What I Learned

I've just come back from the New Vicars Course, or 'consultation' as they are pleased to call it. About ten of us from the southern dioceses (surprising there weren't more, really) gathered at a Roman Catholic abbey and discussed paperwork, conflict management, attitudes to change, and a variety of fascinating matters. The trouble with all this is that, while people are the same the Church over, context is everything and every parish's context is different. 'Understanding Change' is an interesting term. My problem is not some amorphous thing called 'Change', as everything changes all the time, even when it doesn't look like it is. It's changes, the real, actual things you may have to face and do, that are more difficult. Moves away from the concrete and the real to the theoretical are, I think, usually a sign of something wrong intellectually.

Whatever the event ended up being called, it didn't really tell me anything earth-shattering I didn't know, though it provided a good deal of food for thought. Chief among my thoughts, which I think I probably voiced a bit too often, was the growing realisation that I was in a rather different position from all my brother and sister clergy. Firstly they were almost all struggling to move sluggish congregations from hidebound services - Prayer Book Mattins being the chief culprit (I know what the Heresiarch will say, but people simply don't come to Prayer Book Mattins, and nor would you), whereas I'm trying to take things backward if anything at all. Secondly, and far more importantly, I realised that Swanvale Halt is simply rather an excellent parish.

Notwithstanding my grouses when I started, I eventually realised that not one member of the church has criticised any other member of the church to me. There are two good and supportive wardens, an efficient administrator - not enough money or people, but that's my problem as much as anyone else's. My colleagues complained of curates they'd inherited undermining them, being denounced by their own church councils, woefully inadequate staff they can't do anything about ... 'I almost lost it over Christmas', said one young female vicar in her mid-thirties. 'My administrator isn't very good, but the PCCs want to bully her out, and if I let them, they'll be after me next'. My old vicar at the last church I worshipped used to wonder 'how people can come to church and say the same things week after week and it doesn't make the blindest bit of difference to them'. Apparently, it actually has affected my lot, thank God.