FIRST STEPS IN METAL-WORKING

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Hello friends old and new!  Sixteen months ago I finished the Big Walk I began in 2016, visiting every Anglican church in the Diocese of Peterborough – all four hundred of them.

 Now I’m back on the road, this time symbolically linking our own diocese to its neighbours. I’ll start in Peterborough, and work my way back to our ‘new’ home parish of St. Mary’s Morcott, in Rutland, before setting off across our small ‘multum in parvo’ county towards Leicester. After that, we’ll have to see what happens.  Lincoln? Oxford? Coventry? Ely? At the age of 71, it’s more Cardinal Newman than Fleetwood Mac, ‘One step enough for me’, rather than ‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow’…

Stuff has happened since I staggered into Peterborough Cathedral in late 2021. Sue and I have qualified as licensed ‘lay worship leaders’. Sue has become churchwarden in Morcott. We have a new vicar in the Welland Foss benefice, and we’ve lost an ‘e’ from the end of our benefice name. (It turns out we’re celebrating both the River Welland and the stream called the Foss which flows through Morcott and South Luffenham – nothing to do with the valley or ‘trench’ of the Welland, as I originally thought!) We’re slowly learning about the blessings and quirks of country parish life, and the balance to be struck between ‘parish’ and ‘benefice’.

Calling the new blog ‘vinculafido’ is a joke, as you’ll have guessed. I wanted ‘chain of faith’, but even with hyphens that wasn’t working. The Latin equivalent might have been ‘vinculafidei’ but I thought readers might mistake the final ‘i’ for an ‘l’, and it might have been taken as something for or against the Cuban regime  So here we are, with a bit of pun on my name, and a nod to what I’m about on my version of ‘pilgrimage’.

I’ll regularly update the blog, this time not so much with descriptions of where I walk, but rather with shorter reflections in words and music on the places I visit.

I’ll continue to send cards out to the parishes I pass through, but now to the churchwardens rather than the clergy. I’ve come to understand the weight of responsibility churchwardens bear: smaller and ageing congregations, fading finances, enhanced health and safety requirements, stricter safeguarding, a society disrupted by Covid and international tensions. It can feel like a very lonely job, but how we need people to step up to the challenges inherent in parish and benefice life.

Still…as before…I want to say we are BETTER TOGETHER, whatever our nuance of Christian belief. Our worship is BETTER IN COLOUR – if it celebrates diversity and brings joy. To which now I’m adding that we’re BETTER THAN WE THINK WE ARE – because there’s a loving God who cares for us and the people we serve…and the world is better for the extraordinary contributions Christians make to it.

Please join me on the way, and drop me a line on vincecrossmusic@gmail.com  if you feel you’d like to.


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