The man who couldn’t laugh it off

Father Neil Peoples spent the first minutes of the afternoon reassuring a room of nervous young men that he was “not that scary.” He had reason to be gentle about it. Years ago, he was one of them. He had thought about priesthood as a boy, then let it go. Then a bishop collared him with a question he couldn’t shake: “Have you not thought about priesthood?” He “couldn’t laugh it off,” he says, and it made him think he needed “to take this a bit more seriously.”

Now he is the diocese’s Director of Vocations. On Corpus Christi Sunday he stood beside Bishop Patrick McKinney in the Cathedral Hall, in front of 37 young men. Not one of them had put himself forward. Each had been noticed by someone in his own parish or chaplaincy, and invited. That is the idea behind Called by Name, the diocese’s new vocations campaign and the first of its kind in the country. Rather than waiting for young men to step forward, it asks the people and parishes who know them to say so.

“So each one of you is here this afternoon,” the Bishop told them, “because someone in your parish, or many in your parish, thought of you.”

For several of the men, that was the strange and moving part. One man, from Loughborough, had been working in Cambridge when word reached him. He was “quite taken aback knowing that someone had noticed this about me.” A man from Nottingham, who reads at his parish and helps with the music, saw the letter at work and replied on the spot. He wanted, he said, to “be part of something bigger.”

What had brought them was less certainty than honesty about the question. “I’ve always had this question about how do I actually discern,” said the man working in Cambridge. Another young man from Loughborough said being noticed “motivates me to be more involved in the life of the church.” The man from Grantham was the plainest. “I don’t know if this is what I’m meant to do,” he said, “but there’s only one way to find out.”

That “finding-out” is Fr Neil’s work, and he is careful about how he describes it. The pace is theirs, he says, usually a monthly conversation, in person or over Zoom. What he wants a young man to see is “not the sort of Walt Disney version” of priesthood but the real thing. Asked what he saw when the men arrived, his answer was simple. “You see hope,” he said. “People that are willing to see what could be.”

The Bishop was very clear about why the afternoon mattered. “Priests do not grow on trees,” he said. “They do not come out of the clouds. They come from parishes.” The turnout had moved him. “I had no idea how many might come, and this is far more than I thought might come.”

By the time the certificates were handed out, the young men in the Cathedral Hall had stopped being strangers. They were swapping phone numbers, comparing parishes, laughing at the stories of how they’d each ended up there on a Sunday afternoon. None of the 37 has committed to anything, and that’s the point. Called by Name asks nothing of them but a willingness to wonder, and to be open to whatever the Lord might be calling them to. “You got nothing to lose,” said the man from Grantham. “It’s been very no pressure today. It’s very relaxed.”

Or, as the Bishop put it to anyone turning this question over: “Give the Lord a chance.”

If a question like that has been forming in you, or in someone you love, Father Neil Peoples would be glad of a conversation. You can find out more at dioceseofnottingham.uk/vocations, or drop him an email: vocations@dioceseofnottingham.uk

There are no strings attached, just a friendly space to help you hear and respond to the Lord’s call in your life.