Discerning the Spirits

It's been a long, long time since we had a meeting of the Local Vocations Advisors, and even the prospect of nice sandwiches in Church House yesterday lunch-time couldn’t drag out more than three of us in addition to Ciaran the Diocesan Director of Ordinands and Tina who co-ordinates the whole process, matching enquirers up with LVAs and making sure all the right bits of paperwork are filled out. But, as she ruefully pointed out, while the number of LVAs on paper is quite healthy in fact quite a few of those aren’t at all active, and there’s a distinct geographical imbalance with most being in the east of the diocese (‘I suppose they’re just holier over there’).

The discernment process is undergoing quite a change, with what was once the scarifying ritual of the ABM or BAP or whatever it was called at the time you went through the process – a residential ordeal of interviews, exercises and checking whether you tried to eat your soup with a fork, as Fr Gooley maintained someone at his did – now split into two. The first stage will be done online, a quick-fire series of conversations with different interlocutors now focusing on the ‘six qualities’ applicants are supposed to evidence, which we couldn’t resist comparing to speed-dating.  The second is more like the traditional way of doing it but with an effort to make it less like a university entrance exam. In between comes a very in-depth examination of where an applicant is in personal and spiritual terms, questioning everything from sexual habits to substance abuse. It crosses my mind how legal some of this might be – the kind of thing, in normal circumstances, any prospective employee would be justified in telling the organisation they were applying to was none of their business – but somebody must already have thought about that, surely? The intention is clearly twofold; first, to do something to diversify the base of ordained ministry away from middle-aged, middle-class people who are used to writing essays, and second, to try and make it less likely that deeply damaged souls will be let loose on the Lord’s flock without at least flagging up ‘areas to work on’.

People sometimes complain that the modern Church is becoming too homogenous and we have lost so much of the creative eccentricity that made it work in the past. I suppose there might be some hazard in expecting people to have got themselves completely sorted as human beings before they begin their ministry: even for the ordained, a degree of holiness is usually a hard-won prize reached after years of pursuing the spiritual life, not a base position from which to start. Here I am, 52 years from my baptism, 27 from my conversion, and 17 from my ordination, and I’ve barely begun. At the same time, you don’t have to delve very deeply into the history of the Church of England, or any denomination, to come across lots of ordained people who were not just flawed souls (as are we all) but broken ones who then went on to damage others, and the tremendously laissez-faire process of discernment in the past barely did a thing to stop that happening. We were very often sending out pastors who would not so much reap the Lord’s harvest field as burn it, trample on it, roll around in it, and pee on it. A little less of that is probably all to the good.

Church House is a less bustling place these days than once it was: the axe has cut its way through the diocesan staff and all those meeting rooms and offices still gleam, but are denuded and quiet. I wonder whether the Diocese will stay once the lease is up, whenever that is. 

The Vocation of the Whole Church

Michaelmas Day saw me at a church in Camberley giving a talk about the nature of priestly ministry and location, a shortened version of one I delivered a few months ago, to a group of people exploring their own sense of vocation. I found myself talking about Mary, our former sacristan, the ex-nun who had had to leave her missionary order after suffering a breakdown of health in Africa, but who always saw herself as a detached member of the community - a community which eventually repented its harsh treatment of her to some extent. 'I've always kept my vows, and I've always said my Office', she told me. Michaelmas Day was the date of her taking her final vows, so for me it's the 29th of September, rather than the date of her death in March, when I think of her most: it's become not only the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, but also the observance of the Solemn Profession of Vows of Blessed Mary Fearon. Infuriating sometimes, Mary, but a saint. Saints are often like that. 

At Morning Prayer before I headed out, I and Roy our verger said Psalm 150 together, the psalm set by the Church for M.P. on Michaelmas Day. It imagines the whole of creation joined together in a song of worship to God - 'let everything that has breath praise the Lord, alleluia' - and the angels lead that song. I thought of Mary singing the song of the angels along with them, as we should all pray we will one day. It's the work all Christians are called to do, before and after everything else.

