Saint Mary's

The Parish Church of Prittlewell

     From Father Shaun

Dear friends,

David Coster writes …

June is upon us, and it is almost a year since my journey into ordained ministry formally began as I left my friends at Prittlewell to be Ordained Deacon to serve in the parish of St Clement’s Leigh-on-Sea. On the 27^th of this month, at 3:30 in the afternoon, Bishop Laurie will come to St Clement’s and, by the grace of God, will Ordain me to the Sacred Priesthood…

 To be honest, I still can’t really believe that this is actually happening  – I still quite often ask myself “how did I get to this point?” … “surely God can’t really want me to be a priest, can He?” - God, as we know, moves in mysterious ways ‘his wonders to perform’ – but looking back across my life, with all its complexities and failings, I find it very hard to fully understand why God called me - after all, there are many who are much more worthy, more pious and abundantly more holy than I am - I’m just a fairly ordinary chap really, trying to make my way through life the best that I can – or so I try to convince myself.

Luckily, I don’t have to look too far to see that what seems to be a real paradox, actually is God’s usual way of doing things! The God of surprises, the God who turns convention on its head, the God who says “my ways are not your ways”.

If the bible is to be believed (and if it’s not, then we may as well give up now), then God ‘generally’ calls the more unlikely candidates to carry out his mysterious missions. It seems that I am in good company - just look at Jesus’ disciples. They were an odd and dubious bunch indeed, coming from a variety of broken and unstable backgrounds and following him with a mixed set of motives and a variety of fantasies and uncertainties. [Simon Peter the rough-hewn, volatile, often grumpy, quite uneducated, fisherman; Matthew the despised and devious Tax Collector and James and John the slightly power-crazed siblings to name but a few] But follow him they did, none-the-less!

In one sense I guess, that was all Jesus required of them: share the journey with me, and we'll see what happens along the way. He didn’t examine their theological soundness or doctrinal purity. He didn’t criticise their ethics or demand changes in their eschatology before they could journey with him. Jesus let them be the people that they were, with all their strengths and weaknesses, bringing with them the totality of their personality and character and bearing with them their own particular life story. They only had to be willing to walk with him and the rest would follow in due time.

There is a sense in which it is perhaps a little regrettable that religious posterity has endowed people such as Peter, Matthew, James and John with the title 'saint'. The fact that they are ‘saints’ is not in dispute. But the word itself now carries connotations of specialness and pure moral perfection that distances those very ‘human’ characters from the other ordinary people that we ourselves share life’s journey with. It is especially regrettable, I think, because in the case of the individuals that we read about in the Bible, their humanity is only too evident. God seems only to deal with people who have feet of clay, motives as mixed and fickle as fool’s gold, and relationship histories as colourful and sketchy as a patchwork blanket.

God, in choosing the very specific people that He does, is not encouraging or affirming immorality or inconsistency in our living and behaving, but He does call us to face the fact that He chooses real ‘ordinary people’… warts and all!

And so I try to content myself, as I urge you to do – if you are in any doubt about what God is up to in your life - that God chooses and uses ordinary people - just like you and me - in fact, dare I say it, He often chooses people the rest of us would rather He didn't. The very reason that you are reading this letter is that YOU TOO HAVE BEEN CALLED to a very specific mission and ministry  – just like me – it may not yet be wholly clear what that is, but all God asks you to do is walk with Him and the rest will follow in His time.

I hope that, as I approach the day of my priestly ordination, you will feel able to pray, as I pray for you, that God will use me and send me as He sees fit, that He will tease out whatever peculiar gift or talent he has hidden in me, that the humble, unworthiness of my life might in some small way glorify His name and help His promised Kingdom to come.