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Posts Tagged ‘vicar’

Leaky Vicarage, Soggy Church

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on 14 January, 2014| 6 Comments »

Today the diocese sent some chaps round. Don’t worry, they’ve not discovered that I mistook the liturgical season for Christmas instead of Epiphany. We’re keeping that one quiet. The chaps came round after we reported the repeated leaks in our living room ceiling. They’ve known about them for ages actually. And sent chaps round before. The chaps sealed the window in the living room a few times. And then they sealed our bedroom window sill a few times too. And then we’ve had more weather (strong winds and heavy rain do it best) and the leaks have continued and the Vicar has worked out the path the water has been taking (under our bedroom window sill, down the inside of the wooden panelling above our window and then into the panel above the window in the living room).

The panelless living room ceiling

The panelless living room ceiling

The Vicar’s latest email to the diocese mentioning possible damp and rot elicited a rapid response team who arrived today. And they had to take the panelling down in the living room. It was rotten. And there are some patches of rot in the oak lintel above but they can be treated. And the window sill above is now covered in felt. They’re going to reinstate everything when the promised double glazing arrives next month and things have dried out.

And this evening the Vicar had to head to the church basement, where the boilers live. There, appropriately dressed in wellies and rubber gloves, he discovered that the sump pump intake was blocked with leaves and other debris. A trugful of slimy gunk later, he was able to start the pump again and hopefully tomorrow the basement will be free of water.

These have been minor irritations compared to what others have suffered in this recent damp spell, but I’ll be glad when the weather perks up a bit, I must say.

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The Black Country is Best

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 11 January, 2014| 3 Comments »

If you saw my pretty pictures taken from Dudley Zoo, you’ll remember that the Black Country is a beautiful place. And so are its people. And that’s why you should apply for a job here. Especially if you are ordained, because three evangelical Anglican churches (fairly) local to us are looking for new leaders:

St Matthew’s Walsall is the civic church for Walsall. Lots of opportunities and challenges in a multicultural town of over 67,000 people. Job vacancy details on their website.

And Holy Trinity Heathtown is in a deprived part of Wolverhampton but has a lively congregation wanting to reach out. Advert, parish profile and summary from the Lichfield Diocesan site.

St Matthew’s Tipton is the closest to us. and affiliated with New Wine. Advert and profile, again from the diocesan site. Tipton is another typical post industrial Black Country tow-un, with high levels of deprivation and a great need for the gospel.

So don’t delay! Apply today! I don’t *think* they’ll be using Dave Walker’s application process.

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Not Gone But Who?

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 2 October, 2013| 4 Comments »

Who has been sleeping in the holly bush at the entrance to the church? We’ve not seen them, but they seem to have built quite a little den. But since Gone is away at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, we don’t have an immediate suspect. I’m afraid the bush dweller may be disappointed tonight, as we’re clearing out this evening and the Vicar will be taking the debris to the dump.

There’s a funeral in church tomorrow and it’s respectful to the mourners to provide a tidy churchyard. The bush is right next to the church steps by the main entrance door. The church is being cleaned too, as we’ve had scaffolding in whilst damp plaster and ant chewed woodwork right up in the ceiling above the chancel has been removed and repaired. Theological college training can never cover all the bases for ministry life.

Bed (and sitting room it seems) in the bush

Bed (and sitting room it seems) in the bush

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Vicarage Recruitment Drive

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 9 September, 2013| 1 Comment »

The lovely Radiohead left our attic yesterday. He’s headed back home and is busy applying for jobs in teaching. So now there’s a space in the Vicarage for a new Ministry Trainee.

We’re looking for someone who has a passion for people and for seeing God at work in their lives. You don’t have to be considering ordination, although the Diocesan Director of Ordinands would be very happy to see you and two of our previous attic dwellers have taken that path, and Red, who’s still here, is aiming for a dog collar. Perhaps you’d like some time to think about ministry life, or just want to serve in a church before going into something else.

A fondness for cake and the ability to negotiate your way around a cluttered family home might be an advantage. And you should know that we have a cat, a fish and a rodent. But you don’t have to have the rodent sit on your head if you don’t want to. If it’s not for you, maybe there’s someone you know who might be up for Vicarage life. Do please point them in our direction.

