A day in the life: The Dean
Pembroke’s Dean, Dr James Gardom, shares a typical day in his life.
6.30am I get up, say some prayers at home, spend about 20 minutes looking at my emails and then cycle in to College.
8.15am Morning Prayer in the Chapel. We read the texts for the day and if any junior members are present I’ll give a short exposition. It is very helpful to have this opportunity to think about the passage in case I later have to preach on one of them in a Sunday service!
9am Meeting of the Environmental Awareness Committee; I sit on quite a number of College committees. With this one in particular we’ve made lots of good progress, but the challenge is to keep up the momentum.
10.30am I head over to the Divinity Faculty. Five years ago I started running a coffee time once a week in main lobby. It is now completely embedded in the culture of the faculty and people often volunteer to help. If I’m very busy I’m sometimes tempted to miss it, but I always end up having such interesting conversations in which I learn something that in fact it saves a lot of time in the long run.
11.30am I run a one hour essay clinic for the World Christianity paper. This gives the students the chance to come to me with any problems or concerns. It’s the first year I’ve tried it, so we’ll have to see whether it works!
12pm I teach a faculty class using some material called ‘The Christ We Share’. It is a series of images of Christ from around the world and from different periods. Responding to visual representations gives the students a nice break, because so much of what we do is word and text based.
1pm I come back to College to take a visiting group through cafeteria. They have come from an organisation that offers university access to ex-offenders. I often get involved with visiting groups and regularly find that I have to go down and interpret the Chapel for people. For me, it is a great opportunity to tell them what I think is important about the College and the faith at the same time.
2pm I am an undergraduate tutor at Pembroke and so I have someone coming to my office for a pastoral visit. It might take 5 minutes or it might take an hour, you never know.
3pm One of my roles for the wider church is to interview those entering the ministry from across the country whose training has got complicated for one reason or another. I then put my findings into a report that go to a committee, which I will attend tomorrow.
4pm I go over to Wescott House Theological College to discuss the placement of a student here at Pembroke.
7.30pm In the evening there might be a special service, a supper, a discussion group or any number of other events depending on the time of year. For example, every December I run a Christmas Party, a function that comes with the role and has a kind of ceremonial quality to it.
Three days a week I’m not home before 10pm – but it is only this intense in term time.
For more about the cycle of events in the Chapel at Pembroke, see our website.
Top image: Caroline Hancox