Today I am launching my next writing project.  I have for a long time thought that the best people to offer insight into life as a curate are the curates themselves.  Hearing from those who have tread the path before us is great, their insights and wisdom is often invaluable and unique and we should be willing to listen and learn; but the expert at life as a curate today are the curates themselves.  Despite great wisdom and experience, those who have tread the path before us cannot appreciate life as a curate in these cultural times.  Not because they lack some thing but simply because times change.  This is just the general brush stokes before we get to the detail of personal circumstances and the experiences and perspectives that each curate brings with them and lives and works from within.  Add to that individual preferences of spirituality and theological twists and turns and it soon becomes very difficult for one or even a few people to essentially stand up and say what life as a curate is like.

Curates occupy a fairly unique position.  By curates I mean those who hold an office a Assistant Curate under a Training Incumbent in a training post for a fairly fixed time of between 3 and 4 years.  They will have come from some form of training sponsored by their Diocese and when they leave, the majority of curates become incumbents themselves.  This place of liminality acts as a furnace of leadership, where the curate is under authority of the incumbent and yet looked to for leadership from the congregation and community, where there is the constant presence of the promise of future authority and plans for leadership.  Experience is filtered into habits to adopt and practices to never duplicate. Where the training incumbent is both to be followed and avoided, mimicked and guarded against.  It is in these few years that habits at the core of their leadership will be formed and as they come out of the curacy furnace they cool and set and become fixtures of their ministry.

This project is a exercise in collective wisdom focused particularly around issues of leadership and will almost entirely consist of stories.  Stories told by curates about themselves in positions ans situations of leadership.  I will groups these stories and present them with a framework but only so they become accessible.  My hope is that this exercise will become a valuable resource for curates thinking about leadership as a curate.