St Aidan's and St Michael's Days

My licence to minister half-time in the Grimsby Minster parish (originally 'for a year or until a new Vicar is appointed, whichever is the shorter', since extended to last eighteen months) comes to an end on Sunday, St Aidan's Day as it happens. I believe there will be cake and kind words after the 10.30 a.m. service. The new full-time Vicar will indeed come into post a few weeks later.

 

Meanwhile, my 40th anniversary of being ordained priest comes up less than a month later (on Michaelmas Day, Monday 29 September), and I've kindly been given the opportunity to mark that by presiding at the 12.30 daily said Eucharist in Lincoln Cathedral that day. 

 

I'll probably preach about St Aidan's feeling that fresh mission preaching should not be too harsh or demanding at the former service, and (very briefly given the context) about Jacob's ladder being pitched on deeply compromised ground at the latter.

An unvaccinated generation?

 

Both my local parish church and the one where I work have new young adult attenders.  Thing in our Mission Action Plans isn’t what has attracted them.  They have simply pitching up.  In some cases, at least for now, some of them are staying.

I am sure we can overhype it, not least because we’d dearly love to replace the narrative of terminal decline with that of what is being called ‘a quiet revival’, but something low key is going on.  It is a phenomenon being noticed and commented upon elsewhere. 

Post Covid, some of those in a serious generation explore on-line.  It appears that some of them are then seeking out places where they might expect to find a deep tradition being lived out. 

The Bible Society has done some research.  A fresh thought came to me listening in on one of their webinars.  My thought isn’t either a serious analysis nor a theory based on such.  It is more like a parable.

I used too frequently to make a poor joke.  It was about things like the Sunday School and school collective worship work to which I and others were giving significant time.  ‘It is like a vaccination,’ I would say, ‘a small harmless dose given to children now, designed to prevent them catching the real thing later in life’.

This seriously undervalued and insulted the dedication and the quality of work of many.  It also  ignored those whose Christian life was to develop and grow from such beginnings.  But any joke (however bad) depends on there being a tiny element of truth which people recognise.

My fresh thought is now this.  Young adults come from an unvaccinated generation, or at least from places where the level of vaccination has fallen sufficiently low for there to be a danger of pockets where the disease does break out.

The church has existed where the Christian disease is infectious and endemic.  It has also existed where wide spread vaccination has domesticated it to a relatively harmless level.  What we hadn’t expected to see is outbreaks among a new unvaccinated generation.

It isn’t that many people had ceased to enquire.  Everything from the Catholic Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults to the evangelical Alpha Course have been honed and made instantly available in response to this.  Middle of the road Anglican enquirers material does of course exist as well.

But I certainly don’t remember in forty years the steady trickle of such explorers simply turning up, perhaps even expecting us to be more articulate about and more transformed by the Gospel than we sometimes are.

I found a rather good (print size, notes, lay out) copy of St Matthew’s Gospel which I gave to one of them who asked for a Bible the other day.  He wasn’t sure that I’d understood his request because even school Religious Education  had not equipped him to recognise this to be (an accessible) part of the Bible.

Meanwhile, I’ve just noticed the two FP plaques (one on a house in Newport and one on a house in Danesgate).  They are obviously a pair, and there may be others around Lincoln.  They mark the distance to a Fire Plug – literally a bung in a hole in what was then a new water main. 

Presumably the main text (FP, Ft, In) is wrought, while the figures giving the actual distance in feet and inches had been less surely attached and had now fallen off

A new stage of life

 

Each Blog post obviously simply involves selecting an image and preparing a text.  Not in itself the most demanding thing in the middle of full-time work.  Something I did on average a couple of times a week over sixteen years. 

But it has proved surprisingly difficult to fit it into the ‘time off’ from a half-time job over the last eighteen months.  So much so that productivity has ceased. 

I’ve missed thinking through some of the things which strike me.  Even more, I have missed being able to return to the record of them.  This has always been more a notebook for myself than a newsletter for any others who might happen to look over my shoulder.

What is now my eighteen month licence as a priest supporting Grimsby Minster parish lasts until the end of this month, and the newly appointed full-time Vicar will come into post in the next few weeks.  It remains to be seen whether the old blogging pattern will resume after that. 

This actual post only comes because yesterday evening the impending storm led to the cancellation of my train north.  I now have three clear days when I was to be away to visit friends in Northumberland.

The carefully managed dislocation between thirty-seven years of stipendiary ministry and whatever priestly ministry was to follow was well aided by a compulsory gap of six months without a licence or any permission to officiate at all.

I thought I saw the point that those of us whose only experience of church membership over many years had been to have a measure of control, even when the ‘control’ is that of promoting collaboration.  We needed to get used to having no role at all before something quite different and supportive could have any chance of emerging.

