Up in the Rafters

The most striking event in the parish this week has been the opening of a new fast-food outlet on the row of businesses which already has two, and the main happening in the life of the church has been an internal glazing area being cleaned for the first time in about twenty years so it no longer presents a canvas of spattered swift guano, but these are fairly pedestrian occurrences. So my mind turns to times past. The alma mater St Stephen's House has just reorganised the Founder's Chapel, the little worship space that crouches beneath the roof of the old building opening off Oxford's Marston Street that was the original home of the Society of St John the Evangelist, and very handsome it is too to judge by this photo on the College's LiberFaciorum page. That's not Comper Pink, but most agreeable nevertheless, a nice contrast with the black.

When I was there it didn't have the little wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, nor was it a space where people spent a great deal of time. We students were discouraged from holding any events there at all, allegedly because it would have been a death-trap in the event of a fire, but somehow that didn't appear to prevent Compline happening there once a week. It was dusty, alternately freezing or suffocating hot according to the season, and occasionally worse, as during the several days when it was invaded by the College's resident colony of pigeons who made it part of their festering empire until it was recaptured.

There were people who found the Founder's Chapel spooky. We were once treated to the local diocesan exorcist recounting some of his stories, and he referred to the unseen denizens of the Marston Street building, though he wasn't at the House to talk to us about that at all. He was quite a peculiar character, the most uncanny thing about him being the mysterious way his toupée moved around his head. He and colleagues had, he told us, been called in to clear out the whole place spiritually, but by the time they got to the Founder's Chapel there was one presence they decided to leave alone 'as it had more of a right to be there than anyone living'. We all knew who that meant. 

So there were certain physical challenges to spending time in the Founder's Chapel (not least getting up the steep stairs to the very pointy pinnacle of the building) but I never felt that Fr Benson or anyone else posed any kind of threat to my spiritual wellbeing. Instead the Chapel was my retreat of final resort when I was too distressed or disillusioned to go anywhere else. I wouldn't go to the House Chapel: that was where we repaired morning and evening for the Office and, like all my fellow ordinands, I even had my own allocated seat. The House Chapel was too much official Staggers for it to be anywhere I wanted to go at the worst of times. St John's Iffley Road, the old monastic church we looked after and which was open to the public for services, was a vast, empty space that I never had any sympathy with. Instead I would ascend those steps to the slight dereliction of the Founder's Chapel and try to pray there, if praying was allowed to mean throwing my anger in front of God and asking him to do something with it. If I felt he was there at all. Like my old schools, I don't have any great desire to revisit Staggers itself: I was 'clapped out' at the end of my time there, went out the door, and that was it. But the Founder's Chapel is, perhaps, one place I would be happy to be teleported back to. 

Power to the Laypeople

We weren’t sure whether Paula’s licence as Pastoral Assistant had expired, and it took ages before I was able to find someone at Church House who could tell me. Pastoral Assistant, it turned out, was no longer a licenced role: we should have had a letter from Bishop Jo about it at the end of 2019. Neither I nor any of the three people in the parish with PA licences could remember getting a letter from Bishop Jo, but fair enough. PAs were now PAs as long as they and their incumbent wanted them to be.

But that wasn’t, it seems, a one-off: the Diocese is completely changing the ‘Lay Training Pathway’, as I was told in a meeting on Tuesday. Once upon a time, Pastoral Assistants, Occasional Preachers and Worship Leaders were all trained centrally, on their own specific courses, and either ‘locally recognised’, ‘centrally authorised’ or ‘episcopally licenced’; now the intention is simply to let parishes get on with it in all these three areas and if people want to have any training they can take part in the relevant modules of the Local Ministry Programme, the training schedule for priests and deacons. When Sylv, the most active of our PAs within the church, did her lengthy and demanding course, she came out of it with an obvious sense of confidence and of being equipped for what she wanted to do, so it was worthwhile in her case, but the diocese maintains a lot of potential PAs are put off by the training and what they want to do is ‘empower the laity’. Mind you, they also want to avoid the situation where a church has half-a-dozen Occasional Preachers all stabbing their diocesan paper of authorisation with a forefinger and demanding their full entitlement of five sermons a year or whatever. I was baffled by the distinction between the new ‘Lay Pastoral Visitors’ and the old ‘Pastoral Assistants’ who have ‘done more training’, when you would that thought that the training was tailored to the role rather than determining what role you have. Oh well. A liturgical church is less likely to need ‘worship leaders’, and as for Occasional Preachers I allowed local teacher Tim to occupy the pulpit (if we had a pulpit) without a demur as I was sure he wouldn’t preach heresy or upset people too much. I’ve always thought I could do what I wanted in that respect anyway.

