The Irresponsible Socialist: Birmingham

Birmingham

My application for Bradford had been speculative. I just wanted to test the water and was surprised to be offered an interview and even more surprised to be offered the job. And I would have been happy to remain in Castle Carrock or another Cumbrian parish, as indeed in retirement, we now are.

For this reason my last experience of job search in earnest was leaving Newcastle. On this occasion I applied for and was shortlisted for three jobs. In the first I had a fairly strong disagreement with the Chair of the interview panel. I cannot now remember what we disagreed about but he had followed up a question by reacting to my answer in an aggressive manner and telling me that I was wrong. As my answer had been based on personal experience and described a situation with which I was familiar and comfortable I knew that whatever I was, I was not wrong. So I responded to his challenge. We were not exactly pulled apart but a panel member had to intervene and it was clear that my response had made me unappointable at least on that day.

The interview for the second job also became a fiasco. The weather was particularly shocking and I took a train to London from Newcastle uncertain whether I would be able to complete the journey.

I arrived in London and journeyed to the accommodation where I was staying with the only other candidate and where the social events leading up to the interviews the next day were to be held. This included an evening meeting with the team members of the team I would, if appointed, lead.

The job was as an Industrial Missioner and it became immediately clear that in a field of two I was the outsider. The other candidate had worked in the field for some years and knew most if not of the team from various conferences and working parties that he had been part of.

I had been briefed by a close friend of mine that the bishop wanted to create a new vision for Industrial Mission, to see more of a structural critique of society and in particular industrial society, and to bring a more reflective theological mind to bear as an alternative to a simple workplace presence.

It was clear that I could not compete on a level playing field so I decided to emulate my hero Captain Kirk of the starship Enterprise and re-programme the computer.

Unfortunately for me someone had omitted to inform one member of the interview panel of the Bishop’s desire to see radical change for Industrial Mission in London. After a particularly, in my view, scintillating, flight of fancy about how Industrial Mission could be shaped and changed to fit changing patterns of work, the structural changes in the work place, the pressures facing workers as the economy was globalised and the rise of new superpowers, the questioner cut in with a new question.

‘Do you know ANYTHING about Industrial Mission’? She asked. This time I didn’t argue. Again I was unappointable on the day. The safe pair of hands was appointed to the relief of the team members most of whom I would have moved on if I had been appointed as I set about the much needed task of restructuring the whole enterprise.

The last job I applied for was as The Director of the Centre for Applied Christian Studies at Selly Oak in Birmingham.

Selly Oak is a fascinating place. A collection of colleges all in some way associated with Church Education, ministerial development or theological reflection or preparation for working overseas with one of the mission societies. As I saw it my task was to broker the resources of the colleges to the wider Christian community in Birmingham and beyond. This also offered the opportunity to develop my own practice and pursue the wider question of what distinguishes practical theology from its counterpart which was what?

Impractical Theology?

I have had a couple of jobs where if the circumstances had been right I might have stayed until retirement. Certainly the Birmingham job was one such.

Despite the feminist critique which followed the decision to leave Newcastle and move on, I think that as a family we enjoyed living in Birmingham. Birmingham is a much under-rated City and we found it to our liking. We had managed to buy a house and so for the first time had both a mortgage and a sense of ownership. House price inflation ensured that we moved from a 100% mortgage at 11% interest in the first year to a 50% mortgage at 7.5% by year four.

Unfortunately as I began work significant external forces were beginning to impact on higher education. The consequence of this was that colleagues in the college to whose staff I was appointed queried the luxury of employing someone at Senior Lecturer level who was not bringing into the college fee paying students. And far from brokering resources I was being challenged to find ways of selling those resources to whoever would buy them.

It made for an interesting four years during which I was able to visit America twice and to continue to develop my work with Church Action on Poverty and with Church Housing, to build an excellent working relationship with The Children’s Society, to develop some new course including a course which I developed in association with the The Diocese of Sheffield.

An important part of my time at Selly Oak was to seek and be offered an opportunity to spend a day a week as an assistant Chaplain at H M Prison, Winson Green. From the moment I made contact with the Chaplain and visited the prison I recognised this as a place where the mercy and forgiveness of God meets human suffering and sinfulness. It was what the Salvation Army would call the mercy seat. It was an essential place for me to spend time working out what exactly practical theology is worth in the intense environment of the prison.

