This was a search term that recently led someone to my blog. So I thought maybe I could start by drawing one up as I go along over the next twelve months. I’ll try and make it a regular feature.
The Vicar's Wife
If you’re reading and also doing the same job, I’d love to have your contributions too.
This week I’m still not officially a vicar’s wife, but there have been a few phone calls to the vicarage, and I needed to know:
- How someone could hire the church hall.
- Whether a baby living nearly five miles away could be ‘christened’ in our church, as our phone number had been at the top of the list in the Thompson directory. The mother wanted to change the baby’s name in the ceremony.
- The meaning of firmament, purgatory and two other more difficult words I’d never heard before.
The Vicar's Wife 
Best tip I can offer is to get a second phone line installed, so you effectively have a business line, and a personal line, and keep the personal line ex-directory.
Our vicar’s wife then doesn’t answer the business line, allowing it to go through to an answer phone.
I’ll read with interest, being married to ministry myself!
One thing I find is that because they have told your other half something, people assume you know the whole story too. They approach me, start where they left off, and I have no clue! I have had to say: if you specifically want me to know something, you’ll have to tell me yourself!
Hello rt. Welcome to the vicarage and thank you for your tip. So far I’m enjoying answering (or trying to answer) these interesting questions, but we’ll see how frequent they are. We’re in a fairly small parish, so we’re not expecting an awful lot of them… And I like talking to people, even if I can’t answer their questions.
Hi – it may have been me who found your blog that way.
My husband is just starting out on the road to becoming a vicar- it’s a LONG while off yet, he’s only just about to return all his forms – so there is still a chance he may not make it. Think it’s what God wants though, so I’m going with the idea that it will.
Even though I knew that is was highly likely that this would happen at some point, it all seemed to happen rather suddenly and then I realised that actually him being a vicar would put a lot of expectations on me from other people, so I was worrying about that. I like to be prepared!
This will be really interesting to read- thank you!
Welcome Lucy. I try to keep in the loop with the Vicar, but I know it can be difficult to know everything that’s happening. I always think that if I don’t know about something that’s going on, it’s a good sign of a growing and busy church!
Great to hear from you Amy. How exciting to be starting out along the process of going into clergy life. We have been working for the dear old CofE for nearly four years now, plus three at college. People do seem to have expectations of clergy wives, but so far I’ve not found them too stressy. But now the Curate is the Vicar things may change a bit…
What did you tell the person asking for definitions?
(I am expecting the answer to be that they are now signed up for a six week Christianity Explored course with the vicar.)
Hello Ros. I was a bit shakey on my definitions, and said I would love to chat after church. No CE course arranged yet….
So I’m not a vicar’s wife, but as the Assistant’s wife, the weirdest thing I was asked to do was to catch a bat threatening to fly into the creche area whilst the church meeting was happening.
Of course, noone was to know that was what I was doing, lest I scare the feeble.
It’s probably the only time I’ll resemble Catwoman.
Noone prepared me for that.
Well, we’ve had the first comment (complaint?) about the church yard which I let the Vicar deal with. And lots of …. I know you haven’t started yet but can you just…
[…] My first post in this little series on the job description for a Vicar’s wife was about phone calls I answered early on in our time here in the Vicarage. The first comment was from rtpeat, who […]