Weekly Reflection - 28th June - 5th July 2009
June 26, 2009
Tu es Petrus
Petertide, that season of the Church’s year in which we celebrate the life of the Apostle Peter, is traditionally the time for the ordination of priests and deacons. There is much to encourage them in his example. You are Peter, says Christ according to Matthew 16: 18, and upon this rock I will build my Church; but only five verses later, at 16: 23, the tone has changed, Get thee behind me, Satan!, which not only suggests that Jesus knew a thing or two about clergy, but also offers a realistic model for those clergy to aspire to. Christian ministry, depending as it does on the frail earthen vessels of Christian ministers, is often a slow progress, although you might not think so at the sight of those men and women this week emerging from theological colleges and training courses in their shiny new collars and stainless cassocks (among them Gillian Straine, late of this parish).
This year, however, some of them will be left behind on the starting line, because we seem to be producing more curates than we have jobs for. This is, in one sense, marvelous news, with more and more candidates, of very high calibre, offering themselves for ordained ministry, a statistic which bucks the downward trends we so often observe and gives us hope for the future of the Church. Last year London Diocese, for example, produced two dozen new curates, to serve in churches high and low from Cockfosters to Twickenham. This year the problem seems to be that some of the evangelical colleges, which have experienced a modest surge in numbers, simply can’t find enough suitable jobs for the Class of 2009.
Suitable jobs? It seems that some of their more hardline graduates are particularly picky over where they go. Career-minded conservative Evangelicals, like career-minded conservative Catholics, identify certain parishes as powerhouses, energetic in mission, rigorous in doctrine, the kinds of places where a bright young thing gets noticed. For them the prospect of spending three years in the Cambridgeshire fens doing BCP eight o’ clocks and Christingles is simply unthinkable, and definitely not part of the career-plan; so they hold out for a better offer.
I wonder if they’re not missing something here? It’s not their mission after all, but Christ’s; and dilatoriness in answering His call, or seeking to negotiate the package, seems rather nearer to Matthew 16: 23 than 16: 18.
Fr Richard Coles, Curate
Weekly Reflection - 21-28 June 2009
June 22, 2009
Dib dib dib!
In Boston (Lincs., not Mass.) on Wednesday for the seven hundredth birthday of its Parish Church I recalled the last time I participated in a significant birthday there - 2007 - when Scouts from all over the region gathered to celebrate their organisation’s Centenary. I was neither a Scout nor a Cub due to an ideological split with my older brother, a Sixer, which made it quite impossible for me in good conscience to wear the woggle. At the time I rather congratulated myself on getting out of something which would, no doubt, have led to all kinds of humiliations, like camping, singing Kumbaya, and going on jamborees (etymological note: in the language of the Australian Aboriginal Pitjanajarra tribe jamboree means ‘feast of tree grubs’).
It was a mistake. When I was a Curate I was chastened to discover how much the Scouts contributed to the life of the town, and how much scouting contributed to the lives its members. Some of them came from backgrounds that were so deprived that without the Scouts they would have had few opportunities to go on holiday, or to learn to be good at something, or to acquire the self-confidence to make progress at school and college and so on. I thought of some of those children, and the adults who worked tirelessly as Scout Leaders, this week, when I saw in the news that a mobile phone company has withdrawn an advertisement caricaturing a Scout Leader as a dreary nerd. The slogan read: ‘you may be good with knots, you may be good with children, but no way do you have fifty friends in your phone’. It is not only the advertisement’s smug self-regard that seems to have irritated so many people (the company was deluged with complaints), it also seems not to have noticed the new Chief Scout, appointed only last month, is not some bespectacled baldy in long socks and sandals but the TV adventurer Bear Grylls, who even the most jaded ‘2 kool 4 skool’ teenager would long to have in their phone. Most irritating, however, is its sly dismissal of the kinds of values Scout Leaders are supposed to represent; values like commitment, service, and self-sacrifice, values which seem to me have more substance to them, and to offer more to the rest of us, than boasting about how many ‘friends’ you have in your phone.
Long socks and sandals, however….
Fr Richard Coles, Curate