I had to explain that I was keeping myself muted because there was off-screen noise at my end, but I didn’t explain the noise in question was an online seminar on another screen with Professor Ronald Hutton talking about the contribution of occultists Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente to modern paganism. I think I managed to get the gist of both, but it was a close-run thing, I can tell you. 

Engagement

After the safeguarding course was over yesterday, I felt compelled to compliment the Diocesan Safeguarding Officer, especially as she'd been battling a cold all the way through the morning. I said I thought the courses were really very engaging and clear now, and how appreciated this was.

'Good,' she said, 'because I remember you were at one course at the cathedral a few years ago and slept through most of it. I kept raising my voice to try and wake you up.'

Much Study is a Weariness of the Flesh

... so it was just as well the Clergy Study Morning yesterday only went as far as lunch time before we were all released from Christ Church, Woking, to scarper in our various homeward directions. 'A study day like no other', the diocesan authorities had promised, apparently referring to the invitation we'd been asked to extend to laypeople to come along, because there was no other obvious difference from the usual format, and style. A pair of gentlemen from the musical team at Christ Church, armed with a guitar and a keyboard, assaulted 'Holy Holy Holy Lord God Almighty' until that noble hymn lay down and died, we had a sung version of the Creed that had me begging for it to end as one of said gentlemen led us in yet another repetition of part of it, and then we were ready for the speakers. A fellow called Nick spoke about how the Church of England had been issuing reports on how to integrate laypeople and clergy in evangelism, and working life and church life, since the 1940s and that 'if we're still talking about this in twenty years I shall scream'. I didn't think anything he came up with was particularly groundbreaking, though, but perhaps you can't after seventy years of Church of England reports. Then Paul Williams, the CEO of the Bible Society, outlined how the overarching narrative of the Scriptures could be used as 'a lens to interrogate the messages of contemporary culture': I quite liked this, but it was slightly depressing to hear him suggest that most Christians aren't aware there is an overarching narrative, as opposed to a succession of disconnected bits which they cherry-pick to justify their own ideological viewpoints. In between the two speakers, the Bishop pushed ahead of me (and several more people) in the queue for tea and asked me what I thought so far. I wasn't feeling all that well and couldn't help thinking of the scene in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the Vogon captain challenges the captive Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, catching their breath after the psychic and physical pain of listening to some of his verses, 'either die in the vacuum of space; or [CHORD] tell me how good you thought my poem was'. As I waffled, the Bishop sort of became aware that he'd ended up halfway along the queue and insisted on handing me a paper cup in recognition of the fact.

The point arrived for breaking into groups, as it inevitably does. As we were sat in close-serried ranks of linked steel-framed chairs with very little room to manoeuvre round each other, this proved more logistically challenging than usual. I had forgotten we were supposed to bring along a layperson: Marion was there in her capacity as a chaplain at HMP Send, so the laypeople she usually deals with are not easily able to attend external events, and we agreed that clergy are laypeople underneath, as we are so often told. In our small group we concluded that the 'thing we would take away' was Nick's very touching anecdote of the hairdresser whose way of integrating church and work life was to pray for her customers as she massaged shampoo into their hair. This was a better suggestion than my statement that what I would take away was my cup, to put into the compost.

Finally we were shown a short video about the reorganisation at Church House. Little stylised graphics of happy clergy, laypeople and central staff, and even the odd dog, bounced across the screens to describe how the diocese was being restructured around meeting the real needs of parishes, although the Suffragan Bishop's hairstyle seemed to have changed in her translation into digital form. Wondrously, the presentation concluded without at any point using the phrase 'we've sacked a cartload of people because we can't pay for them anymore'.

What Goes Round

I am getting quite used to the lady who leads the termly 'Hot Topic' training sessions for school governors on behalf of Surrey County Council. About forty governors from a variety of schools (including three ordained people, I realised halfway through) spent a couple of hours in the Holiday Inn at Guildford as she breathlessly downloaded a mass of information some of which I managed to assimilate. 

