By Geoff Fisher As I write this, the season is definitely changing. And that got me thinking about change.
Change can be difficult. One of the things we often get told as prospective vicars and as trainee vicars is that it can be very difficult to change the way a church does things: if you do something differently one year, it is an innovation; do it the same way the following year and it is still new; do it a third year and it becomes a tradition, and traditions are so firmly rooted in human experience that we don’t like changing them.
You can have good change and you can have bad change, and frequently the only difference is your particular viewpoint.
But recently, I’ve discovered that not changing can also be difficult.
When I arrived in the Reepham and Wensum Valley Team of Churches, I knew that it would be for a period of no more than three and a half years.
I was being licensed to the post of assistant curate for the purposes of training. (A curate is someone who has the cure of souls in a parish, but these days we most often – though not exclusively – use the term to denote a training position.)
At the end of that training, I would be signed off by a bishop and be free to apply for my first post of responsibility, which would involve another house move. We knew that this would be the way things worked.
I was signed off by the bishop at Easter this year. Most of my fellow stipendiary (paid) curates, ordained at the same time as me in Norwich Cathedral, have moved to their first posts of responsibility. The two that haven’t will have done by the time you read this. That just leaves me. I’m still here. Still the assistant curate. Expected change has not happened.
And I have been surprised at how this lack of change, even though I know that there is a very good reason for it, has made me feel. I have felt a bit like the student in a class that gets held back for some reason.
I’ve worried that outside observers will look at the fact that everyone else has gone off and got a new job while I remain in my training post as a sign that I’m not, in some way, good enough to move on.
I know that these feelings are unfounded: I haven’t moved because I haven’t wanted to; I haven’t moved on because of a lack of ability but because this is where I feel God calls me to be. But the feelings are hard to shake off.
Why do I tell you all this? Because change, whether it is expected or unexpected, and lack of change, whether welcome or unwelcome, are facts of life.
We all face them at various times in our lives. And we may find the experience difficult regardless of whether the change is exciting or scary.
But God holds us. God knows how we feel and is there for us. God is with us in the changes and when things don’t seem to change. God is the one thing that, ultimately, doesn’t change.
Richard Turk, Assistant Curate, Reepham and Wensum Valley Team Churches