The Provincial Board

Regular readers will know that I’ve made it through to the final stage in Selection for applying for training in the Church in Wales. This final stage is known as the Provincial Board.

It comprises of 48 hours of team exorcises with fellow hopefulls, and a series of Interviews covering different areas of your calling, Educational, Vocational, and Pastoral. Once the board is completed, the selectors meet, and discuss your suitability, and then a report is created, that could take anything up to 14 days to complete.

It’s the second week after the provincial. I’m still waiting on my result. I wanted to get my experiance up before I knew, incase it coloured what I had to say here.

The Provincial is one of the most exhilarating, stressful, fun, exhausting, intense and spiritual experiances I have ever had.

That said, where do you start?

I arrived at St Deiniol’s Library at 5 minits to one, giving me 5 minuits to get my stuff upstairs and find the diningroom for lunch. While trying to get the door open, a man looking for all the world like an Australian, opened the door for me. I later found out that this was Jeremy, a fellow hopefull.

This first Lunch was a very strange affair. I guess it helped that we were all in the same boat, and thus very happy to just randomly introduce ourselfs to people. It also helps, I guess, that we are all that kind of person anyway. Here I met Bill. It was clear that we, as people, were going to get on. As for religion.. well, that’s a conversation Bill and I will have to have at some future point.*

The first task we were set, after a quick round of an ice-breaking introduction, was to examine a problem given to us, set in a fictional location. It involved trying to get three different Parishes, of different traditions to work together. There was no feedback, we just had to kind of dive in and say what we thought. The problem centered around one of the Parishes refusing to pay it’s share towards the Church, for fear that it would subsidise one of it’s less well-off neighbours, which had been taken over by “people from the city”, with a new Evangelical way of doing things. There was also a middle-of-the-road parish that wasn’t doing very much. We were the “new vicar”, and had to say how we were going to deal with things.
Generally, we targeted the parish that wasn’t paying. There is only so much time for them to pay the money, before there are fines. There were varying tactics, most of which involved trying to explain to them where the money went (it goes centrally to be spent on things like vicar’s wages, mission programs, training and the like). The time was short, and the nerves high, so we didn’t really make much headway in this. There were many issues to consider, and which one were we to tackle first. We didn’t really reach a decision.

Then it was off to the interviews. My First interview was Vocation. A difficult interview at the best of times, and to have it first interview slot (as there were 10 of us, some of us were “resting” while others were in the interview, no such luck for me). This, however, meant I didn’t have this particular interview to worry about. It was the usual questions about prayer life, and about my calling. The problem with these kind of questions is how you frase them. Something I’ve never been very good.

Then we had some tea, went to Compline (effectively “evening prayer”), and then to bed. Though not necessarily to sleep. It’s not that the room wasn’t comfortable, but nerves made sleep difficult. I eventually simply passed out through exhaustion. I eventually got up and re-read the piece I was to read the following morning. Again. And a bit past it.

The following day started at 8am (8! talk about unsociable hours), with Eucarist. I had to read at this one, so being “relaxed” wasn’t something that happened. Then breakfast, then off to my first Pastoral interview. This is the one that passed in a blur. I don’t really remember anything from it, except that they did want to check the reason I had said what I had said. I guess my past is a little colourful.

Then we were issued with out task “Thought for the day”, and given the rest of the day, inbetween interviews and tasks to wright it, to hand it in before evening prayer. I quite liked this one, and when I find it again, I will post it up here for you guys.

Part 2 comming soon

~Black Xanthus

* Bill managed to change my view on Fundamentalists. He at least seemed to be willing to talk. How that would work outside of the Provincial situation, time will tell.