John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Starting over with Jesus

Starting over with Jesus - my last ever sermon at The Good Shepherd. We travel to Devon tomorrow and my licensing as Team Vicar takes place at St Petroc's, Lydford, on 15th December. Come, if you can...

A place in someone's country

So, you are asking, how did someone so steeped in the city decide to take a welly-wearing plunge into rural life? You presume, correctly, that it took some time to get to the point of saying 'yes' to the Bishop of Plymouth and the people of those five Devon parishes. Here's the story of the journey.

It began back in March when our eyes were drawn to a document attached to the noticeboard outside Iona Parish Church: 'Wanted: a Minister, for this and two other churches on the Ross of Mull'. This was quite an awakening for us. The dawning of a realisation that a new start in a new place was probably what we needed, and wanted. The feeling of a thrill at the idea that somewhere like Iona and the Ross of Mull could be a fruitful and interesting place for me to minister, a very different environment offering interesting new challenges. We spoke to people in the Church of Scotland. I digested numerous secondhand books about Church of Scotland ministry, past and present. Eventually and disappointingly a Tartan Curtain fell on the possibility of this outsider being invited to join them there, but our appetite for change had been whet, our imaginations opened to new possibilities in the rural.

Then followed months of enquiries and travels around the country, triggered by the jobs ads in the Church Times and lengthy and late-night trawls of the vacancies pages of all the diocesan websites; over and over again.

Months of travels - to spy through hedges at vicarages and rectories in Cheshire-set villages and English Heritage ecclesiastical sites; to make reaquaintances with friends and collegues from previous stages on my journey - taking their inviations to 'come and see' places which they thought might just be the 'one for us' - a North Yorkshire market town, parishes tucked under the Clwyd hills; to collect reams of musty papers from tables at the back of ancient churches - handwritten histories, diocesan newssheets, parish magazines - taking care to place coins in metal boxes in the wall to compensate.

We went to places full of history and Iona-like potential (Lanercost Priory, Holy Island), which we loved, but the people didn't want us there. We popped in on parishes deep in green Shropshire and high on Salisbury Plain. We drove across the Snake Pass for a look at some parishes in an area returning to nature after the demise of the mining industry. We sat in the car park of a church plant in stockbroker Surrey and we spent two days in London for interviews to get my name on bishops' wish-lists (an afternoon at Lambeth Palace where a staff member mistook me for a member of the Papal party and nearly whisked me into a  high-level multilingual talk with ++Rowan). I considered everywhere - Estuary Essex, distant Kent, the West Cumbrian coast; all had their particular appeal.

Midway through September a close family member told us that their vicar had just announced his departure and suggested we might apply for that post. But by then we'd made our second trip down the M5 and had accepted the invitation from Okehampton, which even in those circumstances we didn't regret.

I've read some very good books on rural ministry whilst making these journeys; and had some excellent conversations with friend who already know what it's like. Of these, David Osborne's The Country Vicar stood out for me (summary - you can't fit the traditional mould when you have multiple parishes in your care. It can work if the people there work hard with you on agreeing the parameters for your ministry).

But another sort of book altogether was a joy and a great help too: A Place in my Country: in search of a rural dream, by Ian Walthew, who like many people made the transition from the city to the country with integrity, and who learned a lot about country ways through adventure and misadventure. Walthew paints an intelligent and positive picture of his experience of rural living, even through the heartbreak of finding it unsustainable and having to take his work back where the money was, away from the distraction of messing about with his farmhand neighbours.

I have the privilege of being supported to live in the country. It still feels like someone else's country at the moment, on the cusp of arriving there. It's great to be invited to share it, and I hope over time to feel like Ian Walthew did, eventually: belonging there too.