THE ISSUES ARE WORTH WORKING THROUGH: STARTING MINISTRY DURING A PANDEMIC

Photo by Tim Rogers.

It was the second day of the ordination retreat and I was a bit of a mess. I was not frustrated at one particular thing, but myriad things, so the retreat director asked me to think about what my feelings were saying to me. Putting pen to paper, I tried to explain what was churning inside me.

All of these negative things and all of these good things bring together a spectrum of emotion and instead of it being a clear, refined colour, it creates a muddy ambiguous brown. It creates an indistinguishable shade that is overbearing, but trying to see which colours have contributed to it seems like a hopeless task.

It was like a number of paints had been mixed together, but because they were such a range - and all at once - I couldn’t immediately pin down what the individual feelings were. I slowly began dissecting the mucky brown feeling as best as I could, picking out the individual colours that had contributed to it.

A month and a half prior my wife and I had been in a theological training college in Oxford. For the past three years we had eaten, argued, prayed and formed deep rooted friendships with fellow students. I had mentally prepared to leave in June 2020;I was raring to go, to enter the real world and leave behind the academic Disneyland of Oxford. We had not prepared for a lockdown which would force us to leave without properly saying goodbye. Friends would disperse, returning to families or moving to future places of ministry. It felt that we had been robbed of closure for this significant chapter of our lives.

We were also slightly concerned for our future social lives post-college. Making friends in a new area of work is never easy, so for the public to have been on lockdown made it nigh impossible to meet people our own age or attend things that similar minded people go to. We felt that our options would be limited and that it would likely be disheartening to arrive in a new town with the chance to start feeling settled significantly stunted.

But above all these thoughts and feelings, at the forefront of my mind during the retreat was what awaited me the following day at the ordination service. On the one hand, I was thrilled to be getting ordained. It had been a trajectory to which my life had been oriented for so long; it had been something that we had prayed about for ages. Instead of sending out mass emails inviting anyone and everyone to this joyous occasion, I’d had to carefully select 10 people to attend. There was a profound sadness caused by the fact that my family lives on an island in the middle of the Irish Sea. With no live cases of Covid-19 there, the borders had been closed with travel to the UK only permitted in absolute emergencies. There was simply no chance they could attend. During our discussions about their attendance, my heart was breaking, but I did my best to put on a brave face.

Once I was ordained and in post, there were ongoing emails updating me on seemingly nonsensical announcements made by the government regarding worship. Clarity emerged after these through decisions made by the House of Bishops. It was all uncertain as to what was allowed and how long these updates would last before new updates would be provided. To someone new to ministry in this context, it was perplexing and there were regular Zoom meetings featuring comparisons between churches and their approaches to the ‘new rules’.

It was strange because despite all these difficulties, there were moments when the church seemed to step into her own.

Because of lockdown, the house that we were due to move into was not available as originally planned. When we arrived in our temporary home, the local churches had left us numerous cards and flowers to welcome us. It really made us feel as though we were joining something, stepping into a family we didn’t know we had. By complete coincidence (or divine providence depending on your church tradition) the next door neighbour to our temporary home happened to work at the church as a youth leader. We grew close to them as a family. Her husband taught me how to brew beer and we’d frequently spend time in their garden sharing cuppas or dinner. We were also introduced to a group of other curates in the area, who we spent time with, trading stories and laughs with an appropriate social distance between us. With each person we met there was almost always a referral to someone else that we needed to meet – and sure enough, even though we hadn’t realised it, we did need to meet them.

On the 6th August 2020, our group from the Diocese of Norwich were the first cohort in England to get ordained. It took place in pairs along with the limited number of friends and family who could attend. At all times, face masks and social distancing could be seen. On the day, our director of ordinands set up a makeshift broadcasting station in the corner of the cathedral, so it could be livestreamed for friends and family members that could not attend in person. My wife was invited to do a reading, adding a personal touch that I could not have imagined would move me as it did. It was a powerful and moving service. God was there.

The weeks of both pre and post-ordination ministry were filled with conversations with my incumbent that confused me for a number of reasons. Because of government guidelines, the number of weddings had diminished almost entirely. The funerals continued, but with extremely strict and specific guidelines. Our conversations involved pouring over guidelines, updating and implementing risk assessments, conversing with churchwardens. I was there to learn how to conduct the occasional offices – offices that I would be faced with repeatedly for the rest of my life, and yet our time was occupied by something that was a once in a lifetime occurrence. The pandemic had changed how we would conduct church services dramatically. Instead of being taught how to conduct the occasional offices, I saw how my incumbent made and communicated decisions about what the next chapter of church life together would look like. It was like being presented with a mathematics problem and being shown how to solve the problem – sitting and watching as someone else shows their “workings out”. This was not the training that I had expected at all, but it was the training that perhaps I will come to rely heavily upon.

Throughout this time, we have felt stressed and frustrated – things were not operating as they usually did, or as they “should”. There continue to be times when it’s entirely appropriate to mourn these changes and losses. But despite that, we have been privy to seeing the church flourish in ways that we would not have seen otherwise. With the switch to include online services, I had numerous phone calls in which parishioners explained that this new way had helped them better connect with the church due to mobility issues. The welcome we had received as a couple revealed God’s love for the stranger in ways that we had never experienced ourselves before. The ordination service, that included my wife and the kindness of a Diocesan Director of Ordinands who felt the need to learn how to livestream, revealed how the church could make efforts to add personal touches to holy moments without compromising them. The resilience and creativity of the church in dealing with myriad issues showed us that the church took the gospel seriously and thought these issues were worth working through.

We have been touched by the kindness of strangers who have taught us a great deal about the nature of God. We are proud to say that we are called to serve right now in this, God’s church.