The Construct: A Summary

The idea that undefendedness exists among clergy was evident from qualitative research with twenty-five serving Church of England Archdeacons, conducted as doctoral research and further developed in subsequent peer-reviewed publications.Footnote ⁸ Archdeacons were selected as the research population on the grounds that their oversight role positions them to observe, across multiple clergy and sustained periods of ministry, the relational and attitudinal features that distinguish effective from struggling parish practice. The research therefore provides evidence about clergy as perceived by experienced oversight practitioners, rather than clergy self-report.

The term ‘undefendedness’ itself, together with its associated vocabulary – ‘vulnerability scale’, ‘non-defensive’, ‘non-anxious’ and ‘not totally undefended’ – originated with a single participant, Archdeacon PAF, who identified this language as her own spontaneous coinage. The underlying concept was independently corroborated, in different words, across twelve of the twenty-five participants, confirming a stable practitioner reality rather than an idiosyncratic description. Undefendedness may be provisionally defined as the calibrated, non-anxious relational openness that enables the ordained minister to engage people, criticism and conflict without self-protective retreat, grounded in a sufficiently stable sense of self that others’ approval is not experienced as constitutive of identity.Footnote ⁹ The construct does not duplicate vulnerability, humility, self-differentiation or non-anxious presence, though related to each; it names a configuration of relational capacities existing frameworks do not sufficiently capture for the ordained context. Full evidential detail is provided in the companion article.Footnote ¹⁰

Where the Evidence and the Tradition Converge

What makes the qualitative data particularly significant for a theological reading is that Archdeacon participants do not merely observe the relational disposition the construct names – they characteristically interpret it in theological terms. The research did not prompt this; it arose from within the data, unbidden, as a feature of how experienced practitioners understand what makes ministry possible at depth.

Three pieces of testimony are especially illuminating. The first concerns the relationship between secure identity and the capacity for genuine service. Archdeacon SUS grounded the undefended minister’s relational openness in a specific Johannine account of priestly identity:

This is a careful theological claim, not a pious gloss. A distinction is worth making explicit at this point, since the testimony can be read two ways. SUS’s phrase ‘know who you are’ could denote self-awareness – accurate knowledge of one’s own temperament, wounds and patterns of behaviour – or it could denote identity in a more theological sense: a settled answer to whose one is, prior to and independent of role or performance. The two are related but not identical, and the force of the testimony depends on holding them together rather than collapsing one into the other: self-awareness without secure identity produces accurate but anxious self-monitoring, while a claimed identity without self-awareness produces a confidence that has not been tested by honest self-scrutiny. Read in its immediate context – SUS’s comment follows directly from reflection on the foot-washing as an act of service flowing from Jesus’ prior certainty about his relationship to the Father – the primary sense intended is the latter: identity as a settled relational status rather than a psychological inventory, though it plainly requires the former (self-awareness) to be lived out faithfully rather than merely asserted.

Nor is this the identity Phil. 2:6 warns against grasping at. Christ’s kenosis begins precisely with his not regarding ‘equality with God as something to be exploited’; the identity this article has in view is the derivative, creaturely identity Christ’s self-emptying makes available to those he serves, rather than any claim to divine status on the minister’s own part. In Pauline terms, it is closer to adopted sonship (Rom. 8:15–16; Gal. 4:6–7) – a status conferred rather than achieved, and one that, unlike clerical office or congregational esteem, does not fluctuate with performance. It is not, moreover, an identity peculiar to the ordained: it is the baptismal identity that all Christians share, and what ordination adds is not a different identity but a public and representative office within which that shared identity is exposed to unusual pressures of approval, criticism and demand – which is why its security matters with particular force for clergy. SUS identifies this secure identity – one that does not require the approval of those it serves – as the precondition for genuine servant ministry, echoing the narrative logic of Jn. 13:3–5, where Jesus’ capacity for self-emptying service rests upon a prior certainty about his identity and origin. The minister whose sense of self depends on the congregation’s response cannot afford the vulnerability that authentic pastoral encounter requires.

