Who Is Sent My Way

A middle-aged professional gentleman sits in my living room talking to me about his spiritual journey and his sense of being called to be ordained. I'm one of the local vocations advisors, my role being to meet with people who feel a call to some kind of 'authorised ministry' in the Church and to help them work out what that might be, if they aren't already sure. Most of the ones who come my way are from an evangelical background, some from a non-Anglican one and who have been directed to this or that evangelical Anglican church to be gently inducted into the ways of the Church of England. This man, however, is very much an Anglo-Catholic, which is unusual. He has a devotion to a rather obscure European shrine of the Virgin Mary, rather than Walsingham like everyone else, which is also unusual; his experience of Anglicanism runs the whole gamut from All Saints Margaret Street to St Mary's Bourne Street (a bit unfair but you know what I mean). He has by his own admission a somewhat rambling style of discussing any particular topic - our discussions are punctuated by statements such as 'how did we get there?' and 'what was the question?' - which is rather fun. I listen to him and hear curious echoes of other people I've known over the years, including me. 

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Later in the day Evening Prayer is interrupted by a young man who comes through the darkness of the church to tell me he's decided to become a Christian as a result of going to a Traveller-oriented church meeting some miles away. It's not convenient for him to get there regularly, so he asks what time our services are. I listen to him and conclude that plunging him straight into the deep waters of a Swanvale Halt Sung Eucharist is probably not what he needs at this stage, so I say I will make enquiries locally and get back to him.

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I head off for an evening at the Air Cadets to go through the enrolment promise with nine new recruits aged 12 to 14 or so. We are wedged into a tiny classroom as I go through the things they will have to say. They're brilliant, actually, and I have a great time, quite apart from what they may think of it all. When I mention that when Mr Trump becomes President of the US he will also have to make public promises, they all groan and cough. It takes me a while to twig that the most articulate of them, disguised in short hair and identikit combats, is a girl. It's rather exciting to have a group of teenagers listening to my every word, no matter how inadequate and bluffing those words sometimes are, and I must make sure it doesn't get too exciting. They are not my cadre of acolytes!