Even after a good night's sleep I was tired getting up today. Clare needed to car to get to school, so I walked to College. With just moderate gusts of wind it was bitterly cold. After the Eucharist, there were mini croissants for breakfast along with toast, and that made a comforting change. Porridge might have been better for the weather however. I chatted with students over breakfast, worked in my office until Peter returned from a meeting at the Baptist College, then after a brief conversation with him I went into town on the bus with a few tech tasks to perform in the CBS office and bring Julie up to speed on preparations to switch over to a new Sage accounts package.
Tomorrow we're having a training session on aspects of account set-up. After my long conversation with Ashley last night, there were lots of preliminary questions to be asked about what we can and cannot achieve with the new system, so I spent an hour brainstorming and writing them down on a large piece of paper - I know I will arrive after our trainer and it's vital to get as many of our basic questions as possible answered in advance of tackling the hard stuff. By the time I'd done that, I had to return to College in time to welcome Canon Robert Donkin guest preacher for Evensong in the series I prepared for this term. He was in St Mike's three years after I left. We got to know each other when I worked for USPG in Wales a decade later. Now he's Rector of Caerphilly, where I did my first curacy. So, it was a special pleasure to welcome him and introduce him to students before the service began.
In the sacristy beforehand, he admitted he was nervous about preaching in College, his first visit since he left. I told him that was how I felt when I started as a voluntary tutor eighteen months ago. He delivered a beautifully crafted address that stated with great clarity and directness all that I could have wished he might say about formation for a 'Discipleship of Sacrifice' our theme for the term. Back in the eighties, I preached for him several times and looked after Sunday services in Aberaman when he was on holiday. This was the first time I had ever heard him preach. He's a credit to the College, as it was in my era.
Despite all the flaws and limitations of training in those days, (it's so much better now than it was then) we were blessed with some great mentors and role models.Their influence helped to sustain us through decades of ministry. Many things we learned, we questioned in those days, only later realising their value and feeling grateful we hadn't been spared them. Now we're the ones mentoring and influencing those in the position we were forty years ago. It's a bit awe inspiring and nerve wracking for us oldies, but what a privilege to share the same vocation and the same passion for mission and evangelism with people shaped by such different environments.
Nobody in this generation of ordinands chooses to engage in Church ministry as a secure option. Very few did forty years ago too, the change of ethos in the world we inhabited put an end to that idea. In my college time, we began learning anew the meaning of mission and evangelism. We were just awakening to the fact that the centuries of established 'Christendom' were over, like it or not. We were still digesting the assertion Paul Tillich made a generation before us, that Christians now had to "earn the right to speak of God" We were slow learners. You could say were were too late, considering the demise of the church since we were young and full of zeal. What's so humbling is a new generation, eager to continue on the same path, despite challenge and discouragement.
God never leaves Himself without witness.
No comments:
Post a Comment