Are all pioneers young, male and cool?
Are the stereotypes true?
Artwork by Sophie Killingley of Perish & Fade
At a training event for the vocations team of a particular diocese last year a number of the vocations team said they realised they’d been guilty of unconscious – or even conscious – bias in respect of people with a pioneer gift.
by Rev Tina Hodgett
A game betrayed some of these stereotypes: what kind of church they came from, how they dressed, what their personality was like. Often we think of pioneers as men who don’t dress at M&S, have a tattoo or two, are into indie music.
The Playfully Serious report on Messy Church by the Church Army in 2017-2018 revealed that the vast majority of leaders of Messy Churches were women, unpaid, and not licensed in any way. In other words, Messy Churches are run by a movement of female lay leaders.
This has also been my experience in 10 years of supporting pioneering across the south of England. I could share a litany of names of women who were inspired by needs in their community, noticing exclusion, poverty, hunger, loneliness, injustice, lack of community cohesion, and did something about it.
Most of them would strike you as ordinary but they have a skill set from family or professional life that makes them good connectors, good at pastoral care, good at organising, good at dispersing leadership around a group, good at hospitality, good at juggling tasks and hats. Many are now ordained as they’ve been able to grow a community to a point where the members wanted to be baptised, or wanted their children to be baptised, or wanted to take holy communion from the person who had become their ‘vicar’.
Of course, some pioneers are young, male and cool (whatever that is!). But look to the older women. They are founding cafes, running social prescribing events, leading environmental change, setting up foodbanks, starting toddler groups and doing many other things… and keeping an eye to the moment when a faith community can be called into visibility and practice by the Holy Spirit.
If you think you might be called to be a pioneer or want to empower the gift of pioneering within your church join the next Pioneering Parishes First Steps course.
