The Pastoral Ministry in the Anglican Church in England and Wales, C. 1840-1950

Abstract

The hundred years from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century was a period of profound and lasting change in many of the theological, liturgical, financial and administrative aspects of Church life in England and Wales, but the basic assumptions about the nature of the pastoral ministry changed relatively little. The min isterial ideal of 1950 — that a clergyman be godly, prayerful, sta ble, moral, caring and reasonably well educated, was not fundamentally different from what it had been in 1840, nor, as has been shown by contributors writing on other periods in this volume, from many earlier times. Throughout the period c. 1840-1950 there reigned supreme the ideal of the beneficed clergyman as professionally auto nomous, a self-employed, independent gendeman. Although in England at least, less so in Wales, he belonged by education and birth to the middle or higher echelons of society, by about 1840 he was devel oping an increasing sense of separation between himself and the secular world. One outward symbol of this was the adoption of dis tinctive clerical dress. This had started with the black coat and white