Jules has posted some useful tips for people starting "vicar school."
I'd just to like to add that weird combination of "alt-lit" the congregation will never let you get away with in real life, combined with over-sensitivity / preciousness / fear of offence. Which can also spin off into superb fussiness. Basically if you go for lunch and there's a sign up saying they will only cater for meat eaters, vegetarians and people with genuine food allergies - you're probably at some kind of church meeting and quite likely a vicar school.
The Book of Common Prayer is a work of beauty. The hymns of the Wesleys a delight. The Traditional Mass a thing of profound beauty.
So if you find yourself leading a service focused on Mother Julian of Norwich, and you've got the sound of doves crying on the PA, and you want to give everyone a hazelnut to contemplate - but it's spring so you got a bag of shelled hazelnuts from Waitrose - but then you worry about nut allergies so instead of handing them out you put them in bowls as nibbles - but then you're worried about the people with nut allergies feeling left out, so you have to rush out and buy some of Mother Julian's favourite flavour of Doritos - you've hit peak vicar school. Either you have to get ordained and do some real life, or you join the Beaker Folk.
Good job I never went. Yes, the BCP is wonderful, but not all of the time.
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest of the happy clappy stuff, that is reserved for family services, where anything (within reason) goes and you can get away with it, as the BCP types won't be there to complain.
haha!! and once you have purchased said doritos, half your cohort will refuse to take part in such folly or will eat their dorito in loud defiance ;)
ReplyDeletecan I add a link to my post to include these? or feel free to! x
And later, knowing that dropping pebbles into bowls of water to the sound of plink-plink music was seen as 'so eighties' and woud lose you marks on the assignment, it comes as a bit of a shock to discover that elderly rural cngregations quite like that sort of stuff because a lot of them were teenagers in the sixties and consider themselves more Rolling Stones than Vera Lynn.
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