Freedom, O freedom...

For the few visitors to this page, I am alive and well but writing. The 'Modernity, Postmodernity and the Gospel' essay needs a killer end and an edit for submission next Monday. And the dissertation has about 1,000 words of text, lots of reading and a questionnaire all done so far... The final day at college is less than 4 weeks away and ordination now less than 6 weeks. Time seems to have speeded up somewhat.

Ridley Hall Gospel Choir's concert in Cambridge over the weekend was fun - about 140 in the audience who seemed to enjoy the evening, as we did. The copies of the CD we recorded in the chapel the other week arrived in time for the concert and they are selling well. Will try to put a sample on here sometime soon (but can't so far work out how to do this with the software I have). Where the idea came from 2 years ago into my head to try to start up a gospel choir I really don't know. A step out in faith, I guess, because I can't conduct. And then Lisa stepped forward to do the bizz in front and teach the songs, and those who didn't know they could even sing, let alone perform... It's been fun, as well as worship and evangelism all rolled into one. And with Mark taking over from Lisa I think that its future is assured for a couple more years at least.

The End Time...

Not suprisingly, we Leavers are getting a bit demob happy. The lecturer’s comment the other day along the lines of ‘You’ll soon be out there doing all this,’ got the gleeful response ‘Less than 5 weeks to go…!’ Most of us cannot wait to leave. It’s not that we hate the place – although it has its frustrations – and I guess most of us are glad that we came here. But it’s all starting to seem a bit irrelevant and filling in time. We know what our title parish is, who our training incumbent is – the second batch visit here next week for the ‘Things you should know about what we’ve done with them here’ day, where we will be living, the colour of the walls and what size curtains we need, we have our clerical shirts, robes (for those who need them in their parishes) and white or red stole, completed the seemingly endless stream of forms, several us have received a cheque or two covering the grants, got the quotes for removals, written our last self-assessments – and one or two have finished all the essays already. Just the course on funerals and a series of half days on aspects of worship and theology left to attend. Today the Common Room (student union) elected the Deacons (these are equivalents of classroom monitors such as the Food Friars, Punt & Croquet Deacon, Community Tasks Deacon and Chapel Deacons) and sometime next week we current Deacons will cease to hold office. So we are being eased out back into the real world – well, more real than college anyway.
This week the college is particularly full, with various visitors, Mixed Mode students in residence all week and all three years of the students doing the BA in Christian Youth Ministry in some day/night or other. All of which stretches the practice of living in community, the brunt being borne by increasingly twitchy resident ordinands – essay deadlines and exams are just around the corner. There is no doubt that having additional facilities would help greatly and I guess our experience this year has supplied more reasons to try to do that. Having survived nearly three years here I think (for the little that my opinion is worth) that there are many things that the college does very well. What it will have to learn to do well in the future depends on whatever the CofE and God have lined up. After the machinations of the Hind Report on training for ordination and such like we have a pretty good idea about the first, but the second will probably surprise us...