IN NOVEMBER 2024, I became each a newly qualified counsellor and a newly elected councillor. I received many cards congratulating me on the latter, using the spelling of the previous. According to my e-dictionary, these words are fairly often confused — and confusing. One of the cards suggested that I could be the one current stipendiary cleric within the C of E to carry each designations.
In 27 years (up to now) because the Vicar in my parish, I actually have grow to be embedded inside the wider fabric of the community, through myriad occasional offices (I recently led the marriage of the daughter of a pair I married once I arrived here), civic services, school assemblies, and a multiplicity of other community events. But it was the pandemic that was inadvertently liable for a deeper connectedness, as I discovered myself co-ordinating 50 volunteers offering practical care to essentially the most vulnerable in our villages; and thru the establishment of a community foodbank, which still supports 30 individuals, lots of whom are children.
Through such community engagement, I became increasingly aware of other local needs and issues, a few of which necessitated advocacy before parish councillors, on behalf of those that felt themselves to don’t have any voice.
WHEN I used to be asked to think about standing for considered one of several vacancies on the parish council, my mind initially turned to the variety of “plates” I used to be already spinning in my life. Then I turned to Jesus’s parables of salt, light (Matthew 5.13-16), and yeast (Matthew 13.33), and the sometimes disproportionate impact and influence that one individual could make through the challenge of putting Jesus’s teachings into practice (Matthew 7.24-25).
Although conscious of the demands on my time and the narrow margins around my life, I started to think I could make a difference, and that this might help further to melt the partitions of our churches in a way that furthered mission.
Standing as an independent candidate, I used to be deeply encouraged to be elected with the most important majority. It has been illuminating to experience the high-quality training offered, the quantity of timethat the volunteer parish councillors give to their portfolios, the depth of non-partisan collegiality on the council, the sensible difference that will be made, and, sadly, the quantity of criticism (sometimes deeply personal) that some councillors face, especially (though not only) on social media.
MY FIRST real exposure to counselling was through grief-counselling sessions that I reluctantly sought in 2010 after suffering a familial loss, and after taking a plethora of adverse funerals. It became clear that I had inadvertently repressed my emotional sadness (only too common in a society not good at helping us to reflect on and prepare for death), and this had led to a grief which was intensified, delayed, prolonged, complicated, and denied.
The counsellor was adept at listening, empathetic, and proffered sensible insights. Retrospectively, those 12 sessions (financed by my diocese) were deeply healing for me, and helped to complement and transform my continuing response to a vocation to priestly ministry. Since then, a gentle stream of individuals, from the church family and wider community, who were battling various mental-health issues have come to me for pastoral care, and needing onward signposting to talking-therapy services (each private and NHS) which have proved deeply helpful.
THIS “stream” became something of a torrent after the pandemic. It was at about this time that I started to think about the opportunity of training as a counsellor, as a way of giving back into an area that had been so helpful to me. In the summer of 2024, I accomplished the three-year, part-time M.Sc. in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy from the University of Derby, and have become a registered member of the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists (BACP). I currently see private clients online, and others, head to head, on the counselling centre where I used to be a trainee and am now an affiliate.
I collaborate with clients presenting with a broad range of issues, a few of whom have faith. Because of my background and experience, I prioritise making time to supply help to each serving and retired military personnel and church leaders. The latter face special pressures nowadays, not least from bishops who follow a centrist diocesan policy over the allocation of personnel and resources, while stipendiary parish-clergy numbers fall and multi-parish benefices grow to be larger.
COUNSELLING or psychotherapy can minister to the parts of us which can be ignored and unacknowledged. If psychological pain will be brought into our conscious, it becomes accessible for transformation. Healing can then sometimes occur at our deeper levels of woundedness — not only its superficial appearances or manifestations.
That sometimes protracted and sometimes painful process jogs my memory of how God meets us within the deepest places of our broken humanity with gifts of healing. As counsellor and councillor, I actually have found ways of taking the values of my faith within the Lord Jesus Christ out beyond the church partitions, into the encompassing culture(s) and community. They also involve partnership with others, with a diaconal fringe of resulting in serve. I actually have been personally enriched by my involvement in these areas.
I create time for counselling clients on Monday and Tuesday evenings, and the parish council meets in session one evening a month (with some additional committee meetings). On those days, I be certain that I take the afternoons off, and my PCC is supporting me with administrative support.
The pandemic was considered one of those experiences for which one could never really be prepared. Reflecting on it, nonetheless, I recognise that, alongside the sadness that it brought, it has been liable for turning my world the other way up and inside out, in a life-affirming and enriching way. This, I hope and pray, continues to bring blessings and healing to others, too.
The Revd Tim Sumpter is Vicar of Ockbrook and Borrowash within the diocese of Derby, and a retired Chaplain to the Army Reserve.
