Since DynDns announced they were withdrawing their free offering, I have been looking for an alternative. Turns out Microsoft’s Azure DNS has a REST API, and python library. While not free, it is very cheap – so far my DNS costs with Azure are running at 1p/day (although I only incur 5k queries a day). Setting up Azure and a DNS zone is pretty straightforward, getting the authentication and python script working as a bit more tricky, so here’s what I did. First set up the DNS zone in your Azure Portal Now Create an App: Go to Azure AD, […]

I’ve been reading a book called “Marathon: A Manual for Bivocational Ministry” by Doug Black Jr, which has raised some interesting ideas, and is making me revisit some of my assumptions around ministry. The thrust of his book is that Self Supporting Ministry (which he calls Bivocational) is better than ’employed’ ministry in his case. Or to put it another way, that he has become a more effective minister/pastor since he stopped doing it as his employment and started doing it unpaid while in full-time (secular) employment. This is quite a radical notion. (At least to me). It seems to […]

Exciting times on the curacy front, as my training incumbent has now moved on to a new post, leaving us in a vacancy at the church. We are blessed to have a “full time” associate minister, another training curate (who is “full time”), and several other “part-time” clergy kicking about, so in terms of both supervision and workload it’s not a insurmountable stress to have lost the vicar. Obviously it’s not ideal, but on the plus side it will be really good experience to go through a vacancy and appointment process, and I’m fascinated to see what happens both over […]

Just in the last few weeks, I’ve realised that I think I’m over the “hump” of my curacy. Curacies are strange beasts – perhaps even more so as an SSM curate doing one day a week (cue “but vicar’s only work one day a week” joke) – in that so far I have spent the vast majority of my time doing new stuff. Now, I love doing new things, and learning new skills, starting new projects, and so on, but it’s also an exhausting place to inhabit. The upshot is a huge sense of being de-skilled, and a very low […]

I had the amazing privilege of solemnising my first wedding a couple of weeks ago. I genuinely could not have asked or hoped for a more lovely couple and congregation, and it was a joy to play a small part in the new life were were choosing and vowing to start together. I am still slightly coming to terms with the fact I actually married them – that I pronounced them man and wife, and signed the registers and certificates. I feels like the first “proper” legal thing I’ve done as a Clerk in Holy Orders (aside from Ordination and […]

One of the main aspects of the curacy for me has been about growing in confidence – but not perhaps in the way one might think. When I first started leading services at St Mark’s (especially the informal ones) to be honest I hated it – I felt like I had no idea what I was doing, I didn’t know any of the people I was leading, I didn’t know how services we’re “supposed” to be done. It didn’t help that on the very first service I led the projector screen fell off the wall 10 minutes before the start […]

The following is the text for my reflection during a service of 3 hours at the cross today. The theme is “approaching the cross”, and we start “from the outside looking in – the view from the edge (the crowd)” Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” (Mark 15:29) We start our journey towards the cross at the edge, amongst the crowd, looking in. A bit like the crowd in our reading, we are faced with […]

As I have written before, in the Church of England we have three orders of ordination; Deacon, Priest (or Presbyter), and Bishop. The usual pattern for those expecting to be ordained priest is to serve the first year as a deacon, and then be ordained priest the following year. The diaconal year is an opportunity to focus on the servant aspect of being ordained, which is, in many ways, the foundational aspect of ministry, and never changes. That said, I found it a slightly odd year, which felt for me personally to be more about what I wasn’t allowed to […]

Sometimes I deeply dislike computers, especially when they try and be too clever. It’s actually a little bit scary (The Terminator‘s looking less and less far fetched!). Recent incident – true story. My website now runs on my own server at home, at the end of my broadband pipe. Despite what the provider claims it really isn’t fibre, but it is 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up, which is far more bandwidth than the traffic I generate. So far so good. Last week, I suddenly started getting e-mails from Google’s search bot telling me the number of 404s on […]

One of the things I have learnt from my spiritual director is to try to incorporate some silence whenever I pray. By which I mean inner as well outer silence (which is much harder!). I sometimes feel like Chidi from The Good Place, who says his mind is like a waste disposal unit with a fork in it, constantly grinding and grinding away. Other times I feel like Dumbledore, who needed to syphon his thoughts off into a Pensieve. I don’t really know if everyone feels like their head is “full”, or if I’m just a bit odd, but my […]