Over the next week I have four potential candidates for my post coming to have a look at the job and the premises (less leafy-looking than in the photo obviously) close up and personal. It will, no doubt, be fascinating to meet them all and to hear and see their reactions to this old place and to what the job actually involves within and beyond any black and white job description.
I think I have really been taken aback by how much interest there has been in succeeding me, just I imagine, as there was when I succeeded my gracious predecessor and by how much of it has come from people in the ‘rank and file’ of the parish clergy. Taken aback mainly because there are still two weeks until the closing date for applications comes around. But also taken aback because the life of a parish priest or minister is fundamentally different from this life. I always thought they were the same, but actually the nature of the role and the working environment are chalk and cheese. The accountability is less, the flexibility much greater, the hierarchy more pervasive.
Yes, there have been those who could do in their sleep what I do each day and do it better because they are experienced school chaplains in boarding environments, but to me it says a lot that there are men and women coming from the coal-face of congregational ministry who want, for their own reasons, to find out more and then possibly give it a go.
Yesterday in this regard I had my first experience of good old Skype working on our network and having an excellent and fluent conversation involving minimal delays with another potential candidate from across the Pond in North America. Love technology – we should have had this years ago.
For me though, entirely inexperienced as I was in independent education, I still think of the persistent feelings of dread when by bottom first landed on the leather chair in my study that August morning in 2007 and I was somewhat paralysed by it all and pondered the classical clerical question and dilemma, “So what shall I do now?” I think I asked that question a lot for the first term I was here, but then it got easier – familiarity with routines, knowing one’s place, knowing the names, knowing how it all fits together, all helped – and of course the kindness of strangers.
Despite this inevitable challenge for those looking at this from a parish context, equally, there is something about the freshness of never having done a job before to make a person see new things and dream new possibilities – even if many of them because of the restrictions of time and context never come to pass.
