Vocation Day

I attended a vocation day last weekend.   The day it self was well organised and contained some really wonderful testimonies from people in forms of ministry on their journey and arriving where they are now.

The Ordained candidate was particularly inspirational in retelling his story as a series of post cards giving snapshots of his journey from Infant Sunday School, through unbelief and a virtual lifetime without God, until prompted by his children attending Sunday School, he discovered God and Christianity and later a vocation.   A remarkable journey indeed.  With God working throughout and only being acknowledged in Early middle age.

Considering where I am at the moment, waiting for an interview with a DDO, I actually got some direct feedback at the state of the Ordination Process in the Church at the moment, which if delivered in a different manner, might have been considered a discouragement towards offering for Ordained Ministry.

The path to Ordained Ministry is pretty well mapped out in the Ministry Division documentation, but the reality is that the Bishop makes the policy for their diocese and it is variable and each Bishop will have their own ideas and view on the process

Some factors are consistent across all diocese - Discernment via the DDO process, and recommendation for Bishops Assessment Panel and if successful a Recommendation for Training.   All stages including each part of the training package require a further recommendation up to and including Ordination itself - so a candidate can be found unsuitable at any stage and basically discontinued.

There appears to be issues with Stipendiary, with age limits applied, which require a candidate to be able to offer 7 years of service at incumbent status before retirement, after Training and Curacy - or it is not cost effective to pay for the training - how many good candidates have fallen through the net due to this?

What was obvious that if you put more candidates forward for training than the number of curacies your diocese can offer - at some stage, someone is going to either not be ordained or will have to scrabble around for a curacy external to their ordaining diocese.

For Non-Stipendiary Ministry and Ordained Local Ministry, while the same constraints are not applied - the reality appears to be, that they might be informally applied within a diocese to save money.

The deployment of Stipendiary and Non-Stipendiary Ministry is National, means that post ordination - they may be sent wherever the Bishop or Province might need them.  Even Ordained Local Ministry now means Diocese wide - therefore, those offering for Ordination within a Parish context have no guarantee of serving there - the bishop will deploy them, where they are needed, not where they wish to serve.

The message is to inject a sense of realism into any vocation where Ordained Ministry is discerned as the call - because it is going to be a rocky path, with the possibility of the door being slammed shut at any time, with little or no real choice in where you serve.

Despite all of this - I still feel that the path I am on cannot be just dropped due to a slightly negative message - it is to important to allow that to happen.

So, where and what is to happen - God Only Knows, as I don't.