What is in Kelvin's Head?

New Provosting

31/08/2012

There’s a new provosting tonight in Oban and I’m carefully packing the Cope of Glory.

There’s certainly a sense of purpose and excitement about the Diocese of Argyll and The Isles these days.

[Trivia point – the definite article in the name of the diocese is capitalised for the Episcopal diocese of Argyll and The Isles but not capitalised for the Roman Catholic diocese of Argyll and the Isles. You learn these things whilst editing a magazine].

It is always exciting to witness the start of a new ministry which inevitably means someone landing in the middle of a load of other ministries and working out how to relate to them all and trying to help weave them together into one coherent whole.

When you start working in a church it is often the little things that give you the most stress. You can read the accounts and meet the vestry, but who tells you what order the first part of the liturgy works on your first Sunday. Somehow everyone expects you to know the little things.

I remember when I arrived at St Mary’s I wanted to know one small liturgical detail about the start of the service. I asked around. One person told me we did it one way. Another person told me we did it precisely the opposite way. And a third smiled sweetly and said, “We do it whatever way you want, Provost”. All I wanted to know was what was the norm.

There is a legend here that one of my predecessors was once told that he had made 35 changes to the liturgy when he arrived and was surprised to hear that he had made any of them. I can see how that happens, and people think that the slightest change is a point of principle.

Down south, the person who runs a cathedral is a Dean. They are sometimes thought of as “the first priest in the diocese” and occasionally act as a kind of shop steward, able to articulate in a particular way what it is like to be a priest with charge in a diocese and sometimes murmur in the bishop’s ear the concerns of those who don’t get the same chances to do so.

There can be some of that up here too. But here there’s that distinctive word. Up here, the word Provost has its roots in the latin and hints of someone who has been pushed to the front.

My good wishes to Provost Nicki McNelly as she takes up her appointment in Oban. Provosting is an exciting business and, as cathedrals take their particular and a distinctive ministry I believe in. Cathedrals occupy an interesting place in the life of the modern church which I don’t think many could see 20 years ago.

Welcome, Nicki to one particular front line of mission and ministry.

7 responses to “Reclaiming the web”

Paul Hutchinson

14/10/2015

Thank you for making me think in a different direction just before pausing for lunch. I have never had a blog, so came quite late to Internet social discourse, and have engaged more since joining one major network in 2010 and another in early 2014 – normally using those networks rather than a comment box such as this. Not all of us are natural creators of substantial original content, but like to be thoughtful in brief exchange, and so both those major networks, though cursed with many difficulties, serve those brief exchanges quite well. I do agree that the endless recycling of links (on both of them) can be wearying, and I do wish that some old friends would be a little more self-critical. But the price of any kind of social discourse is that one is vulnerable to the otherness of the other.
I feel I ought to be writing a more substantial comment here, but hope that this is enough. The time is not always there to offer deeper reflection: but sometimes a blogger needs to hear at least a small splash from the stone thrown down the well!

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1. Kelvin
  
  14/10/2015
  
  Thanks for the comment, Paul. I’m aware that not everyone is a content creator, but perhaps what I miss is the sense of discovering different communities online and keeping the comments more or less in one place helps with that.
  
  The glory days of 50 or more comments on a post are probably over. I suspect I mourn the sense of community being created even more than I miss the interesting reflections of others. Retweets and shares are always welcome – but they are the means of amplification. Becoming loud isn’t the same as becoming wise, nor the same as becoming connected.
  
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Seph

14/10/2015

It’s a damnable shame—and mostly the fault of Facebook. Twitter at least has an etiquette of sorts, wherein it is considered impolite not to respond to the original tweet, which is usually made by the blogger in question.

Facebook, in short, is the scourge of the Internet. I have often been in groups which have decided to do all of their organizing on Facebook, despite my protests that I’m not on Facebook and don’t want to be, and really an e-mail list would be just as easy, and would they like me to set one up. This inevitably leads to my marginalization within the group, as no-one bothers to keep me abreast of the discussions to which I am not party.

Can you tell I’m upset about this?

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Daniel Lamont

14/10/2015

I am only an occasional user of Facebook but I know what you mean, Kelvin. And indeed, I never read the comments ‘below the line’ on newspapers like ‘The Guardian’. You offer some useful advice. I read yours and one or two other blogs on a regular basis but don’t always comment. However, I can see that the author of a blog would like some feedback. I would be sad not to have the blogs that I do read because they do give me a sense of what people are thinking and an odd sense of community.

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Father Ron Smith

14/10/2015

My own contribution to the blogopshere is, I’m afraid, Father Kelvin, limited to comments I make on other people’s blogs (such as ‘Thinking Anglicans’ and ‘Anglican Down Under’ – a local NZ forum; plus my own blog ‘kiwianglo’, where i pluck articles that interest me personally from the web and provide my own commentary. This still interests me, personally, and provides my few readers with information they might not otherwise be bothered to glean for themselves. Like you, I am no longer an avid Facebook fan.

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David Campbell

16/10/2015

Hi Kelvin – thoughtful as ever – and yours is invariably the first blog I turn to each day. That you bring pressing issues to a wider audience and to people who know, or used to know, the church you serve is a great thing. I’m still blogging relatively strongly, but it’s certainly a different blogging experience when work is set in a very different context and especially community from previously, writing these days mainly for myself about things that interest me, although not quite at the address you have in your Blog Roll. http://www.limpingtowardsthesunrise.com is where it’s “all” happening.

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1. Kelvin
  
  16/10/2015
  
  Thanks David – nice to hear from you. I’ve amended the link.
  
  I don’t think many people use blogrolls to find blogs these days but whenever I remove it my mother complains…
  
  Reply