Fifth Anniversary

Well, today is the Feast of the Visitation and that means that it is also the anniversary of my becoming the Provost and Rector at St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow. I remember my installation service with great fondness. It was wonderful service liturgically and the shape of things to come.

Does it feel like a long time? Well, not particularly. I stopped being called the New Provost about 2 years in and time has just passed by since then.

It is my view that St Mary’s had an unsustainable stipendiary staffing level when I came here and this year we’ve managed to do something concrete about that and appoint a Vice Provost. In some ways, that is the most significant thing that has been achieved since I came to Glasgow.

There has been a lot of razzmatazz on the way, of course, for both brouhaha and razzmatazz are handmaids of the gospel and tools of the kingdom.

One significant thing that I said when I came was that there was going to be a moratorium – not the kind of moratorium which bishops and archbishops impose (which is not a moratorium in any case but a ban). Very early on, I stood in the pulpit and announced that there would be no big building project for my first five years in post. It was my view that the congregation needed a bit of time to relax and enjoy the building rather than seeing it as a constant, never-ending project. I’m convinced that was the right thing to do. I note that the time of that moratorium is now passed.

Does that mean that all of a sudden I have grand plans? Does that meant that the appeal for the Kelvin Holdsworth Memorial Gilded Spire is now launched?

Actually, it doesn’t. I’ve no great plan to go on with, except to encourage the congregation to keep doing the things we are good at and get better at doing the things we can get better at. Oh, and to stop worrying too much about the things we don’t happen to be good at, and there are, no doubt, one or two of them.

Have I enjoyed my first five years. Well, yes I have, though the personal toll of working in a relatively big and complex religious institution that is understaffed is huge and I wouldn’t particularly like to go through those five years again. However, we are in good heart and the good times, are just around the corner.

There is a wonderful excitement around at St Mary’s which is infectious. Someone said to me that there was a sense of that excitement which came over in the Radio 4 broadcast recently and that made me very pleased, for it is the kind of thing that you cannot script. It is either there or it isn’t.

As I look back over those five years, I am pleased at the journey made. But anniversaries are times for thinking about the future as well as about the past, and when I think about St Mary’s today, it will not be the past that I dwell on but what is to come.

Two innovations

3229147813_6629547f51_oTwo rather fun innovations at church yesterday. It had been suggested to me that it might be a good idea to run a guided tour of the church. Indeed, it was.

About 30 people gathered after the 1030 service for a guided tour. The theme of the tour was the seven traditional sacraments so we started at the font and worked our way round to the old resurrection chapel, where we had a look (and a sniff) at the holy oils.

If anyone was wanting to know the history of anything, they probably went away disappointed. I don’t tend to do history with any great level of conviction. It was a great way to have a group conversation about the sacraments though and I guess that most people saw one or two things in the Cathedral that they had never seen before.

The other innovation was an invitation to photographers to come and take pics of the building. This innovation had been tacked onto the guided tour just a week ago, but sure enough, photographers arrived and have produced some great photos. (Hardly any of the photographs are of me, but we will let that pass this time).

You can see their results on the St Mary’s Flickr Pool page.

Some of the same photographers had also been at Lansdowne Church last week for a similar photo-gathering. Some great Lansdowne pics here.

Many thanks to Gordon Smith, who issued the invitation to the photographers and who took the pic on this blog post. Check out his Flickr page too, not least for his slightly surreal photo of Chickens in the Snow (Without Snow).