What They Don't Tell You at Theological College

If you want to know about Ernst Troeltsch, immanence, the correct means of ringing a chapel bell before Evening Prayer on a Tuesday in Epiphany, how so many people are phased by a healthy Mariology, what Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησου Χριστοῦ means, or indeed the greater joys of the latest Kevin Mayhew assassination of a good tune, where do you go? 

Theological College innit. 

You will get all of those things there, served (in the case of my college, Gawd Blessit) with fine food, alarmingly cheap liquor (I recall setting the prices one year) and the company of lovely ordinands - natural leaders called to work almost completely alone for the next four decades or less (which is short hand for that fact that ordinands are a suspicious bunch not fond of being led because they are the leaders, innit). 

You go to your Vicar, tell him/her that you feel The Call (like the Force felt by Jedis but with less Yoda). S/he sends you to the Diocesan Director Of Ordinands where you shalt be grilled until thee be verily dead of the exertion  and with any luck a season ticket to a BAP (not a flour topped roll, but a secret panel where you will be stared at by people who will smile at you while they do it). If you pass the flour-topped bread roll, you will be invited to give up your salary (or much time after work) to study the finer recesses of the psychology of Dr Troeltsch (sat next to some lovey who will have all his books under her pillow already, and will thereby make you feel like a pilchard). After that, you have your pretty new stole blessed, clip on the collar and launch forth into the unsuspecting world of Christians and all their enormities. 

Then you make some discoveries. 

During your curacy (if you are lucky like I was), you will blessed with a training incumbent who will walk you through the 300 million things you didn't learn at college in a meaningful and organised way. You have three years for that - no time at all. 

Then, if that is your Yoda Force, you go on to be the Landlord Spiritual of a lump of London or somewhere else. Semantic prestidigitation on the Application Form will discreetly hide that fact that you were only a curate when you applied and know sod-all really. Day one - all alone except the "to do" list (which will have grown since six months before the interregnum started that you just ended).  

This last few months, I have wrestled with the the parish finances. I have just escorted a very nice man indeed through his redundancy. I have just drafted a Person Specification for a job role that I have just been called to create, and will venture down the fraught road of employee rights and human resource frivolities. I have had to manage border disputes, manage those who don't wish to be managed, be the chairperson of a charity which I needed to register with the Commission (automatically becoming bound by the law in such things). That is before having to find the words to comfort a mother to a baby who may be dying, the woman who sees no hope in life any more, or the man who seeks absolution after a lifetime of alcohol abuse. I have had to be the nice man, the polite man, the man who takes the hits and hides the bruises. I have to have a sense of absolute certainty in all that I do, without apparent personal weakness or the human scuffles that emerge for us all. I have overseen a significant building project blessed as I was this time around that I had a gifted and qualified parishioner to take the lead. Then we come to the stuff of eternal life and salvation - much of that is communicated by me, in my own frailty and oft doubt. I have been on the telly, the radio and am a public name in some places - that requires a certain amount of edification, but is never going to form part of the College Curriculum. 

I don't blame college, or indeed the system. If theological college launched a course that covered all of the above, I'd still be at college or worse, I would have run a mile before applying. The world of the Vicar just isn't what you might ever expect in your wildest or worst dreams. We are, in a very real sense, the jack of all trades and master of none. I thank God daily that he forced me through the world of work that preceded my ordination by fifteen years, because there was the training I use now. Right there. 

Though, to be sure, it is still be best job in the world. Deo Gratias. 

The Death of The Pragmatist

My time at theological college served many good purposes. The arrival of my children tops that list, of course - but something unexpected happened, and something very welcome indeed. It seems to be the thing to do to mash theological students through a million personality models: Myers-Briggs, Honey & Mumford, Hayes & Finch (spot the impostor) as well as flick our giblets over white-boards with perty pictures like Johari Windows, Praxis Models and some bizarre outpourings from one of the seven-hundred gazillion leadership gurus that now creep across the earth.