I usually covered the Chaplains day off and my day would begin like his, with visits to the hospital, the punishment cells, meeting new inmates and then move on to other activities, usually a discussion group or Bible Study.

Powerful, telling tales were rehearsed, there was acceptance of guilt, there was remorse and there was the constant hope of forgiveness. The staff would spend hours looking at individuals and the best way to provide for their needs within the system. There were bullies and those who needed protection, there were frauds and there were simply professional criminals for whom this was a way of life. There were those who had committed crimes of passion and those who had carefully planned their crimes. There were also too many young black and Asian men suggesting that on the outside, the system had failed.

I published regularly and continued to write and publish poetry. Especially I valued my association with The Midland Arts Centre and a stand-up poetry group called On the Spike.

This particular association did get me into trouble in the college. I had written and performed a poem about hitch-hiking. As a student I had often hitch hiked from Manchester to Salisbury, partly as a practical money saving project and partly for philosophical reasons linked to my liking of the work of Jack Kerouac and the beat poets.

This poem was called F**K you Jack Kerouac. It started with the memory of a journey when I managed to get stuck on the hard shoulder at two in the morning at a place called Brownhills just outside Birmingham. The poem ended with the words

F**k you Jack Kerouac,

next time I’m getting the train back.!

When I read it at On the Spike it played well and people applauded. Encouraged I also read it at a college event. The next morning I was called to the Principals office to explain myself. Apparently there had been a complaint about an Ordained Staff Member using inappropriate language at an event where students were present.

Some of the work we did at The Centre was of a very high order and I have some excellent memories of my time in Birmingham. Practical Theology is key to understanding the word as incarnate. Again and again in seminars and in meetings, as people explored the issues arising in their work, it became clear that they were drawing on theological principles to undergird their actions.

Deep seated belief in salvation, resurrection, forgiveness, renewal, transformation and the connections between faith and works all helped people to understand in new ways how their faith was a resource to them in confronting and addressing the issues that cropped up in work, family life and personal development.

When I tendered my resignation to the Bishop of Newcastle Alec Graham had generously observed that practical theology or as the Centre was officially designated, Practical Christian Studies was an area where I had over the time that I had been his adviser demonstrated competence and knowledge.

In time I moved outside the college with a contract to undertake theological reflection in the context of the work of the East Birmingham Task Force it was here, working with young people keen to establish their own businesses, developing, in association with the local churches, a skills centre and a nursery and creating a forum The East Birmingham Theological Co-op where the ideas and engagements could be tested and worked through from the perspective of faith.

During this time I remained a staff member of the college and still had an office and a desk on the campus but seconded myself for four days a week to the Task Force. It was obvious with a change of Principal that the college was looking to save money and so eventually I decided that I should move on again. I applied to become a Prison Chaplain and was offered a job. But it would have mean’t moving again, away from Birmingham which I had no desire to do so I was pleased when eventually I was approached with a request to express an interest in a job with the Home Office.

I became team leader of the Birmingham Drugs Prevention Initiative. The initiative was part of the so called ‘War on Drugs’, the aim was to reduce drug taking in urban centres using where possible different methodologies.

In Birmingham the team introduced two strategies, peer group influence, using the undoubted power of peer group pressures in positive ways and legitimate highs, based on the proven theory that much drug use results from the safety that young people experience and their need for risk and excitement.

We had a small fund to support projects and the ear of significant people in the Police and the Local Authority. But we were in man y senses fighting a losing battle from the start. There were areas of Birmingham, where over the weekend you might have thought that drugs had been legalised. Drugs were endemic in Winson Green as I knew from my Chaplaincy there. One evening I had been attending a recording session for a record the Team had funded, Say NO to Drugs, a band of young Afro-Caribbean musicians were recording in a studio in Ladywood an inner City area. When I arrived at the session the band were almost all smoking weed, I imagine they were saying no to hard rather than recreational drugs, after I left as I was driving on to the ring road, I was overtaken by a black BMW convertible with the hood down, driven by a group of young Afro-Caribbean men wearing black leather jackets. Dealers, that’s when I knew that we were wasting both our time and the tax-payers money, these guys were the role-models for young people in the community.

