LINING UP UNDER HOLY ORDERS

High camp, low church, and a significantly different approach to croquet... In the rarefied, cloistered world of Britain's theological colleges, a quiet struggle for the soul of tomorrow's Church of England priests is being played out. Will the old-style holy gentlemen beat the puritan players?

ON AN EARLY summer afternoon in Cambridge the heat was bright and viscous like fresh pine resin, and the students on the croquet lawn at Westcott House moved slowly, almost as if the air had turned to amber and fossilised them in the half-death of a theological education. Westcott is the more old-fashioned of the two Anglican theological colleges in Cambridge. It still plays croquet by the real, unforgiving rules. At Ridley Hall, the evangelical college which is its colleague and rival, they play croquet more as a sort of crazy golf: as soon as any player is through a hoop, all the players start on the next one. The Westcott rules are better training for ecclesiastical politics. Yet Ridley is more likely to supply the next generation to run the Church of England.

Westcott, located in the heart of Cambridge, still has the sense of timeless calm which you would associate with a proper college. Here is green shade within the quadrangle, in contrast to the bare baked lawns of Ridley Hall; and here is the sort of assured elitism which allows Michael Roberts, the principal of Westcott, to say in his cool spacious room: "Being a parish priest is an extraordinarily demanding thing just because of all the projections placed upon you: just a whole lot of shit."

As principal of one of the most important of only 12 colleges authorised to turn out the Anglican clergy of the future, Roberts is one of the more influential figures in the national church. To have been principal of a theological college has been an unofficial qualification for an archbishop for decades now; and even those principals who, like Roberts, are too old to become archbishops are hugely influential, because their pupils will be running the Church in 20 or 30 years' time. So we may expect some future archbishop, perhaps, to use in public the sort of language that Roberts (and every other priest I know) will use in private when the occasion seems to warrant it.

The difficulties of the job are no doubt real enough. But what struck me most forcibly, talking to the students and principals at Westcott and Ridley a couple of weeks before the summer ordinations started, was that these difficulties were increased for students by the fact that no one seemed to have a clear idea of what their job would actually be or how they would be trained for it. The "parish priest" is disappearing from the modern Church of England as it turns from an institution into an organisation. He is to be replaced by team vicars, priests in charge, and every other sort of manageable clergyman. Bishops become more like employers: "Jesus was a management expert", the Archbishop of Canterbury said once. Priests are even joining Trade Unions.

Ordinands were once young, male and accustomed to the monastic disciplines of minor public schools. Now their average age is 35; many are women and most have done responsible jobs in the outside world. Perhaps the heart of the problem is the divide between the modern and the literal sense of "vocational". Vocational training nowadays means training in sub-academic skills. But the students at Westcott and Ridley have had a vocation in the traditional sense. They have heard a call, and should be learning to respond to it.

Students at both colleges start by unlearning much of what they have learnt before. "This place is completely de-skilling" said one Ridley Hall student. "The average age of entrants is 35; and once here they have nothing to do but to produce essays occasionally: 3,000 words in four months' time, that sort of thing." I laughed rather too hard at this. "Some people find it very worrying that all the sort of decision and hustle they were used to has gone away." He looked like the former army officer he was: forceful, a little bald; blue-eyed and entering middle age with the heavy lope of a rugby player. We were talking at the end of a communal supper, eaten off plates on knees and chair-arms in the sitting-room: baked potatoes stuffed with curryish mince and followed by an apple. It would have been a startlingly awful meal for any students, let alone for the almost middle-aged crowd in the room. But there must be a temptation to overplay the studentness when you return to college .

So what, I wanted to know, was the job for which he was being equipped? How would he know whether he was succeeding or failing? These were questions he could not answer, at least not so that I could understand. When I asked the question, he was under the impression that I was myself a candidate for ordination, up for interview. He launched at once into a flood of evangelical jargon so that his misapprehension was compounded by my incomprehension. When I explained who I really was, he told me that he did not think success or failure were proper terms in which to describe ministry.

So the mystery remains. In their two or three-year courses, the students may study subjects that range from elementary biblical Hebrew to feminist perspectives on biblical interpretation. They can spend seven days in prison, 10 days at a young offenders' institution, or a day at the Cambridge Evening News. They can be taught victim support or work as nursing auxiliaries for a week, and write a report reflecting theologically on their experiences (but only 1,500 words). But what is it all for? What does the well-trained ordinand know or feel? How does he or she differ from a badly-trained one?

No one I spoke to could ever quite explain this. But one former Westcott student had no doubt. "Not at all" would be her answer. For obvious reasons, she wished to remain anonymous: "The colleges are not actually preparing people for ministry, and I don't think they quite know what they are doing, in that you can get your theological training much better from the university down the road, and you can get your pastoral training from people who are doing the job. Your curacy is really your pastoral training. You have to learn on the job.