The second piece of testimony concerns the formative role of contemplative prayer. Archdeacon NIV described the developmental pathway of the relational security the construct requires in terms that draw directly on the contemplative tradition:

The language of the false self, the reference to Keating’s centring prayer and the identification of silent contemplative practice as the means by which hidden compulsions – for control, love, power and security – are addressed, all arise unprompted from this practitioner’s account of formation. NIV is describing a formational psychology that is also a contemplative theology: the minister who cannot face what prayer reveals about their own motivations will seek from the congregation what they have not found in God.

The third piece of testimony names a specific institutional distortion rather than the disposition itself. Archdeacon TIO observed that clergy who cannot acknowledge the psychological difficulty of their role ‘play out their difficulty in ill health’, attributing this in part to a misapplied ecclesiological framing through which Anglican clergy are sometimes formed: ‘resurrection people, they’re unhelpful models in a fractured world’.Footnote ¹³ The difficulty TIO names is not resurrection theology itself but a truncated reading of it. The properly Pauline account of resurrection life is not the simple embodying of victory but very nearly its opposite: ‘always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies’ (2 Cor. 4:10) – a pattern Paul understood well and returns to repeatedly (cf. Gal. 2:20). Where ‘resurrection people’ is taken to mean that the minister must present unbroken triumph, the phrase becomes, in TIO’s observation, a form of institutional defensiveness – precisely the failure mode the construct identifies. Where it retains its Pauline, cruciform shape, it is not opposed to the undefended vulnerability this article commends but names exactly the same reality from a different theological angle.

These three witnesses – SUS on servant identity and its secure ground, NIV on contemplative formation and the false self and TIO on the institutional theology of invulnerability – do not merely illustrate a theological argument constructed elsewhere. Together they constitute a practitioner theology of relational priesthood, developed from within the experience of sustained Anglican ministry, which the Theological Foundations and Psychology of Religion sections take seriously and develop in dialogue with the formal tradition.

Von Balthasar and the Kenotic Foundation

The theological account of what makes relational openness both possible and specifically demanded in ordained ministry begins with the Christological hymn of Phil. 2:5–11. The Pauline injunction that the Christian community should have ‘the same mind’ that was in Christ Jesus, who ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a slave’, and ‘humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death’ (Phil. 2:7–8), provides the doctrinal ground for the Anglican tradition’s characteristic disposition of the ordained minister: called not to wield authority from a position of power but to exercise it in a mode of self-giving. Priestly existence, on this account, is not the exercise of a distinctive ontological status but the enactment of a relational disposition, requiring as its precondition a stable sense of self not dependent on the approval of those it serves.

It is von Balthasar who gives this Pauline account its most direct and theologically rigorous application to ordained priesthood. In his account of priestly spirituality, he locates the foot-washing of Jn. 13 as the paradigmatic act of priestly existence: it is, he writes, ‘taking upon oneself, in humiliation, the dirt of one’s brethren’.Footnote ¹⁴ This is not a counsel of pastoral method but a description of priestly being: the minister who washes feet has relinquished positional authority not as a strategy for effectiveness but as an expression of a selfhood constituted by its relation to the one who ‘did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited’ (Phil. 2:6). This capacity for giving-of-self is inseparable, on von Balthasar’s account, from the prior security of the one who gives: Christ’s kenosis is not self-loss but self-giving grounded in the certainty of the relation to the Father that precedes and sustains it.

