An interview with Jo Rand

Jo, welcome to Cliff College! Tell me a bit about yourself.

Thank you! I'm Jo, I'm a Methodist minister and until recently I was living in Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria. I'm married to Paul; I've got two children and I’m a PhD student at Cliff! I’m currently studying part-time, and plan to go full-time next September. 

Taking on a PhD is a big decision – what particularly made you want to go back to study at this point in life?

When I was doing my MA, which I finished about 18 years ago, I had a lot of feedback from tutors saying, you should really consider doing some further research. At the time I had very small children and things were busy in life, so I didn't quite get going on that. I did actually enrol on the PhD programme here at Cliff about 10 or 11 years ago, alongside ministerial training. When I arrived into circuit to start probation, pretty much a year behind in my studies already, I looked at the completion date on my student ID card, and it was the same year that my daughter would do her GCSEs. Between family life and ministry commitments, I didn't think I could do a reasonable job of the PhD, so I withdrew at that point – but it's always something I wanted to come back to. Now our youngest child is just about to start uni, so it seems like a good time to pick it up again. I’ve also decided to step out of full-time church leadership to concentrate on study. Some people do manage to balance study and ministry life, but for me I knew that I need to make the PhD my main focus.

What is your research subject and why did you choose it?

I am looking at preaching and faith formation, specifically in the context of the Methodist New Places for New People projects. Often when we see New Places for New People, or Fresh Expressions or similar things, their acts of worship don’t always look like traditional church services with a sermon at its heart. So I'm really wanting to ask, how in these contexts are we proclaiming our faith and enabling people to grow in faith as Christians? One area I want to explore is how that relates to what was going on in the New Testament era, in the earliest churches, because I suspect their worship didn't look that much like our services either! And yet, preaching the word was part of their practice, part of what they thought of as church, so what does that mean and look like?  

On a basic level, I believe preaching is about enabling people to encounter God rather than conveying or transferring information. I still think of it as an educational process, but educating through transformational encounter, rather than educating through imparting of information. When we look at education in schools, most schools now don't do ‘chalk and talk’ teaching (although there's a little bit of an interesting swing back towards that), whereas in church, a lot of what we do is still the equivalent of that. I’ve been really impacted by experiences of Godly Play and similar things – I think it’s important to invite people to wonder, and to encounter God in the wondering. 

Other than your actual PhD award, what do you hope will come out of this work? 

I hope that it will be something that can be useful to the church - I wouldn't do it if I didn't think it could be! I hope that it might help us to reflect on preaching, not just in New Places for New People contexts, but also in our more established forms of church. If you add up the amount of time that local preachers and ministers spend preparing their sermons across the whole Connexion, that's a lot of church resource! So, let's ask some tough questions of ourselves about what we think we’re doing and make sure we're doing useful things with the resources we have. And of course, I hope to grow in my understanding and practice through it all. I'm not coming at this with the answers already worked out!  

You’ve chosen to live on campus with your family – which is exciting for Cliff, as it’s a long time since we've had a resident PhD student! What excites you about living on campus, and what do you think will be the adjustments to make? 

I'm really looking forward to really being part of the community here and not feeling that I'm just dipping in and out. I like to be fully ‘in’ things, rather than having to come in and make my place in it from outside. And there are some practical reasons – there’s the cost of time and travel when I’ll be wanting to access the Library and resources here. 

In terms of adjustments, there are going to be relational challenges in being with the same people all the time – but I'm not too worried about that, because that’s not dissimilar to the community we’ve just moved from. The biggest adjustment by far, I think, is that pretty much all my adult life, I have lived in the middle of a community where there are shops. I don't mean for shopping; I mean for remembering in the middle of cooking a meal that you don't have any carrots! So that's going to be my challenge, because I’ll have to plan ahead!