In the end, I was pleasantly surprised to note, I learned a little of who I am.

I am not one who benefits from sitting in lecture halls being talked at for an hour. I struggle with making sense of the world through books and handouts. I don't excel at examinations because my brain isn't wired that way and for most of my life until that point, I thought myself politely retarded or else a lazy slob who for some reason just didn't care enough to try harder. Other aspects of theological education fast became an issue in that way too as there are the poppets who can sit and listen to a diatribe on the European Reformation and then argue the toss over semantics. Me - I was lost within five minutes, often emerging from said lecture theatre down-hearted and feeling quite routinely stupid.

What I did learn, though, is that I am a confirmed pragmatist. I am an experiential learner who knows much about computers by smashing a few to pieces and re-assembling them. I learn by mutual exchange - so if I sit with you over a beer for a few hours and talk with you, I will learn the lesson you seek to teach me. I can ask my own questions, approach it in my own way, build mental-models to illustrate your hypothesis, get there in the end. If you knew me well enough, you would know that I have a neat analogy for just about anything - that is how I am wired. While it means I am average academically, it means that I am practical. It means that I see the world in a way that means I can tackle the unexpected in a calm and measured way. I never flap in emergencies, including the motorway pile-up I was one in the middle of. I got out of the car and started to work it out.

In 1987 or thereabouts, the then Tory Government invented a new method of examination - the GCSE. No longer was it a "sit and be excellent for three hours and your life will be sorted" type of qualification, but one that said you had permission to be who you were built to be, and if that meant you were a plodder, good with your hands but over days not minutes, that you stood a chance in life and in getting some half decent grades that assessed years not a small window in time like exams do. For example, I am quite neat with a pencil and used to love to draw. I'd draw good pictures over the course of a year, but under the rarefied confines of an examination would wholly lack the inspiration to draw at all, let alone well. Times that by all the subjects that I took and you see a healthy situation for those like me. The pictures drawn during the year meant something; they had value to the outcome for me. The degree I am currently completing is modelled in the same way.  I am required to submit portfolios not sit exams - which means that instead of sitting in a cold hall for three hours pretending to remember theories on preaching and hermeneutics, I can instead demonstrate an ability in that field by submitting sermons actually preached in front of real people who gave constructive feedback. Is a preacher one who is gifted at exams or one who can preach to people? You decide.

It has been announced recently, by another Tory politician, that the GCSEs are about to go the way of the Dodo. No more modular assessment, just exams. That would be me screwed then - and many like me. Under these new plans, I would not have achieved the grades that would have got me to A Levels that got me to Further Education that helped get me to this desk as a priest this day. Great for those whose gift is exams. Great for those who, therefore, can look at facts and arguments, soak them up, and regurgitate them on demand like so many photocopiers. Does the world need more photocopiers in soft flesh?

Fairly recently, I saw a video of Sir Ken Robinson (see below) who doubled the epiphany of my theological college discovery about my learning styles. I visit schools from time to time and worry - really deeply worry - that the system is breeding competent photocopiers, and not students who can be who they were built to be. Their vibrancy and life seems to be placed in the back seat while grades and results take the front. I leave you with Mr Robinson.

We'll Meet Again ...

... oh no you won't!

This post is by way of 'homage' to the 'fresh meat' who are currently in the middle of their Leaver's Weeks etc. 

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the life of a priest, the process by which we arrive at our pious perfection is ordinarily by way of a theological college, be that as a full-timer or as a part-timer. That time must come to an end, and such a time is greeted in one of two ways: gladly or else with a sense of panic and mourning. Normal folks leave college glad of the experience, but champing at the bit to get back into real life, earn some shekels, eat in some privacy. Others feel 'called' to theological college, and for them, being dragged kicking and screaming from the bosom of the establishment is a grievous affair. The judges are still out as to whether the latter breed of ordinand is likely to flourish in the real world - I have my views and they are backed now by examples, but for now 'no names no pack-drill'. 