So I prepared a report, it was a philosophical position and bore no relationship to my personal views for or against drugs and drug use. In the paper I argued that the UK Government had a well thought out position on drug use, misuse and abuse. Drugs, in particular Tobacco (Nicotine), Alcohol and Tea and Coffee were freely available, the quality of the product i.e. purity, strength and effects were monitored and published widely, on Cigarette packets for example and the advisory number of units which comprise sensible drinking on drinks containers and most importantly health cost/benefit calculations were factored into the taxation from which the Government drew a healthy income.

My report, submitted for an in–house Home Office Journal, was rejected and I was reminded that I had signed the official secrets act and that it would not be in my interests to publish it elsewhere.

At the end of my two years with the Drugs Prevention Unit we ran a conference as part of National Drugs Awareness week Chaired by Jonathon Dimbleby, and addressed by the then minister The Right Honorable Ian Jacks MP and an American drugs specialist from California.

Another move began to beckon and before they year was out we would be moving to Castle Carrock. But before that happened a link was re-established with Janet’s step-brother Peter and her step-mother Peg. Once the news of her illness reached them they arranged to drive up from Salisbury where they still lived, to Birmingham. We were joined by Janet’s brother Philip and the visit was a great success. It left Janet and I talking again about that wonderful City where she had spent her Childhood and where we had met.

Newcastle

Newcastle

We moved to Newcastle in April 1978. I was appointed as Diocesan Social Responsibility Officer and Adviser to the Bishop and Priest in Charge of St Andrew’s, the oldest of Newcastle’s City churches.

In time I became established in the role once famously characterised in Synod as The Board for Socialist Irresponsibility, praise indeed!

We lived in a wonderful Georgian terraced house in a suburb of Newcastle, Gosforth. In fact the house had been the key to my applying for the job. Our Vicarage in Manchester had literally fallen down. Differential settlement in the long, hot summer of 1976 had effectively snapped the concrete raft on which the house stood and a foundation to roof height crack had appeared, at its widest you could look through and see the interior of the house.

When I saw the job advertised my spirits were low. Janet had been unwell, later we recognised this as the classic early symptoms of the MS. The house was literally falling down round our ears. We were trying to raise three lively daughters in a building site for months whilst the diocese failed to deal with the problem. I had threatened to resign and more or less been told that I had no choice but to stay and put up with the situation.

The advert rang some bells. I had become a member of the Board for Social Responsibility in Manchester and was interested in this kind of work. So I suggested to Janet that we had a day out in Newcastle. We called in to St Andrew’s which had an ancient mysterious feel to it, situated as it is on Gallowgate in the City centre within cheering sound of St James’s Park and its famed Gallowgate End.

Then following the clues and after checking in the phone book we drove out to Gosforth and found the Vicarage. We approached the house via an alley way off the main A1. It was the peace and quiet of the garden, its proximity to The Northumberland Cricket Club ground and the Tennis Courts and the solidity of a Georgian terrace that clearly was unlikely to fall down unless it was pushed, that made us both smile. On my return to Manchester I wrote my application in long hand to the rhythm of a pneumatic drill cutting through the concrete raft outside my study where the entrance hall and downstairs toilet had once stood.

As a family we loved Newcastle and as we began to explore further afield, Northumberland and the North East Coast. My eldest daughter once expressed her feelings when she described it as a county of castles and beaches.

The job involved advising the Bishop and Diocesan Synod and where practicable the parishes, on matters of social concern, of public policy and to identify matters to which the Church should respond and to enable that response.

Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in 1979 and it was the devastating impact of her Governments policies on the economy of the North East which dominated the nine years that I spent in Newcastle.

Towards the end of my time in the Diocese I was asked to prepare a document from the Diocese to be submitted to the Archbishop’s Commission. I wrote the document by inviting comments from all the parishes and then taking away a raft of material to Shallowford House Nr Stone in Staffordshire where I had my selection conference for Ordination training.

