Quite an easy start this very sunny morning, with a quarter of an hour's drive from home to St Michael's Tongwynlais to stand in for the Vicar at the Parish Eucharist. I enjoy going there, not simply because of the warm and welcoming nature of the community, but also because this is the village where my father dawdled his way to school to learn his letters and numbers a century ago. I had to discipline myself to keep strictly to the homily I prepared earlier in the week, so that I could finish on time to drive straight back to St Michael's College for this year's Leavers' service. Eleven students coming to the end of their courses. Ten to be made deacon and one sent out for a period of lay ministry in a Cardiff parish, while she settles into married life, before eventual ordination.
The service was longer than usual, as it included blessing the leavers, handing over stoles of office and certificates of course completion. I blessed Rufus and Rachel, two of the leavers in my group. It was great to see Rachel's dad had come to support her. In the case of Cath, the last ever Methodist student, and one of my tutor group, she received a Communion set for use in her pastorate as a probationer minister prior to eventual ordination, and was given the customary Right Hand of Fellowship by Dr John Wilkes our Methodist staff member.
It's such a shame that the immediate ecumenical dimension of residential training in St Mikes has been lost after several decades of collaboration. Every denomination has its own survival strategy, however, and while that leads to a certain drawing apart, hopefully it doesn't signify any loss of good will, only a lack of creative imagination in forging a common future in the face of resources lost. It seems to me that all our institutions may have to die out before there is a real practical reconciliation of churches able to value and work with each others' different histories and traditions. I thought I'd live to see it, but inertia for truly radical change was lost decades ago.
Today was my final appearance in College as a group tutor. I have enjoyed accompanying students over the past two years, and it's been challenging and demanding on times, not simply in the Lent term when I was locum Dean of Residential Training. It was good to work as part of an excellent staff team and to share in careful thinking about developments in curriculum and models of training. However, I often felt inadequate to the responsibilities of the task, and behind that lay a feeling of powerlessness in the face of inability to change anything that would really make life together for students more bearable. It's a down side of retirement, I guess.
My desire is to stick with offering locum duties mostly in situations that need to benefit from familiarity and continuity during times of change. I wish the training system was flexible enough to allow a handful of students to accompany me in the range of pastoral duties I get to cover. In future each minister is likely to be covering a wider area, and will need to adapt to many more circumstances and people than is normal even in a broadly diverse parish. There's nothing better than learning by doing.
The limitation of College is that all are faced with having to conform to a university culture of learning that leaves too little time for spiritual formation, and living with differences in community. Combined pressures train future clergy to be workaholics, and don't really give them the right quality of time together to learn in depth from each other's way of faith. The one thing that conflict between students of different religious opinions revealed to me was how little some knew about or understood, let alone respected the faith of others unlike themselves.
For all the higher theological input students receive, it means they are likely to emerge from training looking more like survivors rather than initiates transformed and enabled by a formative experience. It's nothing a year's diaconate won't put right, if they're lucky to get the right kind of supervision. But to my mind that only shows how much all ministerial formation and scholarly learning needs to be rooted in the communities students are being prepared to serve. I campaigned on that issue forty five years ago when I was a St Mike's student. It's improved, getting closer to being that way, but there's still much that needs to change before the paradigm shift takes place.
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