]

Knew Bill Vanstone very well would like to expand on your comments. Dont know how to use this machine so please tell me what to do. Does post mean snail mail?

[Sheila Wrigley]

Kirkholt, was not a dreary place,Bill converted hundreds of people. The baby boom coincided with his time there. We had Hundreds of children & organisations were created for them parents followed.He Camped ran shows, an excellent actor himself. great leadership talents.

[Sheila Wrigley]

Bill Vanstone would weep at the state of the lovely church he designed.The parish has been without a Priest for far too long- Is this hoe the Church of England rewards it best? A few of his orignal parishioners all elderly have struggled to keep it going- pressure please & money.Sheila W.

[Tom Allen]

Intriguing post about one of my Anglican heroes. Vanstone is undergoing something of a resurgence in England - his very incarnational approach to priesthood has obvious links with the post-Christendom role of clergy - though sadly with multi-benefice roles few have the time simply to "loiter with intent" in the way that Vanstone seems to have done. With the plethora of academic opportunities today there are fewer scholar priests to be found at parish level
Tom

[susan]

I just wanted to add another voice in praise of this almost unsung hero of post-modern Christianity. As a theology student at a Presbyterian Seminary, I stumbled across Vanstone's chapter on The Self-emptying God from his little book The Risk of Love. The subject was Creation, and Vanstone piece was wedged in our reader between "heavy weights" such as Jurgen Moltmann, Karl Barth, and Sallie McFague. I was instantly drawn to his beautiful portrayal of God as loving creator who does not spare himself, and who is deeply involved in every detail of our lives. It isn't that this has not been said before in some way or other: it was the detailed illuminations from personal experience and real life that gave this book so much more meaning than the other works on the subject. I managed to find his book on line. It reminded very much of the writings of Henri Nouwen, not spun from the comfort of the ivory tower, but forged in the crucible of pastoral experience. Like Nouwen, Vanstone was clearly a brilliant man, but also chose to serve his God in the trenches. We cannot regret what he clearly did not -- but one wishes he had left more for those of us who were not privileged to know him.

[Malcolm Drummond]

I was Bill's curate in Kirkholt from 1971-4. It was a life changing experience and one for which I am eternally grateful. However there is a question that still plagues me after all these years and it is this. I have seen the mess created by lesser men promoted well beyond their ability and wonder how different the C of E might have been had he taken on the levers of power, because he would certainly have risen to the top.At the same time he was the nearest thing I knew to the Curé d' Are in his devotion to his work an his people.