By: John Muhanji on June 2, 2019
The reading this week has touched mainly on the reality of our day to day life of the mother raising her children and the Clergy’s role in the church and community. I remember when we were growing our first born girl, my wife was prudent to follow what nurses guided her at the hospital where…
By: Tammy Dunahoo on June 2, 2019
The Rev Canon Dr. Emma Percy has studied history in Cambridge, theology in Durham, and serves as Chaplain and Welfare Dean at Trinity College, University of Oxford. Yet, in her book What Clergy Do: Especially When it Looks Like Nothing, it is quite clear that her best training to become a priest in the Church…
By: Trisha Welstad on June 2, 2019
This week’s text by Emma Percy is one that resonates deeply with me in my vocation and personal life. Percy’s book, What Clergy Do: Especially when it Looks Like Nothing, uses the metaphor of mothering to relate to parish priests and their role as caretakers and disciple makers. Indeed, this week, the text not only…
By: Wallace Kamau on June 1, 2019
To visit members of my church, I have to go over open sewer and jump over piles of garbage and the alleys are very narrow to get to the houses, not to mention the risk of being cut by the sharp edges of the rusty tin that they use to make the houses. As I…
By: Jason Turbeville on June 1, 2019
When I picked up What Clergy Do: Especially When It Looks Like Nothing by Emma Percy I expected another book on possibly pastor burn out, or a defense of paying pastors to pastor, not what I read. At first, I will admit the topic caught me a bit off guard. It did so, not because I…
By: Harry Fritzenschaft on May 31, 2019
Emma Percy draws on her Ph.D. work and experience as a priest to describe how Church of England parish priests might function – using the model and language of motherhood. The reviewer found the female perspective a fresh alternative to the plethora of male perspective dominated writings. Despite the title, the reviewer felt the allegory…
By: Mary Mims on May 31, 2019
Something must be lost in the translation. In the book, What Clergy Do: Especially When it Looks Like Nothing, by Emma Percy, she describes “Good Enough Mothering” and uses it as a metaphor for “Good Enough Parish Priests” (Percy 2014, 38). Being good enough is not a compliment, and in today’s culture of leadership excellence,…
By: Digby Wilkinson on May 31, 2019
Having just emerged from the aftermath of the suicide of an 18 year old girl from our church, it was a little odd reading a book titled, What Clergy Do. Especially when it looks like nothing.[1] In truth, I almost couldn’t be bothered reading it. My daughter is 18 too, so it was too close…
By: Sean Dean on May 31, 2019
The first time I watched the movie Jurassic Park I really disliked the character of Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum). He was cocky and a little too suave for his own good and worse yet he was not the order loving Dr. Alan Grant. Dr. Malcolm’s area of study is Chaos Theory, which…
By: Shawn Hart on May 31, 2019
It is interesting while reading through “What Clergy Do,” just how similar and yet, how different the various religious groups see their role as minister. Aside from the obvious male/female perspective in this read, there were also a variety of differences that were based upon the traditions and practices of the Church of England[1] as…
By: Rhonda Davis on May 31, 2019
It is finished. I made it. Another school year has come to an end in the Davis house. Since both my husband and I work in higher education while we parent 3 sons, May is full of triumphs and failures. I attend commencements, board meetings, banquets, pinning ceremonies, commissioning, award ceremonies, field days, sports banquets,…
By: Karen Rouggly on May 30, 2019
My grandpa is dying. Last night, we got home from visiting him while he is still doing well enough to interact with us. My family originates from Reading, Michigan and while I love living in California, there is something nostalgic about visiting the old homestead. Because we were there over Memorial Day, we went to…
By: Andrea Lathrop on May 30, 2019
If I had a dollar for every time I have had the conversation “what does our ministry staff even do all day?”…I would have at least $65. Ok, that is not as much as I thought when I first started that sentence, but you get the point. Very few of these conversations have been with congregants;…
By: Jean Ollis on May 30, 2019
Dr. Emma Percy – it’s challenging to track down information on you! I take pride in my sleuthing abilities, but Emma Percy gave me a run for my money. Alas I located her dissertation and was able to dig a bit deeper into her research in an attempt to understand her context of gender (mothering…
By: Mark Petersen on May 30, 2019
I’ve benefited from reading Emma Percy’s fresh book on clergy, even though I’m not ordained nor in pastoral ministry. Her work exposes how the way we view life is often diminished by an entrenched, gendered perspective; masculine models predominate in pastoral ministry. Flipping things around allows for the exploration of creative solutions of problems that…
By: Harry Edwards on May 30, 2019
Reading Emma Percy’s book What Clergy Do: Especially When It Looks Like Nothing turned out to be an enjoyable and fun experience. When I first scanned the pages, (a practice I do before I actually sit down to read any book) I thought “would the cultural and denominational distance between me and the author prevent…
By: Jenn Burnett on May 30, 2019
I’ve never really fit into a mould. I’ve never had any desire to. For a season I was a rugby playing, pastor mom. (I’ve since stepped back to rugby coaching.) Nobody in my life could really reconcile that combination of identities, but I found the tensions were liberating. My final season of varsity rugby, I…
By: Dan Kreiss on May 30, 2019
I had a friend who had been in ministry for several good years but whose advisor and counselor suggested he return to the home building trade where he would be able to recognize the results of his work. The thinking was that he was experiencing unnecessary stress due to the intangible nature of discipling others.…
By: Greg on May 30, 2019
Jonathon Swift said, “I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.”1 I became a full-time pastor at the age of 27. Young, bold, naive, and scared to death, were definitely adjectives…
By: Dave Watermulder on May 30, 2019
There is a very old (and not very funny) joke about pastors and their schedules. It goes something along the lines that a pastor only works “one day a week”. I have been told some version of this quip more times than I can count, often when running into church members or community members in…
