As this review is written, the season of ordinations is drawing on apace. Ordinands are set soon to emerge in shiny clerical collars to embark on diaconal ministry, while last year’s starters are contemplating what for many is the even more significant step of taking priest’s orders. What – their friends, supporters and spiritual directors, not to mention the Church in which they are to minister, may be asking – might they most be in need of at this moment of setting out? What encouragement, what warnings, what inspiration, what correction of expectations and aspirations? Is their need more to be suitably daunted by the grandness of the tradition into which they are entering, or to be flattered that this splendour is their inheritance? Do they need to be reassured that all can be well, or forewarned against all that presumptuousness, anxiety, unconfidence, self-consciousness and the like that experience has shown could so easily come to mar what they may (unfortunately) learn to call ‘their’ ministry?

This book may be the answer, partaking as it does (in some degree, at least) of all of these voices. Whilst carefully not adding to the bloated sum of manuals on ministry that exist, David Hoyle presents a valuable and eclectic review of much of the wisdom to be found within this genre, from the Didache to recent and contemporary authorities such as Michael Ramsey and Robin Greenwood. His commentary is informed by humane and honest reflection on his own experience as college chaplain, parish priest, diocesan officer and (though I am not sure that he would appreciate the soubriquet) senior leader in the Church.

Hoyle makes no secret of his scepticism about some of the contemporary obsessions that bedevil the Church and the priorities for ministerial formation and assessment that emerge from them – managerialism, results and outcomes orientation, leadership and the like – but this is not a polemical book (though you can see the author struggling with the temptation at times) and it would be a tragedy if it were written off as no more than a predictable contribution from one side of what has already become a somewhat tired and sterile debate (I am not sure that the blurb is entirely helpful in this respect). In fact it is a central theme of Hoyle’s case that ministerial priesthood should be rethought and reshaped as circumstances and cultures change. His lament is that the frame of reference, the wells of wisdom, on which much current thinking about ministry draws is so frighteningly impoverished. As he puts it: ‘we have forgotten where we are supposed to go for advice’. What he offers is no less than a heroic effort to make good this disturbing lapse of memory.

Ministry is an inheritance, not a possession, and what Hoyle explores is living tradition, rather than static deposit. There are rich and striking juxtapositions across ages and cultures – a series, as it were, of virtual High Table conversations in which John Chrysostom and H.P. Liddon, for instance, or Richard Baxter and Gregory Nazianzus, can make common cause. Hoyle himself moves among his luminaries with ease and without undue awe (Clement of Alexandria is described as ‘lofty’, Jeremy Taylor as ‘grumpy’ and Ignatius of Antioch as ‘peremptory and pompous’, adjectives not uncommonly attached to bishops, as it happens). Importantly for our times and the debate about current priorities, the context for creative thinking about ministry has often been one of sharp change or even crisis: the Didache addressing the issues of authority as the nature of ministry changed with the passing of the apostolic age, Ambrose coming to terms with changed political reality after Constantine, or (Hoyle’s particular heroes) Herbert and Baxter along with Joseph Hall making sense of ministry on the eve of the proscription of their Church.

At its heart, this book is a plea to think big, most obviously in terms of vocation and formation that is corporate rather than personal (‘We look for heroes when we should be looking for each other’), humble rather than anxious (‘The real challenge … is not how you will deploy your gifts, but how you will contend with your weaknesses’) and – above all – correctly orientated (‘It is the task of the ordained ministry not to talk about itself, but about Christ’). Our thinking about ministry is diminished when it is reduced to anxiously obsessing about ‘doing’ or ‘being’, when faithfulness is a matter of gloriously ‘becoming’ by grace the Church that in the intention and action of God we are. That this is simultaneously both rewarding and demanding, delightful and terrifying, fearful and fun is, surely, the most important insight we can hope to pray both for this year’s new ordinands, and for all God’s faithful people, baptized into ministry.