Today it is three years to the day since I was ‘licensed’ as vicar (‘priest in charge’) of the ‘Riverside Parishes’: two fairly sizeable satellite villages just outside Darlington (Middleton St George and Hurworth) and two churches in tiny rural communities (Girsby and Low Dinsdale). Time for a bit of reflection…
I was expecting it to take around three years to adjust after making the ‘quantum leap’ from being a curate to being a vicar. Life is still a bit of a blur, but I’m beginning to get used to it!
The first year as a vicar is very full-on, so much so that there is a danger of sinking to a low point around a year in. Someone warned me about this, and it does seem to be a common experience. Having done everything once in the first year, the temptation is to try to do even more in the second year. I’m glad I resisted that temptation. It has still been quite full-on, but I’ve been trying not to overdo it.
Looking back on my reflections from when I was one year in, my reflections after three years would be very similar. Two things stand out.
First, my heart is still warmed when people display an appetite for God. I finally managed to get a home group going in one of the villages just over a year ago, and then handed that group over to others a few months ago in order to re-launch a home group in the other village. It’s been a joy to see people properly digging into the Bible perhaps for the first time in their lives. I can think of other examples too.
Second, I am still struggling enormously with the flexibility of the role. My roles include: pastor, teacher, preacher, worship leader, evangelist, school governor, chair of trustees, line manager and leader. There are relatively few fixed points in my week, so it is basically up to me to organise my own time. I certainly keep myself occupied with plenty of worthwhile things, but it is very easy for other worthwhile things to end up being neglected. Some things have to be done this week, so I do them this week. Occasionally I find time to think strategically about some long-term goals. But lots of important things don’t have to be done this week, and when this week turns out to be busier than anticipated, as it always does, they get postponed to next week. But then next week turns out to be busier than anticipated … and you get the picture. Often the key is to put a date in the diary, but when I constantly feel that I have too many things on my to-do list, it is easy to put that off for the time being.
One challenge of any kind of ministry is managing expectations – not so much other people’s expectations, but primarily your own expectations of yourself. There are so many good things that could be done, and the reality is that it is impossible even to do a small fraction of them at all, let alone to do them well. In order to survive, you have to be prepared, frankly, to be pretty useless at most things, and to be selective about the things you do well. This is not easy, especially when you feel the enormous weight of responsibility, and especially if you get some satisfaction out of doing things well. I have a list of things I am doing at least tolerably well, another list of things I would really like to do (or to do better), and a third list of things I am trying to avoid doing, and I desperately need to move some more things into that third list (the ‘to-don’t list’).
There is no shortage of wonderful people willing to give me brilliant ideas of additional things I could do, especially with all the transformation funding we have in the Diocese of Durham at the moment, but it’s hard to find anyone who will suggest things I could stop doing completely, so this additional advice can just increase my sense of being overloaded. (My struggles with the flexibility of the role haven’t been helped by an administrative hiccup that meant my first Ministerial Development Review is in the diary for this autumn, whereas it should have happened around 18 months ago.)
Despite all this, things have continued to go pretty well, by God’s grace.
Indeed, it is vital to have a strong sense of God’s grace: that God loves me, not because of anything I do, but simply because of his undeserved grace.
When it comes to multi-church ministry, I am still grappling with how to serve effectively in such a context.
Multi-church ministry certainly has many challenges. There are the obvious challenges of having more than one church to look after and numerous people to support in their roles. (At one point I counted 26 people who might look directly to me for some support in their roles, and this doesn’t even include rank-and-file PCC members.) I find myself constantly switching between contexts, and it is difficult to keep everything and everyone in mind. It is difficult to inhabit more than one place at once, and this is especially challenging when you are ‘the vicar’ to more than one village. There is also a very different dynamic in churches of different sizes: being the vicar simultaneously of (for example) two churches of 5, one church of 25 and another church of 50 is very different to being the vicar of only one church of 85. Multi-church ministry is often quite lonely too, as the vast majority of the people in the churches are only really involved in one of the churches. This means that you might be more or less the only person who sees what is happening in the group of churches as a whole. (Some people try to treat multiple churches as ‘one church meeting in multiple locations’, but this is always an uphill struggle, and it goes against reality for most people, who know full well that they live in one place and belong to one church. There are steps that can be taken to strengthen a sense of partnership between churches, but that can only go so far, especially if any of the churches have a weekly service.)
I don’t think I had realised how big a change it would be for me, not to be in the same church every week, and therefore not feeling fully present in any of the churches. This was a big factor in thinking about service times, which led in my second year to my first experience of leading significant change. In October 2024, I initiated a process of consultation about the service times across the parishes, largely in order to enable me to be present more often in the two larger churches, rather than basically alternating between them from week to week. I had struggled to work out whether my role was to be as present as possible in these two churches, or whether my role was primarily to support others in their ministry, largely from behind the scenes. I decided I wanted to try to be as present as possible in both churches, which would also enable me to support others more effectively, and which would be much easier if their weekly services didn’t happen at the same time.
The consultation went well, and the changes took effect in May 2025. One of the two larger churches changed its weekly Sunday morning service from 10am to 9.15am, and the other changed from 10.30am to 11am, while the two smaller churches have continued to have one morning service per month, but with different times so that one is close to 9.15am and the other is close to 11am. The end result is that (when I’m not on holiday) I am now present at each of the two larger churches on all but one Sunday each month, rather than being there only half of the time.
In practice, with holidays and other things, in the year from May 2024 to April 2025, I was present at each of the two larger churches on 23 Sundays (out of 52), and this went up in the following year to 33 in one and 38 in the other (again, out of 52). In other words, even after the change, I was still absent on 14 or 19 Sundays in the year. This is still quite a lot, so I still don’t feel fully present in these church (especially after almost two years getting used to being there less than half the time). However, the more noticeable change is to the pattern of leading and preaching. I am now more often present when members of the lay ministry team are leading and preaching, which was basically impossible before, and which makes it easier for me to support them (and to benefit from their ministry). I am preaching just as often as before, but often I am preaching the same sermon twice on a Sunday and there are more weeks now when I’m not preaching at all, which gives me a bit of respite. From the perspective of the congregations, I’m sure they have noticed that I am around more often. The change from 10.30am to 11am has been very smooth, but the change from 10am to 9.15am has made it a bit harder for some people, which is a shame. I was advised to aim for (at least) 1 hour and 45 minutes between start times, as I can then hang around for 15 minutes or so after the first service before having to jump in the car and drive (for 10 minutes) to get to the later service, and that has been very helpful.
What next?
I feel that I’ve just about got over the initial shock of becoming a (multi-church) vicar, so now is the time to begin to think about the future. Where might God want these churches to be in a few years, and what steps can we take in that direction? (‘Vision and strategy’, if you like.) Part of this will involve probably one of the most important aspects of my role: encouraging and supporting people as they step into new roles and new areas of ministry.
In all of this, my focus needs to remain on God, the one who ultimately gives the growth.
‘Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain’ (Psalm 127:1a, NIV).
‘I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow.’ (1 Corinthians 3:6, NIV).