This Christological logic maps directly onto the Archdeacon data. When Archdeacon SUS grounds the minister’s capacity for servant-heartedness in the observation that ‘Jesus knew who he was; before you can really serve, you are called to know who you are’, the theological claim being made is close to von Balthasar’s, on the reading proposed above: the minister whose identity is secure – secure in the specific, derivative sense of a conferred rather than achieved status – does not need the pastoral encounter to resolve in their favour, and can receive the distressed parishioner, the critical colleague, the conflict-laden PCC, without the defensiveness that transforms pastoral encounters into opportunities for self-protection. What the empirical research identifies as the psychological dimension of this security – a stable sense of self not requiring external validation – the kenotic tradition names as the fruit of a prior relation to God more fundamental than any congregational relationship. Undefendedness is not a disposition the minister must work to acquire; it is what the minister becomes as they are formed by the one who emptied himself.

A caveat is necessary at this point and follows directly from the distinction drawn above. The language of secure identity, self-possession and freedom from the need for approval is also, unmistakably, the language a narcissistic pastor might use of themselves – and narcissistic injury, rather than kenotic security, is not infrequently what such confidence conceals. The Archdeacon data offer no direct instrument for distinguishing the two, since the construct was derived from oversight practitioners’ observations of clergy behaviour rather than from any measure capable of differentiating secure identity from its narcissistic counterfeit. Two markers, consistent with the theological account developed here, suggest a provisional distinction rather than a settled test. First, genuine undefendedness, on the kenotic account, is oriented outwards – it exists for the sake of the one served, not for the minister’s own self-regard – so that where ‘I know who I am’ functions chiefly to close down challenge or correction rather than to receive it, the theological ground being claimed is very likely counterfeit. Second, undefendedness as this article describes it is calibrated rather than absolute (Archdeacon PAF’s vulnerability scale, discussed above, makes exactly this point) and remains answerable to pastoral supervision and honest peer relationship; the narcissistic counterfeit characteristically resists precisely the kind of scrutiny genuinely undefended ministry submits itself to. The clergy-narcissism literature gives the worry substance: Ruffing et al. argue that aspects of the clergy role, including idealisation and the pressure to hide the self, can encourage the cultivation of narcissism, and they propose secure attachment and differentiation of self as the developmental capacities that help clergy both to practise healthy humility and resist narcissism.Footnote ¹⁵ That proposal converges with the account offered here, and it reinforces the caution that composed confidence is not, of itself, evidence of secure identity. The distinction cannot be settled definitively on the present data – which, as noted further below, report Archdeacons’ observations of clergy rather than clergy’s or parishioners’ own accounts – and further research from the perspective of those on the receiving end of a defended or narcissistic ministry would strengthen the construct considerably.

Green and Sacramental Relations: A Constructive Anglican Account

The kenotic account requires an ecclesiological complement, lest a purely Christological imitation abstract the ordained minister from the particular relational context of Anglican parish life. That complement is Green’s constructive Anglican account of ordained identity: a ‘shift away from sacramental ontology to sacramental relations’, in which ordained identity is constituted through relationship – to God, the people of God and the community of faith – rather than through a distinctive ontological status conferred at ordination.Footnote ¹⁶ This article receives Green’s proposal with one qualification, prompted by the argument of the preceding section: the relational account need not be read as displacing ontology altogether. Ordination confers a status – arguably, on the derivative sense of identity discussed above, no more and no less than the baptismal status of child of God, exercised in a particular office – but that status is sustained, tested and made concretely real only in relationship. The security this article has in view therefore rests on an ontological claim (identity as gift, not achievement and not contingent on the quality of any given day’s relationships) even as its lived expression is formed, tested and made resilient relationally.

Green’s constructive move, so qualified, has a direct implication for the formation of undefendedness. The security that makes relational openness possible is not conjured afresh at each pastoral encounter, nor does it depend on how well the minister’s relationships happen to be working on a given day; it is grounded in a status given rather than earned, and relationship is what makes that ontological ground real and resilient in a minister’s actual practice rather than what replaces it. The minister formed in ever-deepening relation to God, genuinely embedded in the community of faith as a member before its leader, and understanding those they serve as those through whom God addresses and shapes them, develops an identity that does not need to defend itself against the pastoral encounter. Its stability derives not from positional authority, which fluctuates with congregational confidence, but from a status secure prior to and beneath any relational vicissitude, whose truth is nonetheless only ever known and lived out relationally.