So, like teenagers at the end of GCSEs, there is the frentic 'you will keep in touch won't you?', and 'here is my Ember Card with my new address on it; come and visit soon, please'. This won't happen, and an ordinand is likely to retain maybe two close friends from college days. The rest will become memories, and that is quite normal.

So, some Cloakey advice for the Fresh Meat of 2010 (that was my nickname at College where I was, generally, the resident pain in the arse):

1. You get out what you put in (reaping and sowing?) - this is the maxim by which I minister in Aylesbury. It worked for me in my former working life and it is the case now. If you pour love and enthusiasm into your work, you will enjoy good times. If you clock-watch, adopt self-pity for prayer time lost, for example - you will not do at all well in a ministry that demands love and joy from you every stinking day of the week!

2. Always a Trainee - in your Curacy, you never ever stop being a trainee. I have seen and heard of curacies where the little dollink has spent his/her first week or two learning, and then the successive weeks dictating terms like an old pro. No mate, with humility you shall learn. With humilty you shall learn from not only your Training Incumbent but also from little Mrs Miggins who never speaks to you. The minute that you think you are better than the Incumbent is the minute you have resolutely failed.

3. It is a job of work - and needs to be treated as such. We have all had these misty dreams of a ministry spent in dusty books, on our knees praying, gawping at Icons - but that is what we do when we go on holiday. Where you are going is a coal-face, and you need to dirty your hands and take up the tools and work. Any notion that the job should 'feed you' is folly. We ministers do the feeding, we have to look elsewhere to feed ourselves. 

4. Have fun and do not take yourself too seriously - a healthy sense of irony and a healthy sense that you are 'but a worm' is no bad way of setting out on a day's encounter at the coal face. An expert in liturgy a fit priest doesn't necessarily make. Laugh about life, be thankful and never never never never never stop being grateful that God called you to do this work. Oh, the amount of priests I know who feel that they are there by right ....

5. Family first - in the great scheme of things, the Good Lord demands that you raise your kids and attend to the vocation of your marriage before all else. Do not render your kids orphans or your spouse partnerless. Many of the 'Fresh Meat' folk have young families - and yes, they will impinge on that Messiah Complex time. They will keep your feet on the ground, and they need to. Life in ministry has good days and bad for time at home - so be greedy for family time, not consider it a flexible padding until the next opportunity to go out and be jolly popular again!

6. Under promise and Over deliver - and never over promise and under-deliver. One may seem pants, but the other certainly is pants. 

7. Say NO - it won't kill you, really. Excessive Yesses might, however. 

8. Expect the Unexpected - if being Selected for training weren't mad enough, you will discover that life is a wide panoply of things that will bite you on the butt. They are good and bad in equal measure. Having a heart to expect the unexpected will serve you well. Try and avoid becoming set in your ways until at least the third month!

9. The Years - I was once told that they love you in the first year, hate you in the second and put up with you in the third. Remove the peaks and troughs and I can confirm this as fact. The heady diaconal days soon give way to 'business as usual' - expect it and don't be discouraged by it. 

10. What are you? This is where I might be controversial, but it is my Blog, so there. Are you going to be ordained as a modified Licensed Lay Reader or are you going to be ordained a Priest. Are you going to be an ordained 'minister'? All Christians are ministers. What I am saying is recognise the distinctiveness of your Charism. Ordination is not a promotion for a comeptant youth worker. It is not the front door to Preaching Central - ordination for you is to the priesthood. That is the job you have accepted from God and that is the job you must do. Administer the Sacraments.

Well, there you go - a little list for a Friday. Those who know me well will know how many of those I have lapsed in already. 

To the Leavers -  may God go with you to your new ministries, to your new homes and to your new lives. May He grant you strength to walk forward in your work and to remind you daily in whose strength you work. May your families be protected from your ministry and become an asset to it. Blessing to you all, you lucky lucky lucky lucky .... people.