Specifically a Church Of England vicar (not Catholic). I need to know a few things. 1. Do vicars get to choose which area/parish they serve in or does someone send them where they are needed? 2. If the church is unusable (if repairs are being done, for example) can church services be held elsewhere, like the village hall or similar? 3. How would a vicar be addressed in conversation? Would “Good morning, Vicar/Reverend,” be correct? I know that Catholic priests are often addressed as Father but I have not heard of this being used for Anglican priests. Would a woman vicar be addressed in the same way as a man? Thanks for any help.
If there is a vicar in the house you may get better answers, but (assuming it's Church of England in England not internationally):- 1. My friend at school was a vicar's son so I remembered they have to move house when they apply for posts and found this site for the OP to confirm:- https://pathways.churchofengland.org/search/page-2 2. In our local church when this happened they just moved the services to another CofE church nearby. Even many villages have more than one, and the smaller a village is the more likely everyone is to have a car. 3. "Vicar" I think. This page looked right: https://www.ehow.co.uk/how_12287421_address-vicar.html Our vicar insists on being called by just the first name - which I think is the fashion now.
Your best bet here would be to go and ask your local vicar... if you make an appointment he or she will probably be delighted to discuss things with you
The vicars' placement is at the bishop's discretion though they can apply to other locations they prefer. Parishes can merge or meet temporarily at some place. How vicars are addressed can be a question of "churchmanship"- that is, whether the parish is evangelical/ "low church," "middle of the road," "high church", or Anglo-Catholic. Officially all CofE priests, of any gender, are referred to as "priests" in the official documents (eg Book of Common Prayer) though many of the evangelical crowd hate this term. "Reverend," "vicar," "pastor," "Father/Mother", or something more informal, can all be in use depending on the type of parish it is.
Perhaps this will shed some light on the subject: https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Clergy_of_Church_of_England_(in_England) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reverend
Important to note the church sometimes provides vicarages for the vicar and his wife and children to live in so Imagine he's not going to be as fussed since he effectively gets a free house
Ooh! Ooh! I can answer this, unless it's changed since 1996, when I took my Bachelor of Theology degree from one of the theological colleges at the University of Oxford. I'm Presbyterian myself, but I was on the scene as my friends sought their first placements. So buckle up. During his or her third and final year of theological college, your typical Church of England ordinand will start looking for a curacy. This typically starts in Hilary Term (mid-January to Easter break), though it can begin as early as the end of Michaelmas Term (pre-Christmas). As mentioned above, the bishop of one's diocese (where you lived when you were taken under care) will have a strong say in where you go, though you can apply elsewhere. If you and your bishop don't see eye to eye theologically, you'll want to apply for a vacancy under a bishop who is. In early to mid-Easter Term (also called Trinity Term, post-Easter break to mid-June) you and your fellow ordinands will get notice of where you've been placed. I rarely heard of anyone refusing a particular curacy, so either most bishops are merciful to the ordinands under their care, or the ordinand figures, "Well, it's only three years, I can deal with it." Because--- here's the important thing--- you don't start out as a priest-in-charge. You first serve a three-year curacy under the tutelage of a certified training priest. First, right after the end of your third year of college, you're ordained Deacon. Typically this is done on the Feast of St. Peter and Paul (June 29th) or the nearest Saturday to it, in the cathedral church of the diocese where you're about to serve. (Usually. The Oxford Diocese holds [or held] its ordinations down in Dorchester at the Abbey, because Oxford Cathedral doubles as the chapel of Christ Church College and is too small for the purpose.) You remain a deacon for a year, during which time you can carry out all clergy duties in the C of E except celebrating the Eucharist/Holy Communion. All going well, you and your fellow deacons of your year return to the cathedral in late June or early July and are priested. Or, in the slang of the community, you get your full Revs. Then it's back to your parish to continue your curacy under your training priest for two more years. During this time you'll learn essential skills like handling church politics and the care and feeding of church and parish councils and boards. On rare occasions, if there's a crying need for a parish priest and you're particularly able as a pastor and administrator, your bishop might issue a waiver and let you take your own parish after two years only. Once your curacy is up, you have options. You can continue as a curate or become an Assistant Priest in a larger parish. Not where you currently are: that training priest needs to be freed up to break in the next newbie. Usually you'll look for your own parish or parishes, aka your own "living." Whether that's as a vicar or a rector depends on who owns the rights to the tithes and has administrative control of the parish. If that's the priest in charge, he or she is the rector (from the Latin word for "rights"). If the tithes and admin control belong to someone else (the lord of the manor, a college, etc.) you'll be a vicar (from the Latin meaning "in place of"). Many or most C of E livings are yoked parishes. My friend Anne whom I visited before Christmas is rector of two country churches outside Weston-Super-Mare. Her full social title is "the Revd Mrs Anne W---" (note how it's abbreviated. British English generally leaves out the commas, or they used to. You can also spell it Rev'd). From what I overheard, most of her parishioners call her "Anne." For official purposes she's "Rector." This being a low-church, village parish, no one would think of calling her "Mother." Calling ones clergypersons by their first names is typical, and has been since I had my long parish placements in the mid-'90s. As for housing, I'll leave that for another post.
For the C of E, that's true. It might be the traditional vicarage or rectory located on church property right next to the church itself, or in the case of urban clergy like my friend Corinne, an Assistant Pastor at a large parish in London, a house the church has acquired in the neighbourhood. Note that the old Victorian rectories and vicarages are getting pretty thin on the ground. Most of them were torn down after the war and replaced with relatively modern (i.e., boring) houses. The rectory is the house inside the gate to the left and the parish hall is the building on the right. And yes, they hold services there. As for housing for curates who are fresh out of theological college, we had this saying: "Trinity Term, when curates are assigned their new housing and cat-abuse complaints to the RSPCA go up 1000%."* _____________ *I.e., embryo curates checking out their accommodations and testing whether, indeed, the lounge is too small to swing a cat in.
Which is a great shame. Rectories are great places to be haunted (cf Borley Rectory), but those modern houses are more likely to be haunted by a bad broadband connection.