More details can be found on our church website. And below you can see a pic of Radiohead and Red in their attic living room, where they are able to escape from the pets, the clutter and the mayhem. If the kids don’t follow them up there…

Working hard. Or possibly on Facebook.

Working hard. Or possibly playing games. There’s time for both.

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The Ministry of a Messy House

Posted in Church, Faith, Fun, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on 13 November, 2012| 33 Comments »

The Vicarage often seems to be heading for this state

Before the Vicar started at theological college, we spent time with some wise friends, Muso and Holy, who were already living on campus there. Theological college can be a funny old place where relationships are often very intense – with people studying, worshipping and living with one another, you get to see each other in very sharp focus. Our friends explained how college was a community of saints – and also a community of sinners.

Holy knew me pretty well and she warned me that I should be careful how I came across because (she said)

Some people might find you a bit intimidating…

Can’t think what gave her that idea. Apart from me being very loud, self confident and bossy, that is. And quite tall. So I arrived at college fully determined to restrain myself as much as possible. The Lord clearly thought I’d be unable to do this unaided, so actually what happened when we started was that I contracted a horrible virus and was laid up in bed for about a month. No chance of being too scary then. Or so I hoped.

Later, when we’d settled in, I thought I’d check up on how I’d done with the not-being-frightening thing, so I asked a new friend about it. Did she think I was intimidating when she first met me? I’d not done as well as I thought because she replied:

I did at first….  But then I saw your house…

I give you this story as an example of why housework may not be that important. And why it’s good to share our failings. And why sitting on the computer writing a blogpost is *far* more important than doing that washing up. Or any dusting. Ever. Just think of it as ministry.

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The Vicar on Video

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on 14 March, 2012| 6 Comments »

We’ve slowly been souping up our rather basic church website over the past few months. The best thing we did was get our kind computer-literate friend to change it to a WordPress platform, which was familiar to us from blogging. The old site used Joomla and was just too difficult for us to get our heads around.

We try and update the site a couple of times a week to keep it live, and it seems that people are beginning to use it a little. Most of our congregation aren’t on the internet, but we think that the website is especially important for those who aren’t yet in church.

In our quest to make the site friendly and useful, a video of the Vicar has now been produced by Capable, a church member, and Compassion, who is a great friend of our congregation. I think they’ve done a great job and we’re hoping it’ll be a good introduction for people visiting the website. At least they won’t be surprised by the Vicar’s Scottish accent!

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Come and Hope with us

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , on 25 January, 2012| 1 Comment »

This summer our lodger Rocky is marrying Bee and leaving the delights of our chilly Victorian vicarage for theological college to train as a vicar himself. When he leaves a space will open up in our attic for another Ministry Trainee (or hopefully two). Our Ministry Trainees are involved with all aspects of church life, leading work with children and youth and small groups, they visit parishioners and have many many opportunities to exercise their gifts. They truly get to see ministry from the inside. If you think you (or anyone you know) might like to spend time living in our house, serving our community and learning about God, with the added incentive of plentiful cake and some lively children for company, do get in touch.

More details are on our church website.

Lovely living accommodation

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Writing Right: Recording For Posterity

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 24 May, 2011| 24 Comments »

Last week I made the unhappy discovery that the Vicar is meant to write his marriage registers in indelible ink. It’s obvious when you think about it – you don’t want your marriage certificate to fade after a few years, but unfortunately we hadn’t thought about it and hadn’t had it pointed out either. This information wasn’t included in ordination training, nor in the diocesan training for curates (as far as the Vicar remembers, anyway). Thankfully (and rather sadly), in our sort of parish there aren’t many marriages at all and those that there are aren’t often in church, so not too many documents were filled out in evil biro before we discovered this.

