What to Write in an Ordination Card (Called, Not Promoted)

Called, not promoted: fix the first line first

Matthew Kozlowski, writing the ordination card guide for Building Faith, puts the distinction in one sentence: ordination, unlike graduation, is not something someone achieves. One is called to it, by God and by a community. The training was real and the exams were real, and nobody is asking you to pretend otherwise. But the day itself is a church saying yes to a person, in public, with hands laid on their head. A card that writes the day as a personal triumph, top of the class, promotion earned, misdescribes it in the first line and never quite recovers.

So retire the achievement openers for this one card. Well done on passing. You earned this. All that hard work paid off. Each of those could sit at the top of a graduation card without anyone blinking, because a degree is earned in a way an ordination is not described as earned by the people doing the ordaining. Swap in openers that name the calling instead. Thanks be to God for today. Blessings on your ordination day. I was so glad to be there when the church said yes to you. That last one does quiet work, because it puts a witness in the card, and an ordination is a witnessed thing. There were other people in the room. You were one of them.

Does the word congratulations have to be banned outright? No. Kozlowski admits he has started cards with it himself, and a close friend who writes congratulations and then says something true and specific will do far less harm than a stranger who writes a theologically perfect card copied off a website. The rule is about what the word is carrying. If congratulations is the whole message, the card says achievement and stops. If it is a door into a personal line about the person and the work they are taking on, it passes. Keep it, demote it, and do not let it stand alone.

The personal line is the card, everything else is packing

Here is the sentence most ordination cards are missing, and it takes about nine seconds to write. Name one thing you have actually seen this person do that belongs in ministry, in the past tense, with a place attached. Not a quality in the abstract. A sighting. You sat with the youth group through a power cut. You visited my father in hospital twice when you were not on any rota. Qualities flatter. Sightings convince, because the person reading knows whether the thing happened, and knows that you were paying attention before there was a ceremony to pay attention at.

I learned the shape of this card backwards. My cousin Benedict was ordained a deacon at Michaelmas in 2019, in St Davids, and I wrote his card at a borrowed cottage table the night before with the invitation open beside me. I filled most of the inside with advice. Three paragraphs of it, about preaching to small congregations and keeping a notebook, from a man who has never preached to anyone. Then, running out of room, I squeezed a postscript along the bottom about the Thursday food bank shift he had run for two winters out of a church hall with a broken heater, and how the rota had his name on it in pencil because he kept swapping to cover other people. Six years on, Benedict is a priest with a parish of his own, and the postscript is the only part of that card either of us can quote. The advice page has become a family joke with a title. He calls it the manual.

Build yours the other way round. Postscript first, in full size, at the top. One sighting, one sentence about what it told you, and then stop before the advice starts forming. If a piece of advice is genuinely yours to give because you have done this job yourself, one line is the ration, and it should be the practical kind, about sleep or notebooks or saying no in February, not a theory of ministry. Everyone else: your card is a witness statement, not a handover document. Witness statements are short because the witness only reports what they saw.

Scripture: one verse, chosen for them, cited properly

A verse belongs in this card more naturally than in almost any other, which is exactly why a lazy one shows. The verse that works is the verse that connects to the person in front of you: the reading from their ordination service if you can get it, a passage they have quoted for years, a text tied to the work they are actually going to do. The verse that fails is the famous one dropped in because it sounds ordination-shaped. If you cannot say why this verse for this person, leave the space to your own sentence instead. Your own sentence, specific and slightly clumsy, will be kept longer.

Cite it completely, book, chapter and verse, every time. A floating quotation with no address reads as decoration. The four verses the Building Faith guide suggests each do a different job, so choose by job. Joshua 24:15, we will serve the LORD, fits a household or a whole congregation signing together. Jeremiah 1:9, about words being put in a reluctant mouth, fits a preacher who has told you they are nervous about preaching, and it fits almost nobody else. Matthew 28:19-20 fits baptism and teaching work, and ends with a promise of presence rather than a demand. Luke 22:27, I am among you as one who serves, is the deacon verse, the one about the towel and the table rather than the pulpit. Notice that three of the four are about service or presence, and none of them is about success. That ratio is worth copying even if you choose a completely different text.

