Revd Mary Gregory
Rector of St. Mary the Virgin Church, Coleorton
Letter from Rev Mary Gregory
on her leaving the parish January 2022
It feels very strange to be writing what will be my last letter to this magazine as Rector of this parish. (I'm hoping you might allow an occasional guest column from Coventry Cathedral!)
It's not possible, of course, to neatly sum up six plus years of parish ministry. There is always - or should be - a sense of vision, of direction - but this is especially a calling to be responsive, to fall in step with others, to listen and to interpret, rather than to impose. This has always been so, and perhaps has especially been the case over the pandemic where we have had to recreate ministry online, to care remotely, when our whole mode of being has previously been in person, up close.
If I can write of a 'desire' in my time here (can you see I am obstinately resisting management-speak!), it has been that the people within our seven churches might come to know one another and then to love one another. I have measured the fulfilment of this desire in decibels!
When we first met as a group of churches in Lent 2016, it was very, very quiet, and people gathered in their church groups, staking a claim to a block of pews as their temporary church.
Now, there is a buzz of glad recognition as people see their friends from other congregations and chairs are rearranged to include more and more people within the circle. Now, we live out the name we have given ourselves 'The Flagstaff Family'.
If I can offer you a prayer as I move to my new post, it is that you would continue being family to one another through this interregnum and beyond it; that you would have particular care for those branches of the family which are more remote or in need of extra support. 'Once, you were not a people. Now you are the people of God' (1 Peter 2.10). Love one another.
If 'family' is one picture for my time here, then another might be 'guest'. As I've thanked individual churches at my last service with them, it is this image that I have had in mind; that parish priests are guests, for a time, in settled communities; that you play host to us - and all our foibles; that you accommodate our particular quirks, before we are called to move on again. Thank you for your hospitality. I am aware that I might have been a guest that has irritated you from time-to-time, that I may have trespassed into areas that you have felt to be off limits, but we have laughed, too, and cried, and discovered more of God together. We have shared moments that will stay with me, and will bless me for the rest of my life.
Mine has not been a perfect ministry. How could it be when I am, like anyone, a human 'misshape' wholly reliant on the grace of God? Where I have got things wrong - however unwittingly - I am truly sorry. I pray that you will forgive me. And where, however unwittingly, you may have hurt me, I am forgiving you (for like us, forgiveness, too, is always a work in progress).
For all that has been - including those difficult moments when we learn so much about ourselves and one another - I am truly grateful; grateful, especially, when you have invited me to walk beside you at the most significant moments of your lives, when you have shared yourselves with me. And although we are moving into a time when we will not be so intimately involved, we will always be joined in the body of Christ, in the communion of saints --and I will carry you in my heart, as e.e.cummings once wrote.
And now, for all that God has in store for us - for you in the Flagstaff Family, for me in Coventry - yes! Never a dull moment!
More about Revd Mary's leaving in St Mary's February 2022 newsletter >>