Do you remember how, a couple of years ago, I was in such a despondent state about the headlong, and forced, race towards academisation in English and Welsh schools? Now, we learn, this rush has come to an abrupt but untrumpeted halt. Perhaps as a result of some highly-publicised failures and the general realisation that they are not the market leaders they were purported to be, academies have gone very quiet. The Department for Education has stopped regarding a school being rated by OfStEd as 'Requiring Improvement' as the trigger for it to proceed towards academisation, but as a demonstration that it needs extra support. This is partly due to the departure of the former Secretary of State and partly to the Government's attention being absorbed by other matters: 'rather than OfStEd and the DFE being at loggerheads', we were told, 'OfStEd is in an increasingly influential position.'

Secondly, three years ago OfStEd was busy criticising schools for not concentrating sufficiently on the core curriculum and that other matters were secondary (and for 'secondary', read 'irrelevant'). Now, however, the inspectors have started saying the precise opposite, that children, especially in the earlier years of education, should be able to take part in a 'rich' curriculum that provides them with a rounded set of life experiences. We even now have the innovation of the 'Activity Passport', listing things it's good for children to have done between Reception and Year 6. Here's a flavour:

Reception: Taste a new fruit
Year 1: Look up at the stars on a clear night
Year 2: Get soaking wet in the rain
Year 3: Stay away from home for a night
Year 4: Skim stones
Year 5: Make and launch an air powered rocket
Year 6: Visit a local charity and find out how you can support them

The whole idea clearly arises from the popular perception that children are spending too much time sat in front of screens. Some of the tasks in fact quite sound demanding ('Choreograph a dance') but others bring a bit of a tear to the eye. The pointlessness and disutility of so many of them is one of the few things that has brought me much hope in humanity lately. I didn't expect that from an evening at the Holiday Inn in the care of Babcock 4S.

Taketime

We found out about Taketime through our curate Marion who knows the chap who runs it, a Methodist minister based in Reigate. It's a way of using Ignatian meditation to facilitate an encounter with Jesus in the context of prayer. Ignatian meditation involves imagining yourself into Bible stories, either as one of the characters or an observer, and noting your reactions. Taketime's scripted versions of Gospel narratives shape that imaginary work and at the end you usually 'see Jesus coming towards you. He sits beside you and asks you to tell him whatever's on your mind.' Then you spend some time listening to the answer, whatever form it may come in. Sometimes there isn't very much distinct at all, and sometimes there is. Meditative prayer is like that. A full-works session is supposed to take about 90 minutes but as a prison chaplain Revd Clive has done it very effectively with prisoners in as many seconds.

We wondered whether we might introduce something of this sort at Swanvale Halt to take the place of an existing contemplative event which seems to be dribbling to a halt, and preserving the quiet, contemplative element people appear to value; so on Monday I, Marion and Lillian the Lay Reader went to Reigate to take part in a Taketime training day. It would begin with a sample session. 

And the sample session begins with a relaxation exercise. At this sort of point I usually have running through my mind a dreadful story Il Rettore used to delight in telling, of his wife attending a day for clergy spouses in the Exeter diocese: I will merely write the words 'and let those lemons go!' and leave it there. But I dutifully pictured relaxing warmth flowing up through my toes and so on and tried my best not to be resistant.

And then we got into the story: Jesus's encounter with the first disciples and the miraculous catch of fish. I am not that imaginative a soul and struggled to stay focused. 'Listen as Jesus calls you, by name ... And just tell Jesus whatever may be on your mind and in your heart ... and now just listen to his answer to you, however it may come ...' the calming, measured voice of Revd Clive moved through the room. And so I did. It was something personal I was battling with, something I'm not going to share here let alone with anyone else in that room.

I was caught out by getting an answer. Not a picture or a word as such, but an insight which led me to see the issue I was grappling with in a different and more helpful way. Of course if you're not a believer you're free to see it as the subconscious working away at problems unbeknownst to the waking mind. But that's exactly what makes Taketime a fruitful method for working with people with a variety of religious opinions and none. 