Two traps. Do not quote a verse at someone as a correction, however gently, on the day their church has just affirmed them; a card is not the venue for your disagreement with their denomination, their tradition or their last sermon. And check the wording in an actual Bible or a Bible site before you write it, not from memory. Misquoted scripture in an ordination card is the one error the recipient is professionally equipped to spot.

Names, titles and the envelope

More ordination cards go wrong on the envelope than in the message, because the title changes on the day and the old name is the one in your address book. Work it out before the pen comes out, using the service sheet or the invitation, which will almost always print the person exactly as they are to be addressed from that weekend onward. If neither helps, ask the person or someone in their household a week early. Asking early reads as care. Guessing reads as the opposite.

The common forms, with the traps marked. A newly ordained deacon in the Anglican and Catholic traditions is usually addressed as the Reverend followed by their full name, and as Deacon plus first or last name in speech, depending on the place. A new priest may become Father or Mother in traditions that use those titles, and will stay Reverend, Pastor or just their name in traditions that do not. Reverend on its own, with no name after it, is the error that leaps off envelopes; it works like an adjective, so it needs the name attached. Do not promote anyone in writing. Ordination to the diaconate is not ordination to the priesthood, some deacons stay deacons for life on purpose, and a card that congratulates a permanent deacon on becoming a priest has told them you did not listen to the service you attended.

Inside the card, use the name you actually use for them. A cousin does not become the Reverend because you are holding a fountain pen. A member of their new congregation, writing for the first time, probably should use the title once in the greeting and then write plainly. And put the partner in, where there is one, by name, in one line of their own. Ordination rearranges a household's weekends, moves some families to a new town, and hands the partner a supporting role they did not apply for. One sentence that sees that, thank you to Ana for the years of essays read aloud at this table, gets remembered in that household out of proportion to its length.

When the ordinand is family, or an old friend

Your advantage is history, so spend it. You know what the road looked like before it had a destination: the first conversation, the years of part time study fitted around a job, the interview that went badly. Write one of those, briefly, and let the ordination be where the sentence arrives rather than the whole subject of the card. The cards below are full models. Take their shape, replace every detail, and do not lift their lines, because a line about somebody else's food bank will sound like what it is.

Benedict, I keep thinking about the Thursday rota in pencil, your name swapped in for everybody else's gaps for two winters, in a hall where the heater never once won. The church has now said in a cathedral what that rota already said. I was proud on Saturday in a way I have not got a better word for. Come and eat with us before the new parish learns how much you can be fed.

The second model is for the friend whose calling you watched at close range and occasionally doubted, which is a thing close friends are allowed to say once, in writing, if they say it with love and then move on.

There was a winter, you remember it, when you were sure you had misheard the whole thing and you talked about training for something sensible instead. I listened and privately agreed with you. We were both wrong in the same month. Watching you kneel on Saturday settled it. I will be in the third pew making trouble at a respectful distance for as long as you are doing this.

Keep family cards shorter than you think. The day is long, the new deacon or priest will read forty cards in a heap on Sunday night, and the family card that survives the heap is the one with a memory in the second line and nothing to decode. Pride is allowed in this register, in plain words, from parents especially. What is not needed is the family legend retold at length. They were there. They are the legend.

From the congregation, and the group card problem

Congregation cards fail by committee. One person writes a paragraph of theology, another adds a line about the bring and share lunch, somebody signs in a different pen over the fold, and the finished object says everything except the one thing a congregation uniquely can say, which is: we are the people you will be doing this among, and we are glad it is you. Fix the division of labour before the card goes round. Each signer gets one line and writes either a sighting or a hope, not both, and the organiser writes the opening sentence on behalf of everyone so the card has a spine.

One line each sounds like a restriction. It is a rescue. Left alone, the confident write essays and the shy write their name in the corner in pencil, and the recipient can tell. A line each, in ink, levels the card in a way that suits a congregation, where the teenager and the churchwarden are supposed to count the same. Practical points that sound too small to matter and are not: circulate the card before the final Sunday rather than at the reception, when half the signers are holding plates; leave the envelope unsealed until the last signer has signed; and have one person check the spelling of the new title against the service sheet. A group card with multiple signers removes the plate problem entirely, since people sign from home across the week, and it also removes the lost card problem, which every organiser has lived exactly once.

