From time to time people ask me, 'How do you become a vicar?' Of course, every vicar would have a very different story to tell about their own experience, but the heart of the matter is, that it is the consequence of God calling you to this task.
When someone feels that God may be calling them, or maybe it is suggested to them by people who know them, it is the beginning of a lengthy time of discernment. You can't just turn up at the cathedral on ordination morning, say to the Bishop 'God is calling me to be ordained', have hands laid on you and off you go. The Church needs to consider the matter with you, and come to acommon mind about whether or not you have understood correctly what God is asking you to do.
This usually means quite a series of conversations, first with close and trusted friends, leaders of the church who know you, and your own parish priest, who can pray for you and with you. If they agree that there may be a real calling, the next step is to meet with representatives of the Bishop of the diocese, perhaps a vocations adviser and the DDO (Diocesan Director of Ordinands), who will help make the decision about whether the Diocese will sponsor your application. If all of these people agree, then an application can be made to the Ministry Division of the Church of England, to attend a Bishops' Selection Conference. This is, if you like, the 'last hurdle' in this process of discernment.
A Selection Conference can seem a bit of an ordeal to the candidates who attend it. Up to 50 such conferences are held each year, each one attended by about 16 candidates. During the course of 48 hours (at a secret location Somewhere in England), each of them is interviewed by three selectors. The senior selector considers their spirituality and sense of calling, the pastoral selector their character, relationships and leadership skills, and the educational selector their faith and quality of mind. There are also group exercises, a written exercise, and a cognitive test. The whole conference is conducted in a context of prayer and worship, as all together make every effort to discover what God wants for each of the people there.
At the end of 48 hours the candidates depart, leaving the selectors to stay on for another day to write up their reports, and come to a unanimous decision about each candidate, and whether to recommend that person for training for ordination. For that is all that the selectors at the Conference do: they make a recommendation to the sponsoring bishop, which that bishop may accept or ignore. At the end of the day, it is for the Bishop to decide if he will allow a candidate from his diocese to go forward for training for ordination.
I have recently had the great privilege of being nominated by our Bishop as one of the pastoral selectors for this diocese, and taking part as a selector at my first conference. If you think it's scary for the candidates, imagine how much worse it is for the selectors! They have the awesome responsibility of making decisions which will affect the whole future of the candidates; they have to make a statement about what they believe God's will for each of those candidates is. But it is humbling to be allowed to meet these men and women, of all ages, to hear about their lives and faith, and all the ways that God has been leading them in their spiritual journey.
I can't tell you anything about the results, which are always, of course, completely confidential. What I can tell you is that the people offering for ministry in the Church of England at this time are enormously impressive. There can't be very much wrong with the Church, when God continues to raise up new potential leaders of such calibre, and I would love to show them off to the moaners and critics of the Church and say: Look! This is why there is still a great future, and a hope, for this ancient Church of our nation.
The fact that some people are called, or 'have a vocation', for ordained ministry, is a sign of the fact that every Christian is called by God to serve in their daily life and work, whatever that may be. Some kinds of work have always been thought of as a vocation; but in fact even the jobs we 'just seem to drift into', provided that we pray about them faithfully and really offer them to God for him to work through us in them, are Christian callings. The important thing, whatever we are doing, is as St Paul says to do it as for the Lord. That way our little daily lives and work can be a part of how God changes the world, and makes it the place he wants it to be.
Published in the Marston Times,June 2003