This relational account of ordained identity converges with the psychology of religion, where attachment to God functions as a predictor of psychological adjustment and reduces dependence on congregational approval as a source of self-validation, as Psychology of Religion below examines more fully.Footnote ¹⁷

The formative implication of Green’s account is made explicit in the Archdeacon data. Archdeacon BID expressed a wistful recognition of something that has been elided from contemporary Anglican ministerial culture: a wish that clergy might once again have ‘an openness to being used by the Church where the Church needs you’.Footnote ¹⁸ What BID identifies as a loss is precisely the disposition Green’s sacramental-relational account generates: a selfhood defined by its availability to the purposes of God mediated through the Church, rather than by its own vocational preferences and relational needs. The minister genuinely formed through sacramental relations is one for whom ‘where am I needed?’ takes precedence over ‘where do I want to be?’, not through suppressed need but because those needs are met in a more fundamental relationship than any deployment of gifts can supply. The contemplative practice that NIV identified above is, on Green’s account, the formative practice through which the minister’s identity is progressively realized through deepening relation to God rather than management of human approval.

Walker’s Undefended Leadership: A Full Theological Engagement

The most directly relevant prior contribution is Walker’s account of undefended leadership, whose conceptual vocabulary the research dataset corroborates from an independent empirical direction. Walker’s three works develop a coherent framework. In Leading Out of Who You Are, he argues that most leadership practice is animated by anxiety about self-protection – a defended posture foreclosing the genuine relational encounter from which effective leadership grows – and proposes that effective leaders engage with authentic self-presence rather than from behind the armour of role, status or ideological certainty.Footnote ¹⁹

Leading with Nothing to Lose develops the psychological grounding of this posture, identifying the undefended leader as one ‘whose needs are met through an unconditional attachment to an Other’ (p. 144) – a formulation whose theological resonances with the kenotic account are evident.Footnote ²⁰ In his doctoral study Becoming Undefended, Walker applies the framework specifically to ordained clergy, examining ministers’ own accounts of the defensive strategies that inhibit both their pastoral effectiveness and their personal flourishing.Footnote ²¹

The convergence between Walker’s framework and the Archdeacon-derived construct is substantial, and the present study complements Walker’s focus on clergy self-report with the accumulated observations of oversight practitioners across multiple clergy and contexts. Three further directions of extension are identified: Archdeacon PAF’s vulnerability scale, specifying that total undefendedness is a pastoral error and the construct names a calibrated middle ground, qualifies Walker’s tendency towards the language of achievement; integration within the four-factor CEI model gives it structural relationships with self-awareness, social awareness and empathy that Walker’s singular focus on leadership does not develop; and the breadth of the Archdeacon dataset provides evidential purchase that Walker’s largely theoretical account requires.

It is, however, in three points of critical distance from Walker that this article makes its most distinctively theological contribution. The first concerns the developmental pathway: Walker locates the formation of undefendedness primarily in psychological processes of self-discovery and the cultivation of an unconditional attachment to an Other. The Anglican tradition and the Archdeacon data point towards a related but more specific account: honest, sustained prayer – contemplative disciplines prominent among them, though as the Formation Pathways section below argues, not the only form such prayer may take – honest self-examination in spiritual direction, and the formative encounter of ordained ministry itself as the primary developmental pathway. The Examen, lectio divina and silent prayer over years do not merely improve the minister’s psychological health; they progressively constitute a self whose ground of security is other than human approval, and whose relational openness expresses a freedom psychological self-discovery alone cannot fully supply.