I went and had my lunch in the Castle grounds in Reigate, sitting on a baking hot bench and wondering how so many mussel shells got into the grass a couple of yards away. I felt an unfamiliar sense of lightness and liberty. I had gone along to a training day, and would be taking home a new understanding of myself rather than just a folder with some handouts in it, though I would have that too. 

Sola Fide

Our curate Marion has reached the end of her curacy, although we breathe a huge sigh of relief that the diocese has decided she can stay on until her husband retires from his current position at a local school, which should be four years. She can do this because she is what the Church of England calls a Self-Supporting Minister: that is, she works for free. The Church likes SSMs. What she will actually be now that she's technically no longer Assistant Curate (SSM) isn't yet clear, but nomenclature is a comparatively minor matter.

This is what she gave me to celebrate the conclusion of her training, to add to my mantelpiece of religious tat 'in the interests of theological balance': a Playmobil Martin Luther. It looks distinctly more mild-mannered than the real thing would have been.

I'm very pleased to see I fall within the intended age range, otherwise I'd've had to give it back.

A Flash of Recognition

As Debbie sat on my sofa describing two churches where she was considering spending her time as curate, a strange sense of familiarity began to dawn in my mind. You will remember that Debbie has been 'released' by the diocese: released, it seems, high into the air to land wherever she will, or wherever she will that will meet the requirements of her family as well as herself. 'Curates are loved wherever they go, unless they make a complete mess of it, and God will bring good things out of whatever situation you find yourself in - you'll end up loving the place and the people almost whatever happens', I told her, 'so think about what sustains you and stops you getting lonely and isolated and how you're going to maintain those relationships. Your family is key and if your children aren't happy that will drain you too.'

Well, Debbie's account of one of these two churches rang peculiar bells in my memory and these turned out to be accurate. It was the former incumbency of someone I know (and strangely enough had written a letter to that very day) and who had to leave after a complete breakdown in pastoral relationships there. I remember him saying that the congregation had described their previous vicar in no complimentary terms, either, so I have some concerns whether this church has long-term problems (you sometimes come across churches that are dysfunctional in this way): however, Debbie says the current incumbent, who's been there for a couple of years now, seems to be doing all right. 

What a strange relationship it is between a Christian community and its pastor, and what a bizarre coincidence that I should know the very place Debbie was talking about (for once it's right to play long with the Church of England's customary game of Secret Squirrel by not letting on where it is). But, as Yuuko-San says, 'There is no such thing as coincidence in this world, there is only inevitability'. 

An Offer

This sickening little graphic is exactly why I've never thought of myself as a 'leader' and don't trust those who do. I regularly get bumf through the post from various Christian organisations which want to tell me how to be a leader, grow leaders, learn about leadership, and so on. Anyone who thinks of themselves as a leader should on no account actually be allowed to lead anyone else, in a properly ordered world. 

So it was with ambiguous feelings that I had an email the other day from the diocesan training department 'offering me the chance' to attend a leadership course next year, run by Keith Lambdin, the principal of Salisbury Theological College, and a couple of local clergy. 'The bishop is fully in support of this initiative', said the note, 'and of your participation in particular'. Which makes me wonder whether this is the kind of 'invitation' one can refuse, or not. The course will be lengthy - about a fortnight spread over the year, including two residential sessions of a couple of days each; expensive (costing about £1000 in all, of which the diocese will stump up half, with the residue coming from my annual training allowance and, in theory, the parish); and of as-yet unclear content. My long experience is that professional training courses both within the Church and outside it never deliver what they promise, and the lessons you learn are almost never those which the course intends to teach you. What they invariably do deliver is traumatic episodes of role-playing and opportunities for public humiliation. I have to have a lot of persuading that this will do me or anyone else any good.

I am not averse to the idea of training. A former parish priest who now works as a management consultant and treats Lamford as his parish church has written a book on the management of change within the Church which everyone regards very highly: were the diocese to invite him to run a course which actually looked at what change might really mean or how the Church might be better organised to facilitate it, now, that would be interesting. Unfortunately, as I've said before, while the Church pays lip-service to the concept of 'change', it appears to have no idea what such change might actually look like. 

