Curacy ... a Guide

The Oxford Diocese Beauties - June 2008

For what are, I hope, obvious reasons (if you are more than a passing acquaintance to this blog), I have been thinking a considerable amount about the last three years and the profound honour of the ministry entrusted to my care. I can confidently claim my curacy as being a success - perhaps one of the most successful, not a claim I make lightly or carelessly.Within a breath of time, I will be a curate in a vicar's clothes, and a new and very different ministry will have started. I want, therefore, to consign some thought for posterity, as a tool of reflection for me, and maybe as a helpful tool for someone else later.

So, my Vernacular Top Ten Tips for a Kicking Curacy. 

1. Reaping and Sowing - the absolute truth of this ministry in training is that we get out in direct proportion to what we put in. We are called to work hard, to graft. A finicky over-focus on time off or study-time is not, I believe, what it is about. Those who have had the better curacies are the priests who have had to be reminded on many occasions about life/work balance. After all, ours is the best job in the world. We are not in sole charge of anything except perhaps our diaries, but get to go out do some vicaring and enjoying the rich blessings of ministry without some of the stresses and responsibilities of incumbency. 

2. Loving them into the Kingdom - the phrase taught to me by my Incumbent, this just about sums up every moment of any ministry. In this case, I refer to the level with which curates must fall in love with our ministerial field, its people and its life. I am passionate about Aylesbury and I have set my heart to do whatever is in my power to add to its life. Our communities (parish or wider afield) are the greatest gift in the world to us. Any lesser a view means you can't fully embrace them as brothers and sisters. 

3. The grace to learn - curacies are training posts. We are always fledglings to one level or another, and a heart to learn and the grace to accept a lesson can only be the winning ways in this life we lead. We may arrive good at some things (by God's  grace), but the minute we forget that we are beginners is a moment of great peril. Only someone with a heart to learn can be taught. 

4. The Boss - I have spoken of this elsewhere, but it is still worthy of note here. To my mind, and in all normal circumstances (there are always exceptions, of course), our Training Incumbents know best. Even when they don't (and it is conceivable), their choices and directions are made for our development. Graciousness is about the best way of showing appreciation for that person who has or will devote a considerable proportion of three years to our specific personal growth. Rarely in any walk of life are any trainees so blessed by the experience, time and prayer of one person in such a complete way. If they seem to act like they know best, it is probably because they do. 

5. The people - often passive or unknowing in this, they are much of the source of our learning. Our first clumsy bedside encounters, the first funeral, the first assembly, passing comments that stick to us, feedback (there is a little in curacy) - all of these things improve us. Even conflicts (as there are in churches) are a source of a rich education, all the while remembering that we are part of the encounter. This speaks, I think, of loving the people into the Kingdom with a grateful heart. Even the most talented Training Incumbent can do nothing with their curate in an empty room or field. 

6. The unexpected - three years I would have stated confidently that I was not cut out for ministry in schools. I would have done an assembly a month as a box-ticking exercise and let those who I perceived to be better than me do that bit of the job. God knows better than us, and I thanks God for that because I couldn't have been more wrong about that first assessment. This is but one of a myriad examples that I could give you. Conversely, some things that I thought were "my thing" have become the things I gain least pleasure from now. A heart to accept the unexpected will, I believe, be regularly surprised. 

7. Pecking Order - the 'Curate in Ministerial Raptures' will always get this wrong: (1) Family (2) Self (3) Ministry. The second speaks not of the very thing I denounced in Point 1, but of a need to ensure that the battery is charged before it energises others. This is place for retreats, prayer, reading, study, or just a little of that elusive thing in a ministerial life - sofa time. However, the lesson it has taken longest to learn (if indeed I ever did), is that my family overwhelmingly trump every other thing. Yes, of course there are exceptions and missing meetings or key services in favour of baby-sitting just speaks of poor organisation. This Point refers to taking them as seriously as the work, and both need careful organising to exist (or even stand a chance of existing) side by side. 

8. Have Fun - I have known some curacies to founder, or to remain stunted and never to fully grow. They were all characterised by a lack of fun and enjoyment (that is not to say that such a thing was the cause of the 'issues'). Laugh with people, laugh at yourself, even laugh at and with you Incumbent - it's allowed. Ministry is not an opportunity to be professional poe-faced, because that is as attractive to the world as flatulence. Yes, some of the things we do or witness are just ridiculous, as are we at times - largely because this is a theatre of human-beings doing our best together. 

9. Trust God - perhaps the one that should have gone at the top, but the statement of the obvious that is often the obvious understatement. Those of us blessed with an ordained ministry will know how many hurdles we have hopped through to get to this point. If we think for a moment that we got here by own efforts alone, and not within the calling that carries us in our lives, then we are stupid and conceited. God got us here, and God will guide us on, if we let Him.

10. Ministry is Us, but different - emerging from three years of this, I can see that I am fairly well the same bloke that was trained, but that I have a few tool more to help me along the way. I have not turned into some Angel, become a better man, acquired a more robust conscience or made me any less able to make mistakes than I was before I took this collar. If anything, I am 'me', but in the right place. What I was good at before I am still good at, and what I knew I was poor at, I am still poor at (notwithstanding Point 6). I put this here because I wish I had known that at the start. Early ministry was, for me, characterised by a deep sense that I was failing to meet a standard that I had always assigned to priests. Early blogs posts here will confirm that. Now I am, finally, at peace that I was formed in a greater part by the life I lived before all this started, and that I must embrace that formation accordingly (and not shun it as I had been tended to do). 