Perhaps it seems a bit childish or flippant, bolting my own experience, rooted in my particular place and context, onto the great experience of the Holy Church, my memory of Mary onto the solemnity of the Angels. But it's only a Christianised version of what I think most human beings do, generating meaning and structure through connecting their own story with something bigger than they are. And it makes my small life with my own small and struggling church part of something beautiful and wondrous.

"Designing for Growth"

Before that hard encounter by the roadside in Swanvale Halt I'd been at the new diocesan offices on the Research Park in Guildford. If I wanted to post about something more cheerful, they help: they aim at communicating a combination of professionalism and cuddliness: 'We're glossy and effective, but we're not going to scare you. Would you like a coffee?' I saw three coffee-consuming areas while I was there, two (as I said before) Shoreditch café-like arrangements of colourful plastic seats, one upstairs, one down, and a standing bar round the corner in the upstairs offices. I suppose coffee is the fuel that powers most social and professional interactions so it has to be present, and in fact omnipresent. This is what the main staircase looks like. It wouldn't look out of place in a recently-updated municipal museum:

I was there for a meeting of the local vocations advisors. We were informed that we have lots of ordination candidates going through to selection conferences, but also that an increasing proportion of them are being rejected, so it may be that the drive for more ordinands is resulting in people being passed up the system before they're ready. In the centre of the table was one of those multi-communication pods to allow conference calls, and I wondered how often the Diocese of Guildford needs to do that, or whether all this kit was just inherited from the University from which the Diocese is leasing the building. This new working environment will, at least for a while, make its inhabitants believe that they know what they're doing, though I wonder how long the illusion will last ...

Parish Stories

The discussions we've been having for a while about encouraging vocations in churches which aren't quite from the Evangelical end of the spectrum bore some fruit yesterday when a group of clergy and laypeople gathered at a church not far from Swanvale Halt for a mini-conference, as we'd decided, not based around the model of plucking out likely victims who their incumbents think might have a vocation to do this or that, but to encourage the whole people of God in their missionary life. My role was to give a presentation thinking about the relationship between faith and locality. 

I started with Fr Wilson and the way he felt, and taught, about Haggerston, and rampaged through a book from last year Marion the curate lent me, Revd Andrew Rumsey's Parish, examining exactly the area I wanted to think about. I added a set of thoughts about how the doctrine of the Incarnation affects the way Christians, especially from the Catholic tradition, think about what they are doing in their mission, and how it provides a grounding for an approach to the idea of place and the local church community. We aren't called to have the kind of utter, absolute commitment to place and people as contemplative religious are (I gave the Sisters of West Malling as an example), but we are called to have something like that commitment, and to discover our spiritual identity through those attachments and relationships. I was told after I'd finished how radical the idea is; it shouldn't be, as it's no more than what people actually do, but to say it does row against the tide of the modern world, and, very often, of the modern Church. Everyone seemed very taken by my thoughts but there were only about 30 people there; we'll see where it all goes.

Over coffee I wandered into one of the side chapels and noticed for the first time an engraving showing what it looked like in 1841. In the background, if you look carefully, there is just visible a Doom painting on the arch: on the left, souls being weighed by St Michael the archangel, and to the right hand those found wanting being ushered Hellwards by devils. 

Now, the whole church is painted white, bleak and chill. What happened to the Doom, I asked the incumbent? He told me that in about 1962 the plaster in the chapel was flaking and stained by bat poo. The churchwardens and incumbent at the time decided that the most cost-effective way of proceeding was to scrape all the plaster off, throw it away, and paint the walls with white emulsion, which is how, after at least seven centuries, the Doom met its doom. Now all that remains is a couple of curlicues spiralling down one of the stone ribs of the roof. 'I have often had reason to rail against the diocesan authorities responsible for authorising changes to churches,' said the vicar, 'but I can see why we have them.'

