Up and Down the Candle

I've learnt a new phrase. "Up the candle." A jovial way of asking what your churchmanship is, "how far up the candle are you?"

It strikes me that people at Cuddesdon sit all over the candle. If 1 is flags and 10 is birettas, there's a big clump of ordinands around 5 to 7 (middle church, liturgical, liberal) and another around the 8 and 9 (high church, modern catholic) but still a respectable number sub 5. With the numbers not in any way reflecting any sort of hierarchy, of course.

If you were to map the church's I've attended regularly for a significant amount of time (6 months plus) I think it would look something like this; 4-3-2-7-6. And since moving to Oxford I've attended, and enjoyed, St Mary Magdalen (a solid 9). So I've had experience with most types of church, even if some experiences aren't particularly recent.

I'd tentatively assess St Andrews, from my experience this morning, at around 3. Although, saying that, they have 4 services a day. 8am BCP, 9.30am family worship (the one we went to), 11.15am Eucharist (more liturgical, I'm told) and an evening service which is on the lively end. Is this, I am asking myself, a church which sets out to appeal to people of all kinds of churchmanships? We shall see!

I enjoyed this morning. Very different to the Cuddesdon services I've become accustomed to over these last 3 weeks, but I think I'll grow to appreciate the contrast. Certainly, the people were very friendly, and that bodes well for a positive 2 terms of learning and growing.

Yesterday, I matriculated! Yup, sounds like being put through a mangle, but it was actually quite nice. Dress up in silly clothes, stand in a queue outside the Sheldonian for half an hour, enter the Sheldonian for 15 minutes, hear some Latin and some English, go to the pub. Bish, bash, bosh, I'm a fully matriculated Oxford postgrad. Who'd have thought? Of course, I don't have my student card yet, because my application hasn't been fully processed, but hey ho...!

The MTh is somewhat fulfilling it's reputation as the lazy person's course. While the BA's and BTh's are writing 2,000 words a week, our first essay is due in Easter. And it's only 7,000 words. Now you'd have thought that would mean I've got lots of time on my hands, but somehow the formational side of training seems to be taking rather a lot of time and effort. Mission and Ministry, Pastoral Studies, Spirituality, Theological Reflection, Listening, Liturgy, Introduction to Worship... All separate modules, all requiring pre-reading.

Talking of, I've some reading to do for Mission and Ministry tomorrow. So long!