Being called back for eighteen months into a role involving a level of strategic leadership has rather wrecked that, and I suspect that the dislocation will be harder a second time around.

I think I am beginning to see a deeper point.  Habitual delivery of ministry can be at the cost of the development of personal discipleship.  However much one guards against it, the obvious example is too often asking not so much ‘how do this Sunday’s readings cut into me?’ as ‘what shall I say about them?’. 

This isn’t just personal.  I’ve long been aware of the dangers involved in having to focus on the viability and growth of the church (business plan, fabric financing, mission statement, essential safeguarding) at the cost of, well, kingdom-seeking.  This just seems so much acute in the modern church.

The weighed down pilgrim is from John Bunyan’s grave visited last month.  The burden (which wasn't the reason to choose the image) did fall off.

40 years on

 

We celebrated in Lincoln Cathedral on Saturday thirty years since the first ordination of women as priests there.  I’m not quite sure why the Pentecost and Trinity Sunday ordinations in 1994 (there were so many candidates that we had two services in successive weeks, first for the long established female ministers, then for the relatively new ones) were only now being commemorated in September.

One of the three ordaining Bishops was there and reminded me that even in the 1970s the then Bishop of Lincoln was licensing a lay woman to take charge of a parish (with priestly support on a Sunday) and praying with the Movement for the Ordination of Women protesters outside the Cathedral before each ordination he conducted.

So the pattern was well established when I came to a first incumbency in Scunthorpe in the diocese in 1989 and almost immediately a woman deacon came to villages nearby as Deacon-in-Charge.  She was among those ordained priest at those first services five years later, and she was there on Saturday among quite a number of that first Lincoln batch.

The main oddity about the thirtieth anniversary service was how small scale it was; the first ordinations packed the large nave twice over, the anniversary service did not fill the choir.  Quite a number of robed female priests were in the procession, but only a handful of male ones.

And the following day was the anniversary of my own ordination as a priest, Michaelmas Day falling on a Sunday in 2024 as it had done in 1985.  I preached on Jacob’s ladder, and the idea that his claim ‘God is in this place, this is none other than the house of God (Beth-el), this is the gate of heaven’ might as appropriately be carved, etched or written on the inside of church doors to be read going out as on the outside to be read going in.

And, a day later, today is the fortieth anniversary of my first being ordained - a new deacon ready to be ordained priest a year later, unlike those being made deaconess at the same service.  Having first been licensed as a Curate that day in 1984, I’m still enjoying the serendipity which I've mentioned before of having been so licensed (albeit with a short-term half-time licence) again in 2024.

Meanwhile, the art installation in the Cathedral is of paper doves, on each of which someone had written a prayer for peace.

Three months further on

So, three months ago, I wrote

Working... in a parish thirty-five miles drive from home sometimes feels a foolhardy endeavour, especially when any particular request threatens to tip me beyond the ‘half-time’ limits set.  But actually the only real casualties so far has been the habit of blogging and any diligence in house cleaning. 

Which remains true.  

I’m not quite sure why the discipline of shaping and preserving an idea by making it a blog post length reflection and making an often-enough gesture towards a less dusty environment should be the things which feel most days like taking a step-too-far, but there it still is.

It may, of course, be age.  It was in 2019 that I was first offered a seat on a crowded train (between Naples and Pompeii); I wasn’t even 60.  It was in 2021 than I realised I’d lost the energy to work full time and look after a large house and garden; it was time to retire early.

My report is that last week, sitting in a back-row stall during Cathedral Evensong, I heard the opening of the second reading, and woke for the Gloria at the end of the Nunc Dimittis.  Only a brief doze, but another first.

Meanwhile, here is a picture taken after Matins in Grimsby Minster last week too.

Use of half-times

 

Working for the last eleven weeks half-time in a parish thirty-five miles drive from home sometimes feels a foolhardy endeavour, especially when any particular request threatens to tip me beyond the ‘half-time’ limits set.  But actually the only real casualties so far has been the habit of blogging and any diligence in house cleaning. 

The retirement focus I had discovered (on random bits of research and sharing) has survived, squeezed into the corners of my remaining half-time, culminating on a single recent extended weekend when I found myself both checking proofs for an article (not something I’d ever done before) for Brontë Studies and leading my assessed tour to qualify as a Cathedral Guide.

So here are poor photos of objects newly displayed at the Lincoln Museum and the Usher Gallery next door to each other and a short walk from my home.  The Roman dodecahedron, excavated not far away at Norton Disney, has been a national sensation.  Local student Nimra Qayyum’s Echoes of Exodus, Loss and Longing is rooted in the 1947 Indo-Pak separation, and deserves equal attention.