"The other problem is that the theological colleges have started to train people who are not at the university. So they have to provide some kind of academic input, so of course you get a conflict between those who are doing the real stuff and those who are doing the Noddy course."

SUCH COMPLAINTS are peculiarly modern ones; yet even in the old days, when young men were spiritually prepared in an almost monastic atmosphere, there were equally severe problems, since the traditional colleges turned out to be an extraordinarily bad way to prepare priests for the stresses of being a human being.

In the early Sixties, the principal of Ripon College, Cuddes-don, was Robert Runcie, later Archbishop of Canterbury. Runcie is a man of immense personal kindness as well as charm, and a supporter of women's ordination; yet the regime he ran could have been guaranteed to break up families. At Cuddesdon in the early Sixties, students' wives were kept at a greater distance than their dogs. Women were only allowed in the college once a week, for tea on Saturday, and all students, whether married or not, were expected to attend services at seven each morning and 10 at night. Preparing for ministry was something which men did together, and from which women were, at best, a distraction.

Of course, in some colleges, preparing for ministry was not the only thing men did together. The first thing that I saw in the gatehouse at Westcott was a postcard from the Rt Rev Derek Rawcliffe, an elderly retired bishop who "came out" on television earlier this spring, thanking the students and faculty of the college for their support. Homosexuality is the last great shibboleth in the Church of England: the cause that divides the liberals from everyone else, and which splits theological colleges from each other. In some colleges, notably the Anglo-Catholic St Stephen's House in Oxford (which refused to allow me in to watch them), camp has, at times, been the defining characteristic of the place. The early novels of AN Wilson, in which screamingly camp ordinands get up to pranks such as summoning the devil, are based on his experiences at a theological college; and gay friends assure me that they are hardly exaggerated at all. At St Stephen's, during one period, all the ordinands were known by girls' names. The present Bishop of London, Dr David Hope, made his reputation cleaning up St Stephen's in the Seventies. For his pains, he acquired the nickname Ena the Cruel.

Westcott has never been Gomorrah on the Cam. But it is sympathetic to gays, in a way that Ridley Hall could never be. The principal expresses this in exactly the sort of contorted jargon which makes outsiders wonder whether the Church of England is capable of clear thought even when it wants to be. "That's exactly where the sort of liberal thing bites," he said. "It raises such high issues about the nature of revelation, and about what is natural."

But there was nothing rancorous or populist about these disagreements. We were, after all, in Cambridge. Westcott, even more than Ridley, seemed an oasis of elitist calm and distance from the messy world outside. That may be the most valuable thing a theological education can provide.

Yet the students I talked to were eager to leave. Rosie Deedes - a name no novelist would dare attach to a girl with such a pink-cheeked grin - had been working as a speech and language therapist in Newham, in the East End of London. "I want to get back to 'real life'," she said, marking the quotes in the air with her fingers. We sat with three other students on a shaded bench beside the croquet lawn; even the bumblebees seemed quiescent, as if slain in the spirit by the heat. The students, all in their late twenties, all in shorts, talked unselfconsciously

"You're taken away here from a lot of the pressures that exist outside. You actually get a chance to think about who you are and how who you are fits in with what a priest is. It is a radical change.

"In the bumph about this place that you get before you arrive, you are told that this is part of your spiritual journey, and I like that idea of journeying rather than a skills-based thing. But it is rather frustrating in that we're not being taught anything about skills."

I had a sense that at Ridley, the students were training to be part of an embattled minority of self-conscious Christians, whereas at Westcott they were training to be part of a different embattled minority, perhaps that of the educated. "One of my real concerns is that people don't confuse role with person," says Roberts. "Westcott was poked fun at for producing holy gentlemen; but there is a calling to be a decent human being first, and the role of the priest follows if there is a calling, a specific vocation to that."

The difficulties of the job are partly spiritual but mostly social, or managerial. To be any sort of Christian is difficult enough in this country; but to be a representative of the established church some time after establishment has ceased to mean anything is doubly difficult.

The confusions of the Church of England are familiar. They do not derive from lack of belief, but rather from the failure of passionate, incompatible belief systems to engage with each other. Westcott House and Ridley Hall are now part of federation of colleges in Cambridge, alongside four other institutions training Catholics, Methodists, Baptists and almost every other shade of theological opinion. But the real ecumenism, they joke, is between Westcott and Ridley. The federation arose from economic pressures (three small independent theological colleges are closing or will soon close; Ridley has only 52 students, and Westcott 48), but it is justified religiously, too. "We actually think we are modelling something for the Church," says Graham Cray, principal of Ridley Hall. "My intention is that Ridley students emerge from their encounters with the other federation colleges much clearer why they believe what they do.