The second critical distance concerns the character of the disposition itself. Walker’s framework treats undefendedness primarily as a strategic posture adopted because it produces better relational leadership outcomes. The Anglican account proposes a different understanding: undefendedness in ordained ministry is better described as expressive than as strategic – not chosen for its effects but the outward form of a way of being shaped by the minister’s own formation in the kenotic selfhood the tradition describes. A strategic posture can be adopted without the inner transformation it implies, and the minister who has learned to perform openness without undergoing the formation that generates it is, on the tradition’s account, one of the most dangerous pastoral figures: skilled in the appearance of availability while remaining fundamentally defended at the level of identity. Archdeacon AKO’s description of ‘adaptability’ as ‘the only way that would lead you to that kind of humility where you could actually listen to other people, their criticisms, their corrections and everything that comes in our direction’Footnote ²² describes precisely this movement: from character – the orientation of humility – to the practice that expresses it, rather than the reverse.

The third distance follows from the second. Walker’s account implies an achievable, arrived-at state – ‘becoming’ undefended is the trajectory of his 2014 doctoral title – while the Anglican tradition and the Archdeacon data together describe a developing orientation that fluctuates under pressure and whose deepest form is not achievement but grace. The minister most genuinely undefended is not the one who has mastered relational competencies but the one most thoroughly encountered by the love of God, and most continually returned to that encounter in prayer. Undefendedness is given rather than acquired, its maintenance depending on continued willingness to receive what contemplative practice and honest pastoral encounter offer – the specifically Anglican contribution to Walker’s otherwise generative framework.

Attachment to God and the Security of Vocation

The theological account developed above proposes that the minister’s capacity for undefended relational openness rests upon a prior security whose source is the relation to God rather than any human approval. The psychology of religion provides a convergent account of the same reality. Hall and Edwards and Hall et al. demonstrate that attachment to God predicts psychological adjustment among religious individuals, through mechanisms analogous to those identified in interpersonal attachment research.Footnote ²³ The minister whose relational security is experienced as anchored in a relationship with God characterised by reliability, availability, and affirmation may be less dependent on congregational approval as a source of self-validation – and therefore better positioned for the non-defensive relational openness that the Archdeacon data identify.

This convergence is more than analogy: it points towards a functional reality the theological and psychological accounts both describe from different analytical positions. The Archdeacon who reflected that ‘awareness of self in relation including relation to God’ is among the most important aspects of effective stress managementFootnote ²⁴ is identifying a relational resource – the minister’s experienced relation to God – that stabilises the self under ministerial pressure. The minister who can access this resource is not invulnerable to stress but is less likely to respond through the defended strategies that turn pastoral encounters into self-protection.

Perhaps the most theologically arresting formulation of this dynamic in the research data comes from Archdeacon SUS, who addressed the perennial temptation of the ordained minister to a form of functional saviourism:

What SUS identifies as the ground of sustainable ministry is what the attachment literature describes as the function of secure attachment: the minister whose fundamental security is lodged in ‘another Saviour of the world’ is freed from the compulsive need to be the answer, to be needed, to be irreplaceable. Functional saviourism as a ministerial pathology is not only a psychological observation but a theological diagnosis: the minister who cannot rest in the sufficiency of another will have relational openness systematically limited by the anxiety of self-maintenance, and the formation that addresses this is not a course in stress management but a deepening of the attachment relationship itself – ongoing encounter with God in prayer that gradually displaces the compulsions of the false self-identified by NIV above.

Religious Coping and the Minister under Pressure

A further dimension of the psychological account is provided by the religious coping research of Pargament (1997) and Pargament, Koenig, and Perez (2000): religion functions as a search for significance related to the sacred, and when individuals face stressful circumstances, the religious resources they draw upon shape how the situation is appraised and managed.Footnote ²⁶ The Religious Coping Scale (RCOPE) – Pargament’s multidimensional measure of religious coping methods – distinguishes positive coping – collaborative religious coping, working in partnership with God and benevolent reappraisal, interpreting a threat as holding potential for growth – from negative coping: punitive reappraisal, experiencing difficulty as divine punishment, and spiritual discontent, feeling abandoned by or angry towards God.

