New News

and some other things

I’ve got some exciting news for you today which is that my family and I know now where we are going when my curacy comes to an end. I’m extremely happy to say that I’ve been offered the post of priest in charge at Holy Trinity Winchester and we expect to be moving at some point around June this year.

Lorna and I lived in Winchester when we were first married for five years and I lived there a total of seven years. I dearly love the city. Holy Trinity Winchester is an Anglo-Catholic church that is actually on the road that we lived on when we were first married. So there is an uncanny providential feel about all of this.

Holy Trinity is a beautiful Anglo-Catholic Church just outside of the city centre of Winchester. As you can see from the photos, it is a stunning building particularly the interior in my opinion.

And here, just for fun, is a picture of the same church from 1870, just a few years after its original construction.

There’s a slight twist in this story which is that this is actually a part-time post and it is limited to three years initially. It’s called “house for duty” which means that they give me a house and I work for the church Sundays and two other week days. I decided to look for a post like this because I am hoping to spend a little bit more time on the podcast and working towards a new book. The challenging thing is of course that I will no longer have a regular salary from the church (a stipend) but I will rely on the income I make from the podcast and from other things like my book and this blog. In fact I actually started this blog about a year ago because I expected to be moving to Winchester much earlier than this and was thinking about ways to boost my income. As it turns out the delay has been good for us financially because it’s meant that we’ve been able to build up some savings. But this is still a serious financial undertaking which is a little bit scary but at the same time very exciting. My hope is that I’ll be able to help build up the congregation in the church and the financial side of things so that perhaps this role can become permanent and paid or partly paid at some point in the future. I’d like to do more with the podcast particularly in terms of interesting interviews that I don’t have time for at the moment, developing our website and giving more to our patrons. And I’d like to be able to finally develop this book that I’ve been thinking about and see where that goes. Even though I’ve tried to set the latter aside, the door is still very much open so I am going to try my best to work on it.

So anyway it’s a bit of an experiment really: ministry, podcast, writing and we’ll see what the Lord says through this experience. In all of this I do feel his providential hand and guidance. And I’m hugely grateful for the warmth which I’ve felt from the folks at Holy Trinity so far. I really just want to do my best for them.