More About How Things Are Done Or Not Done

It was a wet Monday morning, and I went with Debbie our ordinand for a meeting with the Powers That Be at the diocese to express some of her dissatisfactions with the way the process of settling her curacy was handled, as you may recall. The Powers manifested themselves on this occasion in the form of the Director of Ordinands and the Director of Training, clad in the kind of comfortable, approachable clothing – pastel pullovers and long-loved jackets - which clergy now all seem to wear unless they’re a bishop. It doesn’t fool me, I can tell you.

A lot of the discussion centred on whether or not Debbie had had a particular form which is supposed to constitute part of her Final Report and on which ordinands indicate something about their aims for their title parish - Catholic or Evangelical, rural or urban, within 5 miles of a Waitrose, that sort of thing – and who was supposed to ensure that she got it. ‘The national understanding is that the initiative in placing ordinands rests on the training institution’, said the Director of Ordinands, and said it repeatedly through the meeting. I thought this was less important than the fact that Debbie’s future, in or outside this diocese, had been settled without a word being said to her about it, and asked how the picture of the initiative resting with the colleges fitted with the parallel one of the training department here settling placements for local ordinands. 'I do try and speak to the ordinands', said the Director of Ordinands, 'but sometimes they're in Bristol and sometimes they're in Durham. The training institutions are supposed to be best-placed to make a judgement on what's best for them.' The person in question, of course, was barely a 15-minute drive away, but I let that rest.

If anything was clear from the discussion, it was that things weren’t clear. It is perhaps not possible to offer a set of accessible criteria for settling curates in parishes because parishes, and their incumbents, are complex and quirky and there are important factors which feed into the decision-making process which can’t really openly be talked about, such as when this or that incumbent might be about to move on or (despite what they say in public) can’t work with someone of the opposite sex. But the boundaries between the responsibilities of the colleges and the diocesan authorities could do with some clarification: and ordinands themselves could at least be talked to. That was all I expected to get, and that’s what was said.

Debbie is now safely provided with a title post in another diocese, so none of this matters to her, apart from the relief of saying her piece. But who knows, I may one day be a training incumbent to another ordinand, and the piece said could easily matter then.

Meeting in the Big House

At various points during the meeting at the house of our suffragan bishop, her cat positively launched itself at the arm of the chair occupied by the Diocesan Director of Training, and then, failing to gain purchase, slipped off back onto the floor, much to the Director's discomfiture. It then ran around the room chasing imaginary things. It would be unfair to suggest this was any kind of metaphor for the activity of the Church of England as a whole. 

We Local Vocations Advisers had been summoned after the departure of the diocesan Vocations Co-ordinator to - well, most of us didn't seem to have had the memo with the agenda, so I think it was mainly exchanging our experiences and outlining the diocese's general approach to the discernment of vocations. The diocese is keen:

• to broaden the body of Advisers to include laypeople and a wider range of people generally;
• to make sure the process isn't so sclerotic and controlled it stops people calling one of the Advisers for a chat and not being immediately channelled down the runnels of The System; 
• to emphasise that vocation includes what people do in their working lives - that the Church needs more Christian teachers, doctors, and so on.

This is of course all to the good, though the bishop also definitely felt that raising the numbers of people being ordained would also encourage people to consider other vocations too. 

'Thank you so much for coming', she said to me and Daniel, the Vicar of Throop at the top end of the diocese. 'It's so important that we do all we can to make sure people from the Catholic end of the Church are encouraged to come forward, it's not healthy if it's all one-way'. Oy, tell me about it. Ideas on a postcard. 

Somewhere downstairs in the house is a cuckoo clock. It cuckooed five times at one point: I checked my watch and discovered it was eight minutes past 8pm. There's another metaphor one should resist.

Prodigal Daughters

Debbie, our ordinand, now knows where she’s going to go to serve her curacy, and she and I had a meeting to catch up last week. She told me how she’d help to facilitate a meditation session with a group from Al-Anon, the network supporting people who care for those with alcohol problems, working with a secular facilitator. Obviously this wasn’t about religion in any way, but Debbie suggested they retell the story of the Prodigal Son using an all-female ‘cast’ to think about issues of betrayal and forgiveness. They’d agreed they would stop at the point the errant child comes home, but the other facilitator ran ahead and, not actually being aware of how the story was supposed to end, as the parent welcomed the child and offered forgiveness.