The relevance to undefended ministry is direct. The minister who characteristically approaches difficulty collaboratively and benevolently – drawing on their relation to God as a resource within the conflict, criticism or pastoral demand, rather than experiencing difficulty as divine displeasure – is positioned for the relational openness the construct describes. The minister whose coping is punitive or discontented is more likely to approach difficult encounters from compounded anxiety: both the immediate pressure and an experienced fracture in the foundational relationship. The Archdeacon data contain evidence of both patterns, and the defended ministry profiles described in the Finding section of the companion article are consistent with what negative religious coping would predict.

The most direct illustration in the research data is the extended testimony of Archdeacon SUS on the formative function of honest prayer:

Read through the RCOPE, this testimony describes a collaborative, benevolent mode of religious coping in which prayer functions as a resource drawn upon within the demands of ministry rather than a retreat from them. The ‘loving, softer heart’ is not the product of improved pastoral technique but the fruit of a coping orientation in which the minister brings their pastoral experience – its difficulty, its cost, its exposure of the minister’s own defended places – into honest engagement with God in prayer. This is what the tradition, in its Anglican and specifically contemplative expression, calls contemplative prayer, examined below; the underlying coping orientation, as the discussion there argues, is not confined to that expression alone.

Two clarifications are required before that examination proceeds. First, undefendedness and religious coping are related but not identical: religious coping describes the minister’s characteristic response to specific stressful events, while undefendedness describes the stable relational posture brought to encounters with others – collaborative coping may support undefended encounter, punitive coping may undermine it, and this relationship represents a productive direction for future investigation. Second, the formative pathway towards positive religious coping is not primarily a matter of psychological technique: the Archdeacon data suggest it is the product of the same honest engagement with God that the kenotic tradition has always described as the condition of authentic priestly existence. It is to that formation that the article now turns.

Prayer, Contemplation and the Formation of a Stable Self

The account developed above converges on a single formational implication: the stability of self from which undefended relational openness proceeds is not produced by skills training but by the progressive deepening of the minister’s relation to God. In the Anglican tradition specifically, the practices through which that relation is deepened are most fully worked out in its contemplative resources – the Examen, lectio divina and disciplined silence discussed below. This article makes its strongest formational claim for these resources because they are what the tradition itself has developed and tested over centuries, and because they answer directly to what NIV, SUS, and the wider dataset describe.

It does not follow that these are the only practices capable of forming the disposition this article names. Traditions of prayer other than the specifically contemplative – Ignatian and Benedictine practice among them, but also the Church’s charismatic and evangelical traditions of sustained, attentive, unguarded prayer and the practices of other Christian communions and, in their own ways, other faiths – may reach comparable ground by different roads, provided the practice shares the features this article identifies as decisive: sustained, honest, unhurried attention to God that is not performed for any human audience and that does not shy away from what it discloses about the one praying. The claim being made is not that contemplative prayer in the narrow, technical sense is uniquely efficacious, but that some such sustained, honest practice of prayer – not supplementary to formation but constitutive of it – is not, on the account offered here, optional for ministers whose office requires the relational openness this article describes. Which particular practice best cultivates it for a given minister, formed within a given tradition of spirituality, is a further and genuinely open question this article does not attempt to settle.

The evidence for this formational claim has already been presented above. Archdeacon NIV’s account of centring prayer and the false self is a description of what the contemplative tradition has always claimed: that honest engagement with God in prayer, sustained over time, progressively dismantles the compulsions – for control, love, power and security – that the defended minister acts out in every pastoral encounter. Thomas Keating’s formulation, which NIV cites, is the contemporary expression of a pattern Thomas Merton had already named: in Thoughts in Solitude, Merton wrote of the point at which prayer ceases to be something the minister does and becomes something inhabited: ‘My whole life becomes a prayer’.Footnote ²⁸ This is not devotional achievement but formation – being slowly changed by a relationship until it permeates the quality of presence the minister brings to those they serve.

