This page is for those of you who haven't been in touch for a while. It's not an up-to-the-minute journal (who has the time?), but it's rather a sketch of the major events in my life over the last few years.
After graduating from VST (before, actually), I was assigned to the parish of All Saints in Vernon to work as their Curate. We moved there in the spring of '93 - Matthew being all of 6 weeks old. My original boss was Paul Robinson, who took a job at St. Timothy's in Edmonton and left All Saints after I had been there about 3 months.
Jane Moorhouse-Bourcet took over in the interim on a 2-day-a-week basis, so basically I had the run of the place for almost a year. Finally they hired Peter Davison to take over, but he knew he had to be nice to me because I had already established my power base... ;-) Peter was a great boss to me - very helpful, mostly hands-off. While at All Saints I was ordained a deacon and, about a year later, a priest. It was a good time.
Andrea found the school system here to be very difficult to break into as a teacher. She subbed for a long time before landing any kind of contract, and even then had to rely on her Music specialty to get anything.
In the meantime Andrea founded a chapter of the Midwifery Task Force to promote local awareness of the Midwifery movement in B.C. and to watchdog hospital birthing practices and the government's implementation of a publicly-funded midwifery program.
She also began taking the EFM program at All Saints which has proven to be a major milestone for her spiritual development. I'd recommend the program to any parish or diocese as probably the best Christian Education program anywhere.
After two years in Vernon I got hired for the parish of St. James & St. George, in Armstrong and Enderby, respectively. I call it a 2.5-point parish because attached to the two main points is a little community church up in Mara (St. Matthew's), which is Anglican once a month. A layperson takes services out there during the year and I would go up for Christmas.
Armstrong is just a 20-minute drive from Vernon, so it wasn't a big move. In fact Andrea continued to teach in the Vernon district and Matthew continued with the same caregiver.
Soon after we had moved to Armstrong Alexa was born, so Andrea took a maternity leave to be with the kids while Alexa was an infant. She went back to a very bad job for the '96-'97 season, which she hated so much that she took a leave of absence from the district and set up her own "professional home school" for 6 children plus Matthew. The school ultimately didn't work out financially, so she returned to the public-school system in the fall of '98 teaching half-time kindergarten at BX School (on the road to Silver Star mountain).
The two points in Armstrong-Enderby were quite small – about 55 on a Sunday morning in Armstrong and 30 in Enderby. My most notable efforts in the parish were two: first, an emphasis on children in worship and the elimination of Sunday school; and second, adult education in the form of a number of six-week Lenten lecture series. The latter effort went over well, but after some initial enthusiasm the former effort failed, because it relied on high levels of commitment and churchmanship on the part of the families.
In the end, however, such programmatic concerns were interesting but not the heart of the life of that church. At its heart the church was simply about people: praying together, caring for each other and supporting each other in faith. I learned a great deal from that parish, and not least about myself.
Meanwhile during that period of time I maintained a high level of involvement on a diocesan level: in youth and camp ministry primarily, but also as a delegate to General Synod.
2001 was a year of profound change for me. It began when I was named as regional dean of the North Okanagan in my diocese, and accelerated when I was appointed back to Vernon as their incumbent. At our diocesan synod I also shifted away from things like liturgical and musical support roles to being the chair of the resolutions committee. In short, I graduated from Young Turk to Old Boy in the space of 12 months.
As a result of these changes I am surrounded by ironies.
For example, while I have been in my region longer than any of my regional colleagues have been, I am the youngest of them by a good margin; and until recently was at least 15 years' junior by ordination. It was obviously an honour to have been named dean, and at the time there were good reasons for it (most of the other clergy positions were vacant at the time or expecting to be so), but the responsibilities do not sit very easily.
Also ironic is the fact that I was selected by All Saints primarily on the basis of strengths such as preaching, teaching and concern for young families. I was also very interested in the prospect of training curates. As it turns out, however, the parish is in financial crisis. In fact it's been in the red since 1995, but this was not well-known, and even took me a full year to figure out! This means that while the preaching and teaching are nice and everything, what they really need right now is good management, stewardship education and financial development. Note that none of these skills were listed on my resume (but thank God for the law degree!). As a result of the strained finances the parish and I decided to scale back all support staff by 5% and - wait for it - live without a curate. Ah well - mysterious ways, and all that.
Another oddity of my appointment was that I performed my last service in Armstrong and Enderby on September 30th, 2001, and the very next day showed up for work in the Vernon office. There simply was no time in that kind of transition to move house, so a year and a half later, on April 23rd, 2003, we finally made the move back to Vernon. On a Wednesday after Easter! Furthermore, the house into which we moved needed a bit of work, so for the first few weeks we lived in the basement while the upper storey was completely renovated. Life has not been dull.
Andrea's employment has been blessedly stable throughout this time, and as I write this she continues her half-time kindergarten position at BX with the same partner she had when she started. The children continue to grow and thrive, and unless something goes grievously wrong at All Saints I expect to have been able to provide them with a geographically stable childhood - no mean feat for children of clergy!
As of this writing Matthew is 10 years old and (quite deliberately) full of all things gross and violent. He's currently begging me to show him movies like Terminator and The Matrix but I've held him off so far. Earlier this year we moved him out of French immersion into Andrea's school, which was a great decision: many of his teachers at the French school left much to be desired, and we were worried about permanent emotional scars from the particular teacher that precipitated the shift. He is thriving in his new school and continues to be a serious, sensitive, smart and sporty kid.
Alexa is still in French immersion and has been blessed with good teachers so far. The bets are off from grade 4 and up, however, and we have contingency plans. She is lazy like me, temperamental like her mother, loquacious in both official languages and unbearably charming.
May 15, 2003