The Rev Canon Prof Michael Hull delivered the Principal’s Charge on Monday 1 September 2025 whilst the Initial Ministerial Education students in Phase 1 (IME1) were gathered for their Orientation Week. The Charge is delivered to students at the start of the new academic year on a theme for the year in the presence of SEI’s staff team. Then, on Friday 6 September, Prof Hull turned the tables and addressed the staff team in the presence of the students.
In my Charge to the student cohort on Monday, I used as my point of departure ‘evangelical truth and apostolic order’, the Scottish Episcopal Church’s strapline, and I referred to the Scottish Episcopal Institute’s strapline ‘forming people for ministry’, which had been my point of departure in last year’s Charge.
Oddly, it is a bit ‘back to the future’ with this address, entitled ‘serving people for ministry’. Am I in some sort of straplinear solipsistic struggle? I am afraid to ask what others may be asking about where I am – or where I am going with this address! – nevertheless I answer myself, ‘no’, my struggle is not with our straplines, my struggle is with my ministry, with the responsibility to lead our team, particularly our directors and tutors, to form people for ministry. How am I supposed to do that?
What I struggle with – a struggle that is an occupational hazard and an ongoing consequence of the office I bear – is how I may support you well in what it is we are supposed to be doing. You’ll know the Principal’s Charges are delivered to the students. In them I use a lot of second-person plural language, albeit with third-person language as appropriate, I think. There is more than a bit of grey in all that because the staff team are sort of interlopers, are they not, rather than interlocutors? So, in this address, we have our students with us in the room, but for a change, we are the ones on the spot, and they are students listening in.
‘Formation for ministry’, the SEI strapline, has been around for about 10 years now, and I use it a lot, but it has never sat all that well with me because, although it is certainly well intentioned, it seems to place too heavy a burden on the staff. When I start to think about formation for ministry, I think about the Good God speaking to Samuel about the sons of Jesse in 1 Samuel 16. Samuel is no fool by any means; likewise Jesse, who knows his sons, many of whom Samuel and Jesse take to be fit to succeed Saul. Yet God chooses the ruddy and unprepared David. David was not on their radar at all – he had not even been invited to the Advisory Selection Panel at Bethlehem!
So, what good would we be at ‘forming’ if we cannot even get recruitment and selection right? No, if I had my druthers, I would change our strapline to ‘serving people for ministry’. Now I do not want to overstate my case, but, again if I had my druthers and I do not – just ask the Institute Council – I would eschew any sense of ‘forming’, even ‘training’, because although those words are used gently and to good effect across the Anglican Communion and other Christian denominations, like the United Reformed Church, every time I find something along those lines in Holy Scripture, it is God’s work, not humans’ work, that makes things happen.
God forms the universe in Genesis 1 and 2. God forms us in our mothers’ wombs in Ps. 139.13–16. St Paul speaks about Christ being formed in us in Gal. 4.19 and Rom. 9.20. If the forming is in God’s hands, all will be well. However, if God’s doing the forming, why are staff, like me, getting the exotic titles and salaries? By my lights, we have some claim to our titles and remuneration if we follow Jesus’ example. Jesus, at one of the most pivotal points in his earthly life, says, ‘For who is greater, the one who reclines at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines? But I am among you as one who serves’ (Lk. 22.7; cf. Mk 10.45; Mt. 20.28; Jn 13.1–17). Jesus is a servant.
Now, lots of priests tell me one of the most moving and awesome things they do is to celebrate the Eucharist. I get that. They feel great humility in offering the Lord’s Supper. In standing before God and their fellow humans in persona Christi. For me at least, being in persona Christi that way at the altar is not as humbling as what I have sometimes been graced to do on a Maundy Thursday. In some churches in their Maundy Thursday services, as we in mine, the keynote Scriptural reading is the account of the Last Supper from John’s Gospel (Jn 13.1–17). After the Gospel is proclaimed – and before the Eucharist – I go down from the chancel, take off the outer vestments, wrap a towel around my waist and pour water into a basin, and I symbolically wash the feet of some members of my congregation in persona Christi. In the dynamic tension of the first and the last. In the dynamic tension of the Cross that is at once a sign of defeat and victory. In the moment, I recall St Peter’s words at that first Last Supper, when he objects to Jesus washing his feet, and remember what Jesus told Peter: ‘You do not realise now what I am doing, but later you will understand’ (Jn 13.7).
My takeaway from that, akin to St Paul’s knowing only in part (1 Cor. 13.12), is that serving the students in SEI must be a rarified imitation of Christ. It must be done in persona Christi. That is what we staff are called to do. Our primary goal, as I see it, is to serve the students and all who are included in SEI’s broader remit ‘to educate the whole church’ in their baptismal vocations. I do not want to fall into a bunch of clichés or make a big deal about churchy jargon, but I want us to make this academic year one in which the students will see us as their servants, in the very positive sense of service, like Jesus washing feet. Almost every official document – in what we may call ‘the secondary literature of formation and training’ – reads, sadly, pretty much like a module outline: lots of aims at the start and lots of learning outcomes at the end, with the aims meeting the outcomes in a sort of Janus-faced but mirror image, yet with nothing of substance in the middle. It is not about us, the staff team, it is all about God and, at the same time, all about the students. To take our service as an imitation of Jesus leaves Jesus right at the centre, say, between the aims and the outcomes.
I do have something, though, that I would like to share with you to help us. It is not from churchy circles. It is not from university circles. It is rather from an outlier to both. I would refer to this as an ‘engaged pedagogy’ without letting the definition limit the reality. It is from the late bell hooks in her book, now thirty odd years old, entitled, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Milton Park: Routledge, 1994; p. 13):
To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin. This means acknowledging the full and complex humanity of students and also working to mitigate the harm done by systems that too often fail to see students and teachers as full humans.
hooks’s quote starts with the infinitive ‘to educate’: ‘education’, from the Latin educare, meaning, ‘to bring up’, or ‘to nourish,’ or ‘to lead out’ or ‘to draw forth’; and it ends with ‘humans’: ‘human’, from the Latin humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘ground’ and ‘human being’.
My takeaways? First, our vocation to educate our students is sacred. Second, our vocation is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. Third, our vocation is to respect and care for our students’ souls. Fourth, our vocation is to accept we are all broken by systems failing to treat us – and them – as sacred. And, finally, our vocation is to see ourselves and our students as full human beings whose feet we are to wash.
I am guessing that if we see our students in this way, in the way exemplified by our Saviour in his earthly life, then, maybe, SEI would be serving people for ministry. In persona Christi, we would realise what we are doing. What do you think? Is that a way forward for us?
Photo credit: Jesus Washing the Apostles’ Feet (Jesus Washing the Feet of the Apostles)
