This is sort of a meta-post to give fair warning that I’m moving away from a paid WordPress hosting plan, and am going to allow “revjameshandley.com” to expire in a couple of weeks. My hope is that this blog will revert to the free plan, and still be available at revjameshandley.wordpress.com. If not I’ll have to come up with a different plan! Either way, all the existing permalinks will break (sorry).

Well, my curacy has finished! I received the letter today from the Bishop signing me off – my initial ministerial education is complete. Like the rest of the world, the past 12-18 months have been like nothing I’ve ever experienced or could have expected, and I don’t think I can even start to do it justice in a short piece like this. But I did want to mark the occasion. The massive thing about my curacy for me has been the discovery of Self Supporting Ministry as something other than Stipendiary-Lite, and this is a journey I am still on. […]

As I have now entered the fourth, and hopefully final, year of curacy, I thought it was about time for an update (seeing as this blog is supposed to be a record of my curacy journey)! As I posted in the September last year, I have been trying to think and reflect a lot more about Self Supporting Ministry, and reading as many books as I can find on the subject (and there aren’t an awful lot). Part of the upshot of this was a realisation that I needed to give my day job (and ministry there) more respect – […]

A few weeks ago, I was praying with someone, and I had what I believe was a prophetic word from God for them. While it was for them personally, it came back to me this morning as a much wider word for our times. The essence was about seeking God in the “micro” choices. In the right now. Don’t worry about what’s going to happen in 3 months, 6 months, 5 years, or even next week. Just here. And now. What is God saying to you about the next 5 minutes, 30 minutes? How are you going to be aware […]

It’s Easter morning – Hallelujah. What a strange Easter morning it is though, stuck as we are in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown. Much much more to be said about all this, about church, about community – but the inspiration for this post was when I was awoken at about 4.30 this morning. You see, the more Easters I have, the more I feel that we jump the gun a bit. It took the first disciples a further 50 days before the joy and release of the resurrection took hold. Immediately after Easter, they continued to be in “isolation” […]

At my work we regularly have business development sessions, where we review performance, do some forward planning, and so on. We also usually do some organisational development – around teamwork, communication, that sort of thing. Last summer we had a session on culture, and the organisational culture in particular. Now I am lucky enough to work in a company that has a very healthy and positive culture – we have a high level of transparency, trust, encouragement, cooperation, and a low level of passive aggression, sabotage, negativity, secrecy, politicking, and so on. All good stuff. But then one of my […]

Over Christmas I watched “Home Alone” with my younger son. I must admit I’ve always wondered why this gets categorised as a Christmas Film, as  the only thing Christmassy about it was the fact it’s set at Christmas (a bit like Die Hard), and has some nod to being apart from those you love. Home Alone (I would have said), was a film about at 8 year year old setting traps for hapless burglars (such as bowling balls dropping on their head) for 2 hours. It turns out the film is not about that at all. Not even remotely. The […]

It is my experience that some books just scratch where I am itching. It might be the writing style, subject, or simply that it has come at the right time for me to “get it”. These are the books you read that just help things make sense, or put into words the things you’ve been struggling to vocalise. The best example of this for me is Contemplative Youth Ministry – Practising the Presence of Jesus with Young People” by Mark Yaconnelli (SPCK 2006), which is a book that spoke deeply to my heart, and opened up contemplative spirituality for me […]

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 […]