Oxford Pastorate

The Aims and Character of the Pastorate’s Ministry

 

The evangelical Anglican clergy and laity who set up the Pastorate were clear that the new entity should ‘bear the distinctive stamp of their own tradition: it was to be, as its first appeal for funds made clear, ‘AN EVANGELICAL PASTORATE FOR UNIVERSITY MEN AT OXFORD’.[1] 

If, at first, the aims of the Pastorate were defensive: ‘preventing undergraduates from evangelical homes from drifting away from the tradition’, the Pastorate soon turned towards actively witnessing to the good news of Jesus Christ.  It saw itself ‘not as a university pastorate for evangelicals but as an evangelical pastorate for the university’.[2]  Indeed, the primary aim of the Pastorate, as stated in its Trust Deed, is ‘promoting true and lively faith in Christ amongst members of the University of Oxford’. 

As will be discussed in more detail below, the Pastorate pursued this aim primarily through ‘personal influence’ which was supplemented through the organization of open meetings, lecture series and mission events.  For example, the Pastorate was the driving force behind the initiation of The Socratic Club, of which C.S. Lewis was both president and chief speaker, which became the most vibrant forum for religious debate in the history of twentieth-century Oxford.  The Pastorate and its appointed chaplains were closely involved in the organisation and operation of the triennial University Missions alongside the college chaplains and the clergy of the University Church.  Among the largest of these were those addressed by William Temple in 1930, where attendance never fell below 1400, and the first to follow the Second World War when Bishop Stephen Neill, first brought to Oxford by the Pastorate in 1933,[3] spoke in the Sheldonian Theatre addressing ‘enormous audiences night after night’.[4]

However, although its mission and character were proudly evangelical ‘the Pastorate diverged from the stereotypes associated with evangelicalism’:

Far from being negative, exclusive and oppositional, it represented and evangelicalism which, while definite about its own position, was positive, inclusive and constructive in its emphasis [...] the combination of a firmly held evangelicalism with a broadly non-partisan attitude seems to have become a Pastorate tradition.[5]

Interestingly, this positive and inclusive attitude was, perhaps, most clearly to be seen in the Pastorate’s willingness to draw Christians from many different traditions into their missionary activity.  It appears that the Pastorate considered a passion to communicate the good news of Jesus Christ as good a test of orthodoxy as any.

Perhaps the most spectacular example of the Pastorate’s ecumenical tendencies was the mission to Bournemouth in 1933.  Led by Bryan Green and organized locally by Max Warren, the mission team comprised 12 clergy, including Miles Sargeant of Pusey House, two Mirfield Fathers and around 140 undergraduates of widely differing Anglican traditions all cooperating on the basis of ‘an intense devotion to Jesus Christ’.

The emphasis on mission, openness to those of other Christian traditions, and desire to work in partnership with all those who share an intense devotion to Jesus Christ, continue to characterise the Pastorate into the present day.