This is the blog post that I set out to write yesterday – but I ended up following a different path!

Brian McLaren has written a book, Naked Spirituality, which summarises/simplifies a lot of the work on Stages of Faith.  Summaries of McLaren’s work can be found here and here (be patient – the first few slides are pictures, but the words come).

Richard Rohr has written and blogged about the two halves of life.

I would roughly map these to Simplicity/Complexity and Harmony in the McLaren model.  Rohr thinks that there needs to be some kind of crisis to move between the two, and I would map that to Perplexity.

So, which stage do we wish our clergy to be in?  The first of the McLaren links above suggests that if we wish to grow in our faith we require leaders who are further along the path, but also that we can find that threatening.

Both models suggest that people are at their most “productive” in Complexity/First half of life.

There appears to be a dilemma here.  If we wish our clergy to “make things happen”, which seems to be the current vogue, then we need them to be in the first half of life.  If we wish them to lead us through the stages of faith then we need them to be in Harmony (it is really difficult leading a church if you are in Perplexity!).

So, what kind of clergy do we want?