I met an old friend from Stoke, Syd Clewlow and his wife Rose in the local pub, had a few pints and talked over the old days then went back to Shallowford House and sat up all night writing.

The Document was accepted by The Bishop’s Council and submitted to the Commission. Later when the Commission visited the North East Bishop David Shepherd complimented the document I had prepared and commented, ‘hard writing makes easy reading’, he also said that it was one of the better submissions received by the Commission.

I later learned that the Bishop had written separately to the Commission disassociating himself from the document on theological grounds!

The main thesis of the document was summed up at a meeting of the Commission in the Civic Centre in Newcastle, symbol of T Dan Smith’s the ‘Brazillia of the North’ as a direct consequence of the Government’s economic policy, it was stated by a senior member of the Local Authority staff, the North East suffered from three problems, ‘Poverty, Poverty, Poverty’.

Whilst in Newcastle I had been attending various meetings of a network of Social Responsibility Officers. One such meeting in London had been addressed by Professor Peter Townsend, who spoke to his recently published book on Poverty in the United Kingdom.

A number of us were scandalised by the irrefutable findings so clearly documented in Professor Townsend’s book and so late into the evening as we discussed how we should and could respond to the challenges that the book presented the idea of a National Church Campaign was born. Church Action on Poverty was the direct result of that conference and I became a leading member of the campaign along with other key individuals including the Revd. Professor John Atherton, The Revd. John Austin, The Revd.Tony Addy and after funding was made available, the campaign was strengthened enormously by the appointment of John Battle who later became MP for Leeds North.

I stayed in Newcastle for nine years, the longest time that I remained in any single job, although Newcastle was never a single job.

There was a parish, St Andrew’s in Newgate Street was the oldest church in the city. It was the home of the City Centre Chaplain, a semi-independent Chaplaincy that reported to the Council of Churches group. There was a gathered congregation drawn from a wide area including across the River in Gateshead.

I tried to make St Andrew’s a laboratory for Social Responsibility in the City centre and a lot of interesting work was undertaken from drop in sessions for people with emotional problems to a telephone support service for people with HIV and Aids.

The most challenging project which divided the congregation and caused a flurry of resignations was the opening of a Youth Group for Gay Teenagers.

HIV and Aids impacted on the North East in the years after 1985. I had by then enjoyed a sabbatical in the USA with my family.

I had been appointed a Proctor fellow at The Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was here that I re-discovered a vocation as a poet writing my first poem after seeing a bus driven through Harvard Square by a driver who was a doppelganger for George C Scott in The New Centurions.

It was also in the intensive atmosphere of Cambridge that I discovered the power of the Churches movement towards the Ordination of Women. Three women in particular impressed and challenged me, Carter Haywood, Sue Hiatt and Katy Cannon. The college was a mixed community of women and men in training, with an emphasis within the college on gender difference, as a family we were in a minority as a heterosexual couple in a stable and monogamous relationship.

The atmosphere was challenging and stimulating and I managed to generate extra income by serving in an interim ministry at Christ Church, Somerville, this included Sunday services and taking the Eucharist to members of the congregation no longer able to attend through infirmity, (known in the States as shut-ins).

I was also invited to be an assistant Eucharistic minister at Trinity Church in Boston. They paid $50, there were usually four teams of two, taking the elements around a circular sanctuary rail with up to a thousand communicants.

At Easter in 1985 the two services attracted around a thousand worshippers at each service and during the service I noticed a Brinks Security van arrive to take the collection directly to the bank which had opened especially for the purpose of receiving it. There was just too much money to leave in the Vestry whilst the second service was happening.

I have had three significant periods in my life, theological college liberated the young, working class boy, Newcastle helped me discover the truth of my vocation but Cambridge, Massachusetts was where I began to sense that wonder which makes life truly transformative.

The experience came at a particularly significant time or me. In 1980 two major events occurred which affected me deeply. In July 1980 my son William was born and in the November of the same year my Mother died.

I recall visiting her at what turned out to be the final time I saw her alive. She in bed and I sat on the bed next to her. My son was wrapped in a blanket, lying on the bed asleep. Janet and the girls were downstairs occupying themselves and my Mother shared with me in a small voice weakened by her illness, by then the Cancer had spread into her lungs and vital organs, memories of her early life and her parents.