If you are the new minister's previous congregation, the sending church, your card has a different job again. You are not claiming them and you are not mourning them in public. Thank them for something dated, name the thing their leaving leaves in good hands, and wish the new place well by its name if you know it. That last detail, the new parish named rather than called your new church, is the difference between a blessing and a forwarding address.

If you do not share their faith, or you barely know them

You are allowed to write this card without borrowing a voice. A sentence of honest regard, in your own register, from the colleague, neighbour or in-law who does not believe what they believe, is worth more to most new clergy than a page of scripture copied by someone who does not read it. They spend their working lives telling the difference. Write what is true for you: that you have watched them work towards this for years, that the people they will serve are lucky, that you were glad to be invited and glad you came. All three are complete cards when a sighting is added.

I do not have your faith, so I will not pretend to words I do not use. What I have is eight years of watching you be the person colleagues go to when the news is bad, including me, twice. Whoever gets you as their pastor is getting the real thing. I was honoured to be in the room on Saturday.

Do not write I will be praying for you if you will not be. I will be thinking of you is not a weaker line, it is an accurate one, and accuracy is a form of respect this recipient will register. The reverse also holds. If prayer is your real practice, say so plainly and do not apologise for it or explain it. What never works is the hedge between the two, something like you will be in my thoughts and prayers, copied from a sympathy card, which commits to neither and sounds like it.

For the person you barely know, a child of a friend, a colleague's partner, the ordinand whose service you attended because your choir was singing, scale down without apology. Two sentences and a signature is a respectable card at that distance. Name the service, name one thing in it that stayed with you, the hymn, the silence at the laying on of hands, the bishop's dreadful joke, and close. Distance handled cleanly reads as good manners. Distance padded out with borrowed warmth reads as what it is.

Gifts, money and when the card should arrive

A gift is not expected with this card. Building Faith is blunt about it, a gift is usually not necessary, but a card is wonderful, and that ordering is worth trusting. The new deacon or priest is not short of objects after an ordination weekend. They are short of sleep and of evidence, later, that the day landed with the people they hoped it would land with. Your card is that evidence. Send the card as the whole gift without feeling you have underdone it.

If you do give, give to the work or the shelf. Money delights in one church tradition and embarrasses in another, and amounts vary too much by place for any figure to be useful here, so take your cue from the family or the congregation's organiser rather than from a website. Books are the traditional safe gift and the traditional trap, since every ordinand receives devotional classics in duplicate; a book token, or a note saying a book token is coming when they know what their new shelf lacks, beats a guess. For a close friend, the gift that keeps surfacing in clergy households as the one that lasted is unglamorous and practical, good food delivered in the first fortnight of the new post, or a standing invitation with no expiry date on it.

Timing is forgiving in a way it is not for birthdays. A card handed over at the reception is lovely and will be read in a pile at midnight. A card that arrives ten days later, once the visiting relatives have gone and the new job has had its first ordinary Tuesday, is read alone and slowly, and there is a real argument it does more good. A month later is still fine if the card says why it is late without making the lateness the subject. Past that, write it anyway. Clergy keep these cards for decades, in boxes, through moves between houses that come with the job. The date on a kept card matters to nobody in year nine.

Turn it into a group card

A congregation, a choir, a staff team or a whole extended family can say this better together than any one of them can alone, because an ordination is the rare occasion where the group is part of the story the card is telling. The community called this person too. A group card is the community signing its own name to that. Gather the lines across the week before the service rather than in the vestry afterwards, one line each, sightings over sentiments, and let one person write the opener so it does not read as a noticeboard.

A congratulations ecard built for a group makes the gathering painless when the signers are spread across parishes, time zones and, in most families, levels of organisation. One link goes out, each person adds their line in their own time, and you can create a card online in a few minutes rather than posting a paper card round three counties and losing it in the second one. For the thank-you that follows a pastor later in the year, once you have seen the ministry rather than the day, the shipped thank-you messages for a pastor are the companion piece to this one.

The jar of honey I bought from an honesty box on the lane out of St Davids that weekend, two pounds fifty in coins pushed through a slot in the box, was finished by Christmas, and the jar has outlasted the honey by six years. It sits on my kitchen windowsill holding a spider plant cutting a neighbour handed me in 2023, its roots showing white as thread in water I change when I notice it, which is not often enough. The cutting has produced two babies anyway. Both are still on the sill in egg cups, waiting for me to become the sort of person who finishes that job.