I'm a Chaplain again.

The honorary (i.e. unpaid) chaplaincy posts that sometimes seem to come with parish ministry can often be interesting relief from the mundane parts of ministry. Here in Falkirk I have 2 chaplaincies which have come with the post. I'm part of an ecumenical team at Graeme High School and I am chaplain to the Falkirk Campus of Forth Valley College.

This week I was busy with the school. The RMPE department use our lovely little Church as a resource and every S1 class in the school gets shown round it with a sheet on religious symbolism to fill in. I then do a class visit to guide them through the sheet and answer any questions they have on the building or on what I do in general. Which has led to some interesting conversations with the kids on death & funerals and other topics not strictly related to why we have a Star of David carved on our pulpit.

I also had to pop in to the College today. The Chaplaincy there has been a bit problematic due to our contact on Student support and Diversity being off work for a large part of last year. So the exchange of information about activities has been sporadic. Luckily, the new contact person seems keen enough to move things on, although 2 weeks notice about Freshers Fayre is pretty useless - both Alison (the Stirling Chaplain) and I are away. But I hope to get some useful links going with the Student Association Diversity Officer. It worries me that Chaplaincy may not be accessed by students because they assume Chaplains represent religions which ain't into diversity and are either anti-women or anti-LGBT people. I think a face to face contact to make it clear that this isn't the case would be useful. The Church may not be as exclusive as its detractors make out.