Having found out about the need for the special ink, I made some enquiries and have the following information for anyone else who is similarly underinformed about writing legal documents:

  1. Apparently, ink should be to ISO 12757-2.
  2. You can get pens with this special international standard ink from Staedtler (who incidentally make the world’s best felttips, in Vicarage experience).
  3. Traditionally, Registrar’s Ink has been used. The original recipe contains iron gall and clogs up fountain pens. You can buy a fountain pen for your registers and flush it out if you prefer a scratchy pen to Staedtler’s ones. [Late edit: A reader has ordered from the Registrar’s Ink website and his pen was a Parker vector, supplied with a Parker quink convertor.]
  4. Registrar’s ink does not fade from documents, nor from carpet, in the unhappy experience of one of my informants.

Hopefully this blogpost will prevent the writing of a few registers in dodgy ink in the future. I suspect that as the number of church weddings continues to decrease, clergy will be less familiar with this requirement and fading ink registers may become more numerous.

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Weekend Adventures at the Vicarage

Posted in Faith, Inner city, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 16 May, 2011| Leave a Comment »

My head is still spinning a bit after this weekend. On Friday an old pal from our Cambridge church turned up on our doorstep wanting a bed for a few nights – he’s on a walking tour of the country. My parents also came to stay and Rocky’s fiancee stopped over Saturday and Sunday nights. So we’ve had a houseful.

So far, so fairly normal – we’re glad that we can accommodate plenty of folk and love to show hospitality. But then the Vicar and I were both busy on Saturday – he on a Bishop’s Quiet Day and I on a Food Hygiene training course. And I was teaching Junior Church on Sunday and obviously it’s a pretty busy day for the Vicar aswell. So that made our schedules seem extra packed. We were very grateful to the grandparents who entertained the Queen, the Joker and the Engineer to soft play and a Chinese buffet whilst the Vicar and I attended our Saturday events.

But besides all the busy-ness, we’ve had some bother with buildings. Firstly, two of the Vicarage windows now have stone holes in them – a small pane in the living room and an enormous pane in the kitchen. Unsupervised primary school age children have been playing a stone-throwing game in the church yard so we think the damage is accidental rather than malicious. Doesn’t stop it being very annoying, though. The kids have now been banned from the church yard until we can work out something with the parents so that games don’t get out of hand and result in the sort of trouble that happened this week. The Vicar’s long-term desire to raise funding for a Families and Community worker gets an extra impetus every time something like this occurs.

And the banning of kids from the church yard now seems like a very wise move indeed after the discovery on Sunday morning of a plaster rose from the church clock face, shattered on the floor by the front door of the church. So the front doors had to be cordoned off and the congregation had to come into church through the North door. That made it extra embarrassing for the latecomers, who came in in full sight of everyone else. Various people have suggested calling the new Bishop of Ebbsfleet to sort things out with the masonry. Failing that we’ll be getting the builders in to ensure that things are safe and noone has the sky falling on their heads on their way into church.

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Census Confusion

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 25 March, 2011| 26 Comments »

As Formfiller-In-Chief in the Vicarage, the lovely census form falls to me. Actually, we have two of them, as the database people think that The Vicarage at House Number, Street Name is a different dwelling to House Number, Street Name. Anyway, I will be communing with the forms over the weekend and battling with the usual question:

What exactly does your husband DO?

Before I get to the that, there’s the question of the Vicarage itself. I’m not sure whether our landlord is the Vicar’s employer or not, as he’s not officially ’employed’ – he’s an ‘office holder’ and the house is part of his ‘freehold’.

And then, of course, there is the employment question. The Vicar is not really an employee (although the diocese handle his stipend and he answers to the bishop), nor self-employed (though many of the ways that HMRC look at him are similar). I think he may be ‘doing any other kind of paid work’. The folk over at Thinking Anglicans are also wrestling with this and are suggesting ticking all the boxes in the first employment question (26) – although I think that option is really for people who have more than one job.

Alas, you do not have that choice for Question 33 and you must choose between being an employee and being self-employed. What will you all be choosing? And there is also the challenge of describing what you do in your main job. Pastor-teacher? Cure of souls? Ministry? Preaching the word and administering the sacraments?

I’m also looking forward to answering Q37: At your workplace, what is the main activity of your employer? If we go with the thought that the Vicar is employed by the Lord, I could have some fun with this: Running the universe. Upholding all things by His powerful word. For example.

Looking forward to hearing your suggestions. And it’s meant to be completed by Sunday…

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