Call Waiting

On March 25, 2009 / By maggi dawn / Reply

Revdwendyposter There's a weekend course on in Cambridge next month specifically for young people (aged 16-19) who are interested in ministry – a chance to look further at what ministry is, and how to develop the gifts you have in the service of the church and the world.

Of course, ministry is not the sole preserve of those who are trained, and theologically speaking everyone has a "call" or "vocation" – we're all called to become fully human, to know and understand what or who "God" is, and to serve the world with whatever gifts we have. But part of being human is developing our communal activities, and whatever we do has a component of leadership and organisation. Faith, like everything else, leads us to organise ourselves in various ways.

For many Christians of school or college age, the only people with a formally recognised ministry that they have met are a good ten or fifteen years older than them, and the idea of going into ministry themselves is something that doesn't really occur to them until a good bit later. There are, of course, some arguments in favour of being a little older before you take on some elements of  ministry, but there are equally good arguments for encouraging people to develop ministry (both formal and informal) regardless of age. My work with student-age people has led me to believe that young people have unique gifts, and the church is impoverished if we don't help them to develop.

As part of my work at Robinson College, I supervise the work of people who are in formal preparation for various kinds of ministry – I usually have one or two Ordinands or ministers-in-training on placement with me, and have recently been helping another person who has been exploring the possibility of Licensed Lay Ministry. I have stuck my neck out more than once to try to open up the possibility of "calling" to young people. So I'm really glad that Call Waiting is happening.

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Comments

  1. Peter Carey
    On February 15, 2009 at 4:52 am

    very interesting…
    …one point I’d quibble with, email did “exist” in the 70s, actually the 60s, too, but really only for a small fraction of academics and military and researchers…
    http://wiki.answers.com/Q/When_did_email_start_reaching_american_homes

  2. Chas
    On February 15, 2009 at 7:56 pm

    Strictly speaking, email did exist in 1978, but I wouldn’t expect someone of your tender age to remember that …

  3. maggi dawn
    On February 16, 2009 at 4:32 pm

    you’re both right, it did exist, but not for the masses. I lived with a couple of friends in London in the 80’s, one of whom worked in the states a lot and, to keep in touch when he went away, set up an early form of email in our house. You had to type in a lengthy string of numbers and letters as your personal code (about 36 I think) then your message, then the numbers and letters again. It was laborious and highly prone to failure, and I remember thinking, “this will NEVER catch on…”

  4. Hugh A
    On February 17, 2009 at 12:29 pm

    I was taught at school that a billion was a million million but then one Chancellor (I can’t remember which) decided that we should use the USA definition of a thousand million. The irony is that the current global debt crisis has got the economists looking for a word to describe something bigger than a billion!

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