However this gentleman says good things about Fr Keith Lambdin, and our curate has lent me his book which isn't bad, rather firmly and clearly written and with a minimum of nonsense (at least a couple of chapters in). He suggests most clergy - almost willy-nilly - fall into the leadership styles he calls the Monarch or the Warrior, which are in fact the least helpful in the context of the modern Church, and posits a set of different ways of thinking about what you do as a minister (I like putting it that way, rather than 'leadership styles') which are a bit more healthy. I can't see 'the Coward' or 'the Evader' as an option, unfortunately, but I'm hoping reading the book will justify me in not doing the course.

Nuts and Bolts

Long ages ago, one of my great predecessors in the parish sent a group of his folk on the diocesan course for lay Readers. 'You should get a degree in theology after all this', he said on them reporting back, 'this isn't what we need in Swanvale Halt.' Being the kind of character he was, he set up his own training course and produced a whole set of 'Lay Pastoral Assistants' who were sort-of communion-ministers-plus. Over the years this group of people not only performed a liturgical and pastoral role but also took on leadership responsibilities including furnishing a number of churchwardens. It struck me that what the then Rector had done was begin what big Evangelical churches tend to call 'leadership courses', creating a set of people who were trained not necessarily for any particular role but encouraged to feel they had the confidence to take on things when they came up.

I decided to have a go at this, and came up with what I called 'Nuts & Bolts'. It's not intended to have that much of a spiritual element, but more to introduce people to the practicalities of what the church does and why. We begin on a Saturday morning with Morning Prayer, so that introduces people to a different sort of worship without laying it on very heavily - and also the idea of reading the Bible publicly without much preparation. So far we've covered what the Church is for, the history of the church in this parish, and types of ministry; this week we'll examine church properties, timetable, and regular events. The idea is that people will emerge the other end with a greater sense of ownership and knowledge about what the worshipping community they're part of is actually up to. The problem is that so far almost all my takers have been people who already have a good deal of responsibility in the church or who are, realistically, past doing so. I can only hope that we're setting a sort of marker by doing this and that in years to come it may fulfill more of the purpose I envisaged. As with so much else that I'm doing!

An Opportunity for Reflection

I wasn't expecting to be granted a curate to start in the summer of 2012, and yesterday had confirmation that this is so. I am not that long from being a curate myself and only became a 'training incumbent' because there was already a curate at Swanvale Halt when I arrived; and given the somewhat hazardous financial situation of the church we could do with having the curate's house rented out and bringing in a few thousand pounds a year. But I was rather taken aback by the email from the diocese which informed me I had failed to 'demonstrate that you fully understood the role a training incumbent undertakes'.

It made me think about my own curacy at Lamford. In my first week Il Rettore told me 'I can't do anything for you except teach you how to say the Mass' and so that was what he did. In my first year we had Mass practice most weeks, but everything else I had to work out for myself. I asked about what he did to prepare couples for their wedding or having their children baptised and he would shrug and say 'I don't know, I just chat to them'. Whenever I saw him take a funeral service his preparation seemed to consist of scribbling a few notes on a scrap of paper in the Vestry before the service started. Our 'staff meetings' (the diocese is very, very keen on staff meetings) occurred over coffee on a Monday morning in the café run by the Turks round the corner from the church, and consisted of me, Il Rettore, the organist, and sometimes the parish secretary if she wasn't too hung over from the weekend. Occasionally we opened a diary but never a Bible. I don't think the powers-that-be like this model very much.

But the thing about Il Rettore was that he cared about people. He could get away with pretty rough prep for funerals in a way I never could, but he dealt so brilliantly with bereaved people it didn't matter. He couldn't tell me what he did with wedding or baptism couples because each time he just engaged with them and who they were, not with a scheme or system (I need a scheme or system). And as for myself, he cared about me. He was my friend and I could always take him into my confidence in absolute trust that he would keep it; the advice he might give me was almost invariably wrong, but that wasn't the point. He was there and cared, and being given advice mattered less than being given tea and being taken to look at the new season's tomatoes in the greenhouse.

It's worth saying that we were all rather scandalised to discover that a curate in an adjoining parish to Lamford was approaching presiding at his first Mass having had no liturgical preparation at all from his incumbent, who was the husband of the diocesan Director of Training. He came, rather on the quiet, to Il Rettore for that.

I'm being offered the chance to talk this over so it will be interesting to discover what the diocese thinks the role of a training incumbent really is!

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.