There is so much more that can be written and the experiences of others will vary, of course. I fail to see how I could have been more blessed, by the life, company, training and experience that I have had here in Aylesbury. More specific thoughts and thanks will be written later. 

I Just Gotta be Me

I have been thinking about Priesthood, being a Christian, and about being a person in the world today. I was thinking it last week and into this, but this thought process have been brought into sharp focus by a gathering of Curates that I have just enjoyed this last 24 hours or so.

A question raised towards the end of this little gathering was 'Who am I in Christ?'

This question was raised within the context of a bunch of baby-vicars trying to make sense of their newish lives in public ministry, and how best they may do that small thing. It seems that much of what and who we are in our own perceptions is the hinge upon which our work and life swings. Questions about self-identity, the blood-pursuit of Christians to model themselves on the person of Jesus Christ, and the inevitable mopping up after the inevitable failure - all these things dog us as they do all Christians, irrespective of tradition or ecclesiological expression. 

This issue is often right at the forefront of our thinking. In the days in which we find ourselves, we learn of the battle that ordained women are enduring in their claim for full equality with men in the Church. We further learn of the divisions that this is causing between the many lobbies and their members. We are all alive in times that scream out a litany of self-improvment, self-awareness, betterment, sin-purging, de-toxing and so on. Christians are the worst offenders in that, sadly. We have more choices in our lives than ever before. We can be just about anyone we want to be, the choice is ours. The thing about it, my brothers and sisters, it is our right to be whoever we seek to be. 

Those of you who are kind enough to read this Blog regularly (thanks to you) will know that a lot of what is in my mind is about either identity (mine or that of others) and my idolisation of children and childhood (my own kids in the main). The latter, I am fast discovering, informs the former.

Christians spend the large majority of their spiritual time wishing that they were better (in whatever criteria they mean it). The liturgical expression of many Christians hinges on prayerful self-flagellation and 'mea culpas' aplenty - all in the long journey to perfection in the image of Christ. This is, sadly or not, a path to absolute ruin. I am quite sure that I am called not just to be a priest, husband, father and friend - but also to be David Michael Cloake. I am quite sure that I am not called to be Jesus of Nazareth, or the Angel Gabriel. I think my adoration of childhood stems from the fact that at the moment of birth, a person is at their purest. At birth, the human being is as Christlike as it is possible to be. Only as we walk forward in life do we move away from that and in the end we become so divorced from ourselves that we have trouble finding the pathway back. The minute that I resolve to stop trying to be someone that I am not, and turn around to aspire with a whole heart to be the person that I am, will I start to become a fit disciple. As 'me' I am the person made in God's image; as a poor impersonation of someone whom I believe is more Christlike than I, I most certainly am not. 

My prayer for me, for those in my care, for those in the Church and in the world at large is not about who may or may not do this or that (though such matters are important, pressing and painful), but that everyone may learn to be who they are meant to be - themselves.

Authentically, perfectly, rightfully ...

Lord, in your mercy ...

...hear our prayer?

I have just returned from a perfectly wonderful weekend, the Curate's Conference. Yes, you might imagine such a gathering to be loaded with angst and pathos, a struggle between arm-waving and thurifying - but no, this went like a dream. We were all holed up in All Saints' Pastoral Centre in London Colney - a wonderful building, more especially in late spring when the weather has been as beautiful as it has been this last couple of days.

The theme broadly dealt with the issue of 'difference', and in providing input, offered a Keynote Speech from Revd Vera Hunt, a profoundly deaf Priest from the Diocese. Among other stuff, there were presentations from the Army, from the new-age perspective, an offering from the former Dean of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem, workshops surrounding deaf-awareness and more besides. The Conference has a warmth about it that I reliably informed is unusual, and tensions born of the wide spectrum of ecclesial differences that we as Curates embody seemed to me (a resident at an end of a spectrum) to be largely absent. The whole shebang was capped off with a rather extraordinary (in a good way) Eucharist, the style and content of which was prepared by the Curates in all their variations of 'colour'. It worked, it felt right, its integrity was maintained. The Bish (as in +Alan, as in blog) Presided and delivered the finest sermon that I have heard from him - and all in all, I am feeling 'top banana'.

My ministerial interests are broad in scope, but one facet is my great love of  and for the deaf community. My Sign Language is rusty to the point of full engine stall, but I am still greatly enamoured by all that the deaf community represents of and in itself. Deaf culture provides a very poignant reminder about how we exclude members of our faith communities without wishing to. Evidently, 1 in 7 people experience a hearing loss of one level or another, so statistically, there must be 20-odd in my average Sunday gathering. I can Sign a little, but I don't. I end prayers with 'Lord in your mercy hear our prayer' habitually, I talk at the speed of light and move around too much when doing so - and so on. This weekend has reminded me once again how valuable the perspective offered by my work with the deaf is to me and my theology and practice. I said yesterday, and I say again here, that a signed Eucharist is about as beautiful a thing as you can get, liturgically. I aspire to be able to provide such a service. With input of this importance offered to Curates, I believe that there is considerable hope for all Christians - so long as those who experienced the speech offered by Vera embrace the very mandate that she made. Yes, we have a Chapliancy to the Deaf/ened Community, but we as ministers (ordained or lay) also share in that job too. 

Only one Curate commented (anonymously) on their feedback form that the whole Conference offered them  nothing relevant to their curacy. How blessed that person and their congregation must be - though I guess even robots have a right to worship somewhere!

Excellent Conference, wonderful wake-up call, food for thought, warm fellowship among those of us trying to get on in this life of ours - lucky me, I say!