"I say to them: 'You will be wondering why a very liberal Joe Soap from Westcott can stand before the same bishop as you do and make the same vows as you do, and mean something quite different - but Joe Soap will be your friend. And you won't be able to caricature his views.' "

Cray himself makes an unlikely-looking head for a theological college. With his lined face, wispy beard and straggly hair he looks almost as if he should be folded around a bottle in a pedestrian underpass. I first met him years ago, when we fell into conversation about exorcism. The first thing to strike me was how undramatically he told wild and startling stories. His flock might froth at the mouth and scream all night, but he talked about it with less passion than if he had been discussing hymnody.

He was then Vicar of St Michael-le-Belfrey, York, one of the most noted and successful charismatic churches in the country. He started as curate there to David Watson, a huge celebrity in the charismatic movement, who introduced to Britain a confident expectation of healing miracles. Watson died of liver cancer at the age of 44, and his failure to be healed became a defining and chastening experience for the charismatic movement in this country.

Cray ran St Michael-le-Belfrey for 10 years after that, and he now stands more or less in the mainstream of the evangelical current that seems to be taking over the Church of England: he believes in miracles and women priests; but not in practising homosexuals or Tory governments. He also has a gigantic collection of rock records, going back nearly 30 years. The spill-over comes down from his living quarters to his study, where the packed works of theology and sociology along the walls share space with The Concert for Bangladesh and other tokens of lost eras. At the age of 46 he is clearly marked out as a coming man in the Church of England. And he is training priests who will change it further.

" 'Subversive' is not the word I would choose for what I do, but it is accurate," he said. "I know the Daily Mail Church of England exists, with the old maids cycling to Holy Communion down country lanes, but there is a sense in which it exists only in the imagination; and where it does actually exist it is quite a small proportion of the C of E practising at the moment."

The Church for which Graham Cray is training his ordinands is in no important sense of the word established. Its engagement with the outside world is that of a missionary, trying to understand the things around, so that they can be converted. That, I think, is why he has his record collection. It is not just art. It tells him about an unfamiliar world outside - whereas 50 years ago, a man in his position would have collected music to reassure him that civilisation was for ever.

Even establishment in the looser sense of a collection of known doctrines that everyone can ignore has vanished, he says. "That has gone - believing without belonging. There is no connection between the belief in God that the majority tend to have and going to any sort of church. We are a church which gets 3 per cent of the population in its pews and calls itself the national church, in a country where probably 75 per cent of the people at large could not tell you what the core doctrines of Christianity are as Christians have expressed them."

Before we talked, he had lectured his final year students on how to change their parishes once they arrived. He spoke for two hours and there were 27 books on the reading list he handed out. He was fluent, and concerned to be understood. You would not hear many sermons so good. But he also used enough charts and diagrams to confuse a much larger audience. He talked of Myers-Briggs personality types, even management studies: "No one told me at theological college that I would end up as the man with whom the buck stops in a large voluntary organisation."

Once he got through the jargon on the whiteboard, he started making cogent human sense.

"Your church has a personality," he told them. "It has an ethos as a distinctive community of people which has been formed by all sorts of different things. Every congregation has a story, and if you don't understand the story you will not only not effect change, you may try and bring about inappropriate change.

"There is a problem with every parish," he said. "They wanted the archangel Gabriel, but they got you." What struck me most, listening to him talk, was how much it was taken for granted that the parishes to which they came would need "change when it is required by scripture, and required by the prompting of God".

"If change is needed, a little early is a good thing. Too much early is disastrous. I can't tell you where the line is."

The students listened with an attention and admiration quite startling in an audience so old. But Ridley Hall is not a place for idle flippancy. In the chapel are commemorated the clean-cut missionary martyrs of the 19th century and the young men and the students today, however much their exposed legs and occasional bad language might shock their forebears, have the same off-putting seriousness. They surrounded me with an impenetrably distant attentiveness, like fish examining a drowned sailor.

One afternoon there was a lecture on the development of the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Church of England from 1534 to the present. Though voluntary, it drew an audience of about 30. The lecturer was learned, sincere, and heard respectfully, but he read his script as if he would rather be writing, and the students listened as if they had rather be reading.

His jokes were small, precise illuminations, rather like nightlights: he said that the 39 Articles of the Church of England are not so much the laws of cricket as the boundaries within which many different players can play in many different styles. These boundaries, he said, have grown and shrunk over the ages in response to the age and preferences of the players, but the Eng-lish do have an instinct for when they are too large or too small.

This was, apparently, an explanation that he had used to a group of Lutheran scholars at a conference in Germany. It must have made a great deal plain to them about the English approach to theology. Beside him, the bearded vice-principal's head wobbled with intermittent wakefulness. But the students were dauntingly awake.

Outside the lecture hall, the next generation of ordinands waited for interviews in the resinous heat. They were still swathed in suiting, tightened up with ties. But their wives, more coolly dressed, already wore permanent smiles and had a sheen on their eyes like the bloom on grapes, as if they had been vicars' wives for ages. !