The following is no more (and no less) then a collection of quotes I have come across regarding Self Supporting Ministry, with their sources. There is no order or implied endorsement/agreement, I just want to collect them together somewhere. It will be added to an an ad-hoc basis.
“The expression of religion in daily life is not an extra, but is of the essence of Christianity. It therefore seems right that some clergy should be fully in the strains and stresses of daily life to the extent of earning their living in secular work.” (Worker Church Group Statement, 1959. As reported in Church Times 8174, 6 September 2019, p. 20.)
“So while traditional holiness cuts itself off, not only from sin, but often from tile hopes and travails of the world, worldly holiness is achieved by responding to the summons of the holy to serve in the world. The secular existence is the locus of the encounter – the holy gives it meaning. If sacred and secular are separated the self too lacks integration; it is not whole.”
Dorrie Johnson CHRISM Paper 3 – “Spirituality for Work“, 1997. CHRISM website
“Barry [developed this idea further in his book The Relevance of the Church (1935), where he was actually the first to coin the phrase ‘non-stipendiary ministers’. He] claimed that there would be a beneficial and sacramental sign to the church and world if some ordained clergy were engaged in secular employment:
‘What is really important about this suggestion is not the alleviation which it might offer to the problem of staffing the parishes … It would save Christianity from becoming a caricature of itself as something that people do after working hours.’ ”
Patrick Vaughan, CHRISM Paper 11 – “Challenging Clerical Stereotypes – reflections on the genesis of NSM”, 2011.
“We who minister in secular employment find ourselves required to use the everyday language of the workplace to ‘see and tell the Christian story there’. We cannot hide behind the language of theology when talking to our colleagues. Story is an important tool for us too, and we find ourselves using twenty-first century examples to help us put our points across.”
CHRISM Paper 7 – “The Kingdom of Heaven is like.…”
“We should expect, then, the ordained ministry in some way or other to carry the marks of a divine calling and authorisation, a celebration of the mystery of God’s presence in creation, redemption and fulfilment, and a patient service of the needs of the world. In fact these three aspects of ministry, which belong to the whole Church and are focussed in the ordained ministry, could be said to find expression in the threefold order of bishop, priest, and deacon.”
Peter Baelz, “Ministers of the Kingdom” in Ministers of the Kingdom. Exploration in Non-Stipendiary Ministry (CIO, London: 1985). p. 37
“What interests me is the way that a person’s work does or does not sustain that person’s sense of purpose. … I think most people want to be good for something. I think they want to something that matters, to be part of something bigger them themselves, to given themselves to something that is meaningful instead of meaningless. And yet meaningful work is hard to come by.
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The basic principle is to do no harm. Beyond that, you are free to do quite a lot of things for a living, but they are not all going to come with their own evident purposes. Supplying that purpose is going to be up to you.
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No work is too small to play a part in the work of creation. … Any worker with a good imagination should be able to come up hundreds or people whom his or her work affects.
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Yet it is always possible that one’s true work in the world is not what one does for a living. … In a world where the paid work that people do does not always feed their hearts, it seems important to leave open the possibility that our vocations may turn out to be the things we do for free. … While it is sometime possible to turn your love into you work – especially if you can figure out how to live on less – that is not always the best idea. … At least part of the beauty of unpaid work is that we choose to do it. In the midst of lives driven largely by compulsion, the choice to take on more work simply because we love doing it is an act of liberation.”Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World (Canterbury Press: London, 2009). pp 113-116
James Handley 