The Ignatian Examen is perhaps the most practically accessible expression of this formative vision within the wider family of practices just described. Its core discipline – daily attending to where God has been present and where the self has resisted – cultivates the interior attentiveness undefended ministry requires: noticing what is happening in one’s interior life, including anxiety and self-protective impulses, rather than acting out of them unreflectively. Lectio divina and contemplative silence operate through analogous mechanisms, creating conditions in which the minister’s habitual strategies of self-management are encountered rather than enacted.

The empirical support for this formational claim is provided by Turton and Francis, whose study of attitude towards prayer and professional burnout among Anglican parochial clergy established that clergy with a positive attitude towards prayer recorded significantly lower levels of emotional exhaustion, lower depersonalisation and higher personal accomplishment than those whose attitude towards prayer was less positive.Footnote ²⁹ This finding is consistent with the argument developed above: it is not prayer as such, but prayer as honest, attentive engagement with God – what Archdeacon SUS described as ‘honest about our praying’ – that is associated with the formation of the relational disposition this article examines. The implication for Anglican formation is direct: prayer of this kind is a primary formative discipline through which the minister’s relational identity is gradually constituted, and its frequent relegation to a private matter of individual devotional taste requires theological challenge.

Pastoral Supervision as Ministerial Formation

If the practice of honest prayer described in the preceding sub-section is the primary site in which the minister’s relational identity is shaped in relation to God, pastoral supervision is the primary institutional site in which that formation is continued, supported and examined in relation to the specific encounters of ministerial life. The Archdeacon data express this with notable consistency. Archdeacon SUS articulated what many Archdeacons implied:

KOL was equally direct in her recommendation to clergy struggling with the emotional demands of ministry:

The convergence of these testimonies – from Archdeacons who have observed both supervised and unsupervised ministry across their Archdeaconries – constitutes a practitioner case for supervision grounded in exactly the kind of evidence institutional decision-making should weigh.

The theological account of what pastoral supervision does is provided by LaMothe, whose argument for the necessity of supervision identifies the supervisory relationship as creating conditions no other institutional provision can create.Footnote ³² The minister who cannot acknowledge failure, vulnerability or the cost of pastoral encounter to any colleague within the institution may acknowledge it to a supervisor whose accountability to the minister’s formation, rather than to their institution, is primary. LaMothe further proposes that the supervisor does not merely provide a reflective space: the supervisor embodies the qualities – radical courage, humility, compassion and hope – that the minister is being formed to express.Footnote ³³ The supervisory encounter is therefore itself a formation in undefended presence, not merely a space from which that presence is discussed.

This theological register for pastoral supervision – a formational encounter mirroring and extending the kenotic account developed above – has a direct implication for the Church of England’s current provision, which remains in most dioceses a variable offering: available to some clergy through episcopal or diocesan initiative but not systematically provided across ordained ministry. This variability is not merely an institutional inefficiency but a theological deficit. The minister not provided with a sustained, confidential, skilled supervisory relationship across their ministry is left to form undefended relational openness largely by chance, through unsupported encounter with the pastoral demands ministry itself generates.

Ministerial Identity Formation: IME, CMD and the Relational Self

The two preceding sub-sections identified the primary formational practices – honest prayer and pastoral supervision – through which the relational identity undefended ministry requires is formed and sustained. This sub-section examines what this implies for Anglican initial theological education and continuing ministerial development, and what specific adjustments to existing frameworks the theological account requires.

