4 18/11/2010

I thought you might be interested in a little more detail about how I am being trained to be a Vicar, so here is one part of it:

I’m part of a pastoral group with other students at college who like me are working at St Matthews and Woodlands church.  There are 10 of us as well as our college tutor.  We meet up on a Monday from 9-2 alternating between St Matthew’s and Woodland’s team leadership meetings.  At about 10.30 we break off from the leadership meetings and spend a couple of hours either discussing an element of spirituality (based on a book called ‘Spirituality workbook’ by David Runcorn) or doing a group theological reflection  based on something that had happened in the past week.  The theological involves learning how to apply the ‘academic’ theological teaching that we get at college to  real events that we faced at church or college that week.  We then share lunch together and for the rest of the time the church leader will join us and either have some input about church leadership (i.e. preaching styles, organisation, team leadership) or open it up to us to ask any question we might have about church leadership, from personal factors (how to maintain your spiritual life in a leadership position) to the practical (how to avoid burnout or engage with the local community).  We also meet on a Friday at college to pray and talk for 40mins before lectures start.

I would also like to say how thankful I am to St Paul’s, your pray and financial support is absolutely amazing.  On the financial side, your giving has been a real answer to prayer as I didn’t have enough to cover this first year and was worrying where it would come from.  But over the last couple of weeks I’ve had a couple of checks come through the post from people at St Paul’s which has put this worry to one side, a real answer to prayer, thank you.

On another note, things with Zoe are going great (again your prayers are really appreciated) and we have now both got the scary ‘meet the parents’ bit out the way!!!