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.