When Debbie asked her about it, she said she’d been overtaken by some phrases she’d remembered and couldn’t get out of her mind: ‘Love is patient, love is kind, love bears all things, suffers all things’. She couldn’t remember where she’d heard them (my guess is at a wedding). ‘It comes from the Bible,’ Debbie gently offered, beginning a conversation about the Bible, about Jesus and about forgiveness.

Calling Who?

To be fair, the Diocese is aware that there is something of an imbalance in the sorts of people who are training locally for the Divine Ministry. Actually there is a whole set of imbalances, but the one that most concerns us here is the great preponderance of candidates from evangelical backgrounds of different sorts. Too monochromatic a flavour to the CofE is deemed to be undesirable, so the ministry department has been gathering together incumbents from various churches they inadequately but comprehensibly describe as ‘central-plus’ to talk about the matter. I offered to host the first meeting, mainly because I knew the bishop would be there and I was keen for him to have an idea what Swanvale Halt parish was like. Il Rettore was there, all the way from Lamford. In fact there aren’t that many outright ‘catholic’ parishes in communion with His Grace of Guildford; probably about half a dozen, so, as I say, ‘central-plus’ isn’t that bad a denominator to delineate a miscellaneous collection of catholic, ‘floral-and-choral’, ‘high’, and not-quite-evangelical churches.

We chatted through a couple of meetings about what might be wrong. My thinking is that, at the moment, catholic congregations tend to be small and find it hard to develop the sense of excitement, involvement and wellbeing that bubbles over the top of the pot in the form of people seeking to explore a sense of vocation. It happens, of course, but not that often. Smaller churches are likely to be finding it harder to keep the show on the road (not a very Christian concept anyway), and so, on the whole, it feels less fun being a Christian in them than in a big church throbbing with souls. I suggested that if the diocese really wants to increase the number of catholic-minded ordinands it needs to pick a couple of likely parishes and work on them in the long term, put resources into them, send them curates even when they don’t qualify under the existing rules and subsidise youth-and-families workers even when they don’t have the money to pay for them, that sort of thing, and not expect to see much return for ten years or more. Of course they won’t do that, because it’s too complicated. The powers-that-be from the department talked instead about publicity and vocations events, the stuff they know they can do without shaking things up too much. It’s not just institutional inertia: they’re as overworked as everyone else.

At our second meeting the incumbent of one of the more prestigious churches in the diocese boldly told them they’d got all this the wrong way round (he’s long since given up any thoughts of being a bishop so can say what he likes). ‘We keep talking in terms of individual people’s vocations to this and that’, he said, ‘when I’ve becoming increasingly aware of the common nature of the enterprise. We discover our priesthood, if that’s what we’re talking about, as the Body of Christ together, not as individuals on our own.’ He’s got together a group of people who he’s identified as likely characters, not to fill any particular roles, but to think about how the parish might assist its people in realising their own vocation as members of the Body, meeting together regularly over the course of six months or so running up to Easter. The group (‘I wrote to 14 people but we’ve ended up with 12, coincidentally’) hasn’t got much of an agenda as such, and isn’t aiming at identifying people to send up into the diocesan system of vocations-discernment (though that might happen), but about affecting the way the congregation thinks.

It all sounds a bit vague, but I rather like it. It isn’t actually linked to any particular kind of church identity at all, but sounds like the sort of low-key, discursive and open-ended venture that could work well for the sort of people who find themselves in smaller, non-evangelical churches, and at least has more roots in the life of the Church than roadshows and mailshots. We have other fish to fry at Swanvale Halt at the moment – many, many others – but it will be worth remembering.

(And anything will be an improvement on the truly shuddersome images you can discover, mainly emanating from our Roman brethren, by merely asking Dr Google to search the word 'vocations' for you.)

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. 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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!