Ven Chris Lowson

Encouraging young people to listen to the call waiting

For Ven Chris Lowson, the Church of England’s Director of Ministry Division, Call Waiting - comprising a brand new website at www.callwaiting.org.uk, a magazine and other useful resources - is a key initiate, and he is hoping it will do more than any other project to reshape the age profile of priests serving in the Church.

“We’ve not been very good in recent years in attracting young people,” he says, “and this campaign is trying to remind young people that they can do this; this is something that God may be calling them to do.”

One of the problems is that as the world of employment has changed, the Church of England has been, in Chris’s words, “overvaluing experience against potential”, leading to a situation where too many at the younger end of the scale are told to return to the idea of ministry when they are older.

“Whereas in fact people like me,” he adds, “came into this when we were 24 and first felt a call into ordained ministry at 13.”

On the Call Waiting website, there is a full description of the types of work in which that potential may be employed - such as parish priest, or position which reaches out directly to the needs of a community.

“Then of course,” Ven Lowson says, “there are sector ministries as we call them - people working in prisons, in hospitals, in the armed forces, as a chaplain, having had the experience of working in a parish first.”

Various training options are available to those called into ordained ministry, many involving a residential degree course in theology; although Ven Lowson stresses that the Church of England is not just looking to attract academics.

“There’s lots of ways of contributing to ministry: there’s academic intelligence, but there’s also emotional intelligence and pastoral gifts and leadership gifts which might not be really academic, and we will tailor-make the course to suit the particular needs of that individual.”

Before a potential priest gets to that stage, he, or she, must discern whether or not ordained ministry is right for them, part of a two-pronged process of discernment.

“One is a sense of inner call which needs to grow and develop,” advises Ven Lowson, “and another is a sense of the Church saying, 'Yes we think we can do this as well.' As not everyone who presents that inner call is actually suitable to go through to ordained ministry.”

Listening to this call can lead to a host of unanswered questions; and this is why paragraphs on the subject of calling, along with a whole miscellany of information, resources, audio testimonies, biographies and links, have been made available at the website www.callwaiting.org.uk.  

You can hear this interview now by clicking here