How to become a vicar

I wrote this as an e-mail for the people at work today, and some of them found it a really helpful explanation of the steps to vicaration, my signature on my e-mails points to my blog, so my DDO has also read it and I’ve updated it to reflect his thoughts!

There are three stages to pursuing your dream of wearing a cassock and dog collar.

Discernment
Training and
Curacy (although technically you get your dog collar and cassock after the training stage)

Discernment
Unfortunately, it is not possible simply to speak to your vicar and say “I really think the Lord might be saying I should be a vicar” and that’s that, although that would be the place to start. If your vicar agrees that the Lord might be saying you should join the ranks s/he will start you on the discernment process. What happens next varies from diocese to diocese, but essentially is a process of trying to hear from God and making sure that this is what he wants!

Typically, you have to meet with the Diocesan Director of Ordinands (no wonder everyone calls them the ‘DDO’) who is paid to listen to you and God and work out whether it’s right that you are called to ordained ministry. Usually you will be sent to see someone else too, usually not a vicar. In St Albans, for example, they like to make this person someone who is trained in psychotherapy, in Peterborough Dioecese a lay person who has experience of testing vocation. This is to get another perspective on the hearing process.

Once the DDO is satisfied, they will send you to see the Bishop. The Bishop will chat to you for a while and have read a report about you by the DDO. It is up to the Bishop to make the final decision as to whether you should be allowed to train for vicarhood. If they think you are a likely candidate, they will send you to a Bishop’s Advisory Panel which is a 3 day event where you have 3 interviews, a group exercise and a pastoral letter to write amongst other things. The Bishop’s Advisory Panel then advise the bishop (strangely enough) as to whether you should be trained for vicarness.

The Bishop then decides. He can accept the panel’s advice, or he can ignore it, it’s his choice. If he says yes, you will then start training. From the first conversation with your vicar to this point can (exceptionally) be a few months, is most often at least a year and in St Albans diocese they like to really really know you want to be a vicar, so the process takes around 2 years.

Training
Training takes either 2 or 3 years, depending on your age and whether you have done any formal academic theology in the past. As a rough guide, if you are 30 or older, or you have a degree in theology already you will do 2 years, otherwise it’s 3. That’s all about to get more complicated though as a result of the Hind Report. Usually, training takes place at a Theological College (the Church of England does not call them bible colleges!), and is full time. It is possible to do the training part time over a number of years, but if you’re training to be a full time vicar, you will usually do the training full time.

Curacy
Once you have graduated Theological College you will spend four years doing ‘on the job training’ as a ‘Curate’. Your dream of vicardom is close at hand. At the start of the first year you will be ordained by a Bishop in a Cathedral as a ‘deacon’, which allows you to take services, funerals and baptise people. After you’ve completed your first year you’ll be ordained a second time, but as a ‘priest’ which means you can take a service of holy communion and marry people (I mean take the marriage service rather than get married). Then after the four years is up you can apply for a job running a church of your own!

So, from first thoughts to full on ‘I’m the vicar’ takes around 8 years, it’s not an easy process…