Creative Perseverance: Sustaining Life-Giving Ministry in Today's Church

A.J. Pell is rector of Christ Church in Hope, B.C., editor of the
Canadian Evangelical Review, and an instructor of Liturgy, Anglican
Studies Programme at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C.

To say that the Christian church and Christian ministry are in crisis is
far from understatement. Symbolic of the crisis is the ongoing
revelation of sexual abuse in the church at the level of parish and
seminary and church agency. Gill Goulding sees the sexual abuse scandals
as a symptom of a deeper problem, the abuse of power in ways both legal
and illegal. Further, she see the effects of abuse of power as touching
not just the perpetrators and victims but all who are involved in
ministry in the church. Ministers are drained and disillusioned, and so
their work and the churches they serve suffer.

Goulding proposes to meet the widespread effects of abuse of authority
with “creative perseverance,” and this book works through the basic
dynamics of such a process. It begins by enabling and allowing victims,
direct and indirect, to voice their pain and suffering. It requires
those in authority to listen to the stories and the feelings with
disciplined openness. The process must also include confession of sin by
those who abuse power, even if for supposed “good” ends, so that
reconciliation may take place. And it should lead to constructive change
that is faithful to the God who always listens to us and who through the
Cross knows the depths of suffering from the abuse of power.

On the one hand, this is a useful but not particularly new approach.
Dialogue is one of the mantras of the 21st-century church. Where
Goulding expands the dialogue is in recognizing and applying it to the
invisible victims: clergy and other ministers whose energy for ministry
is undermined by the abuse of power around them. On the other hand,
Goulding’s vision is too narrowly Roman Catholic. She does not
acknowledge that the problems stemming from abuse of power are sprinkled
all through the Christian church, nor does she explore resources for
creative perseverance outside her own tradition.