ARTICLES

Apprenticeship: Beginning of year 2

Kate Hallworth gives us her thoughts and hopes for the year ahead in Buxton

 

"What are you going to do next year?" is the question I'm most regularly asked at the moment. It only seems like 5 minutes since I started as a ministry trainee and now I'm 2 months into my second year. My answer to the above question, for the most part, is "I'm not quite sure!". I'd love to be a trainee forever, but unfortunately that's not an option. So until I make some decisions, unemployment looms!

I'm not a person who enjoys being forced to go outside their comfort zone, so there were lots of challenges last year and I really was thrown in at the deep end. Having never led Bible studies before, suddenly I was meeting with 3 groups of teenage girls each week to study the Bible, and being terrified of small children, clearly doing a creche was not the place I wanted to be. However, 14 months later, meeting with the girls is my favourite bit of the job...and I'm no longer traumatised by 2 year olds!

The best bit of being an apprentice, for me, is being able to take 2 years to learn more about God and how to serve Him and His people better. I've loved getting to meet up with the girls and study the Bible with them. It has been such a privilege to see them grow as Christians over the last year. One of the key things I've benefited from has been the North West Partnership ministry training course. It's been great to have a day a week where I'm taught from the Bible and am being taught how to teach it to others.

I think there will be a lot of new challenges this year, including learning to lead adult Bible studies in a women's homegroup and leading youth groups from the front. My default attitude with all of these things is "I can't...", but hopefully with God's help, I might just about be able to! Because we're quite a small church, I've had lots of opportunities to teach the Bible. This has meant that sometimes it has been really tiring and I've often been working alone, but it has been great getting more chances to teach the Bible,

If you're reading this and you've just started as an apprentice, well done! It's a great job and I hope you love every minute of it. I'm sure you're also exhausted! Guard your free time and your day off. Also, make the most of the fact you have a year or 2 years ahead of you where you have so many opportunities to study God's word. It has been a great blessing to me to have so much time to read the Bible and Christian books and study the Bible with people.

I hope that these 2 years will leave me better equipped for wherever God puts me in the future. Writing this article has made me remember just how much I love being in full-time ministry...so maybe that's what I'll do next year!