Anglican IME attends to theology, liturgy, pastoral skills and mission – all necessary, but none of which by itself forms the relational self from which these capacities are exercised. This is not to suggest that Anglican formation has been indifferent to questions of character and inner life. The Church of England’s Formation Framework for IME Phase 2 speaks of ‘qualities to be inhabited’ rather than criteria to be met and asks curates to evidence seven of them – Love for God, Call to Ministry, Love for People, Wisdom, Fruitfulness, Potential and Trustworthiness – each explored across four domains of relationship: Christ, Church, World and Self.Footnote ³⁴ The Framework already looks for much that this article commends. In the domain of Self, it expects the curate to be prayerful, to sustain a private prayer life with the support of others and to be committed to the Daily Office or other forms of public daily prayer, while inviting engagement with a range of approaches to prayer across the Anglican tradition and the wider church; that is a formulation which treats prayer as necessary and leaves its form open, as this article does. It looks, too, for self-awareness, for the capacity to live with vulnerability and for the ability to accept fair criticism with humility. The argument of this section is therefore not that formation has ignored the inner life, but that a framework which names these qualities, and the kinds of evidence that might show them, describes its own curriculum grid as ‘permissive and not determinative’, leaving open how they are to be formed. The specific, sustained, supervised attention to prayer and to defended relational patterns that this article describes may be read as one answer to that question, offered in continuity with the Framework rather than against it.

The minister with excellent pastoral technique but a fundamentally defended relational identity will exercise those techniques in the service of self-protection rather than self-giving; empathy will shade towards identification rather than accompaniment, authority towards dominance rather than servanthood. The most important feature of ministerial formation is not the content taught but the character of the person mediating it. Archdeacon HOD identified the formation agenda as the most significant unresolved challenge: ‘how valuable is this research… if we could come up with, not a magic bullet, but an approach that worked with emotional intelligence as an intervention’.Footnote ³⁵ The approach proposed here is not a discrete intervention but a reorientation of the formation culture itself.

Three specific adjustments to existing Anglican formation frameworks follow from the theological account developed in this article. The first is the integration of sustained, honest prayer practice – understood broadly, in the terms set out above, rather than as the prescription of any single tradition’s technique for every ordinand – into IME and CMD as a constitutive element of formation rather than a supplementary spiritual offering. This means designated time and skilled facilitation for practices drawn from across the breadth of Anglican spirituality: the Examen, lectio divina, contemplative silence and the honest self-examination of spiritual direction, alongside the charismatic and evangelical traditions of sustained prayerful attentiveness in which many ordinands are already formed. It means treating the formation of the minister’s prayer life not as a private matter for individual discretion but as a vocational competency as fundamental as liturgical knowledge or pastoral skill. And it means providing formation in how one prays under pressure – whether the minister’s characteristic coping in difficulty is collaborative and benevolent or punitive and discontented – as a formation priority that existing CMD programmes rarely address.

The second adjustment is the deliberate formation of peer communities of honest mutual engagement across the curacy and early incumbency. The defended minister is formed in part by an ecclesial culture that rewards the performance of competence and penalises the acknowledgement of failure or need. The formation of undefendedness requires communities in which honest mutual self-disclosure is modelled and sustained – where the ordinand or curate learns, through repeated encounter with colleagues who neither perform invulnerability nor require it, what relational openness concretely looks and feels like. This is formation through encounter rather than instruction and cannot be delivered by curriculum alone.

The third adjustment – systematic provision of pastoral supervision from the earliest stages of ordained ministry – follows directly from the preceding sub-section. The minister whose supervised engagement with their own defended responses begins in the curacy and continues across every subsequent phase is formed differently from one for whom supervision is an occasional resource sought only in crisis: the formation of relational identity is a work of years, not episodes, requiring provision as continuous as the ministerial life it accompanies.

The formation of undefended ministry is not, ultimately, a programme. It is a culture – a sustained institutional disposition to take the inner life of the ordained minister as seriously as their external competencies and to recognize that the minister who can remain genuinely open to those they serve is the fruit not of better training but of deeper formation. The theological account of what that formation is forming – the kenotic, relationally constituted selfhood of the ordained minister – is the Anglican tradition’s most enduring and most practically consequential account of what ordained ministry demands.