2nd July 2010

A Chaplain’s Diary

 

Tonight’s the night!

 

Tuesday 29^th June

 

Tonight was the licensing of the new Anglican priest, Canon Mel Smith, in Puerto Pollensa.  I had drawn the short straw so I had to preach.  It was all a bit embarrassing because the Bible reading, which was part of one of St. Paul’s Letters, started “the hour of my departure is upon me”.  I couldn’t think of anything less appropriate.  At least I hoped the hour of Mel’s departure was not upon him, given the amount of time that we had carefully put in to the appointment.  He has only been here for four weeks and his personal belongings from England only arrived yesterday in a white van.  Fortunately the congregation saw the joke and laughed limply when I pointed it out. 

 

Mel’s affair with Majorca has gone on for too long.  He loves the place.  In 2001 he acted as a fill-in locum priest here in Palma before I took up my post, he has helped us with a couple of Christian Giving Programmes over the last few years, and earlier this year was a locum in Puerto Pollensa.  It’s obvious that he and the congregation have fallen for each other, so we had to regularise this infatuation, and tonight we made an honest man of him and presented him with the Bishop’s License as the Assistant Chaplain of Majorca with responsibility for St. Andrew’s congregation in the north of the island. 

 

When we were advertising for a new priest last year, the Congregational Committee listed the essential qualities they were looking for.  They wanted somebody with an outgoing and flexible personality, who had a liberal and collaborative style of working.  Rather tongue in cheek, we also said that he had got to have an appreciation of sun, sand, sea and Spain, but needed to be someone who wouldn’t be seduced by what, on the surface, appeared to be a very attractive lifestyle.  We needed someone who would have the ability to see the social problems and encourage the congregation to engage with them.  And lastly we were desperate that he should have a sense of humour…. and boy he will certainly need it!

 

 

The good news is that I think we more or less got everything we asked for.  The bad news is that he’s not perfect like all of us.  Secretly I think we all wanted to appoint the Archangel Gabriel but, there again, he never applied.

 

 

 

If you believe that “a coincidence is a small miracle – where God prefers to remain anonymous”, then we had one here: Mel has for some time been considering a job in the Diocese of Europe.  His children, Helen and Christopher, are grown up, Kasia, his wife, has just retired from a full time, senior, teaching position, his old employers were prepared to release him – so a move was possible and Mel was just what we were looking for.  So I was glad that we could clinch the deal, not only for ourselves, but for God as well.

 

The Anglican Chaplaincy of Majorca with its three congregations in Palma, Puerto Pollensa and Cala d’Or, and the huge Diocese of Europe, stretching as it does from the Canaries in the west to Moscow in the east, and from Stockholm in the north,all the way down to Casablanca; has been served down the years, and indeed is still served, by some outstanding clergy and congregations whose reputations for learning pastoral care and service have stretched far beyond their immediate churches.  I have no doubt that Mel, our new priest, will fit that mould.

 

He is a very capable and experienced priest.  He was born in Staffordshire in The Potteries, he trained at King’s College London and St. Augustine’s College Canterbury, he is a trained teacher, he was the Rural Dean of one of the largest deaneries in the Diocese of Lichfield and, in his last job, in the Diocese of Worcester, his time was spent helping parishes to develop and grow.  He’s also a Canon Emeritus, an honorific title – like an ecclesiastical OBE, of Worcester Cathedral.  So given his experience we’re lucky to get him.

 

The job is an impossible one, because you have never finished work - and I know that from personal experience.  So I am glad that we have been able to upgrade this post from a part time one to a full time position.  Mel’s role will be to work with the congregation across the northern half of the island above a line from Soller to Porto Cristo, taking in Inca, Sineu, Petra, Manacor, Alcudia and Cala Millor. 

 

On a practical level, I suggested to the congregation during my sermon, that they try to find out what he’s good at and exploit it to the full, and then, for the things he’s hopeless at – and there will be some things that, like all of us he will struggle with – find others to fill those gaps. 

 

 

 

Without being too slushy and romantic, clergy are meant to be a sort of shepherd, but it’s not a picture that particularly works for me, though it does evoke a rather romantic image.  Over the years, Mel and I have led pilgrimages together to the Holy Land.  On one occasion, we were travelling through the desert on a coach to go down from Jerusalem to Jericho and the Dead Sea.  At the side of the road there was a Palestinian shepherd surrounded by his sheep.  He was stretched out on the ground, resting his head on a stone, clutching a large can of lager in one hand, and as a sheep wandered off, all he would do was yell and lob a huge stone at it ….. perhaps not the sort of image we clergy should be trying to follow, though I do rather like the idea of the tin of lager!

 

I hesitated to point out that most sheep with any intelligence would no doubt be in two minds about whether they actually wanted a shepherd at all.  At the best they steal your coat, and at the worst they eat you.  No doubt the congregation at Puerto Pollensa are thinking that one out.

 

I finished my sermon by telling the story of Jack Nicholls, the former Bishop of Sheffield, who was preaching on one occasion in York Minster to a load of clergy – I think that is the collective noun for clergy – a load, though others do come to mind!  In his sermon he said to all the clergy present, “don’t kill yourself – it’s meant to be an impossible job – and it’s meant to be impossible in order that we may be forced to rely not on ourselves but on the graciousness of God – and anyway you’re only the clergy – the real heroes are out there in the pews!  It’s not an autocracy – it’s a team – congregation, council and clergy, each playing their part and working together with the lightness of heart of those who know they are on the winning side and that Resurrection, not Crucifixion, has the last word.”

 

 

Fr Robert Ellis is the Anglican Chaplain of Mallorca

St Philip and St James Church

Calle Nunez de Balboa 6,

Son Armadans, Palma 07014

Tel: 971 737279

e-mail:anglicanpalma@gmail.com

www.anglican-mallorca.org