She knew that she was dying. But like so many important matters throughout her life she preferred not to face that fact head on. So she reminisced. She spoke about her Mother, Henrietta who was known as Flo, and the mystery surrounding her early years. Her birth records could not be traced and it seemed that she had been adopted by a farming family in Yorkshire and raised partly as family and partly as an extra pair of hands on the farm and around the house. She spoke about her father Frank Oswald Wilde and how I reminded her so much of him. She spoke about his kindness and generosity, of his temper, and of how he had found her marriage to my Father difficult both because, as the eldest of three girls she was the first to marry, but also because my Father was a Roman Catholic and he was anxious about what would happen in a mixed marriage.

Eventually William stirred and she tired and the conversation came to an end with photographs scattered across the counterpane of the bed. As I carried William downstairs I knew that it was the last time that I would see her and I wanted to go back and embrace her, but I also knew that I couldn’t and she wouldn’t want me to, so I left.

She died two weeks later as I was in the car heading towards Manchester for a visit which had been arranged under the pretext of a meeting. I left the Hospital Mortuary and walked back to my car. I was thirty five years of age, married with four children of my own, but I felt simply orphaned, the moral centre of my life had gone, I was like a boat that had slipped its mooring, adrift and aimless.

My children and especially my wife Janet came to my rescue and as a family we were able to grow together more closely. It was during the days immediate following my Mothers’ death that I saw more of my Father and we grew closer than we had ever been, before or since.

It is one of the legacies of the Second World War that men were away from home and family for extended and in today’s context almost impossible lengths of time. Janet’s Father had been in India with the RAF and when he returned his wife and eldest child were almost a separate family from the two children born after the war had ended and he had returned to his wife.

My Mother and father had married during the War and my Father, who was in a reserved occupation as a skilled engineer with AVRO in Manchester had volunteered for the RAF.

His first posting was to Gourock on the Clyde and here he had arranged for my Mother to join him. She had a job inspecting Aircraft engines which were being imported from America, disassembled, inspected, mu Mothers’ job and re-assembled, my Father’s job before being fitted into British Fighter planes.

Some time in early 1945 my Father was posted to Melton Mowbray and my Mother, by then pregnant with me, returned home to Manchester where I was born on the 29th April. That day Dachau was liberated and the war was almost at an end. For years my Mother insisted that I was born on Victory in Europe day although given the length of time that Mothers and newly born Children remained in Hospital in those days, she was quite probably still in hospital on May 8th which was officially the day when Victory in Europe was declared.

After our return from America the family settled back into school but I couldn’t settle as readily into my old routines. I had been quite changed by the experience and felt that it was not possible to return. I am the kind of person who hates retracing his steps whether it is a country walk or a trip to the coast, I prefer to return a different way. My boredom threshold is quite low.

So I began to think about what might come next. Colleagues with whom I had worked closely were beginning to feel that it was time to seek a move themselves and so the possibility of change was in the air.

I began by looking back at our American experience and candidated, to use an American term, for three jobs, Rector of Christ Church, Cambridge, impossibly ambitious but sometimes aiming for the heights is the right thing to do. I was shortlisted into the last sixteen, itself something of an achievement, but despite friends being convinced that my accent would have got me the job of I had been interviewed, I was not invited.

Then came an Assistant Priest’s position in Baltimore, on this occasion I was invited, but at my own expense and for a preliminary interview. I felt that the risks associated with this were too great and so I withdrew my name from consideration.

My final application was for the position of Urban Ministries Co-ordinator for the Diocese of New Jersey. I made excellent progress in pursuing this application, I made the final shortlist of three and believed that I was to be invited for interview. Then I took a telephone call from the Chairman of the Search Committee apologising and reassuring me that they wanted to offer me an interview.

Apparently of the three one was Californian, one was from Massachusetts and there was me from England. The Bishop ruled out the Californian and decided to interview the candidate from Massachusetts and offered him the job.

I decided that I couldn’t keep coming second and so turned my attention to Jobs in the UK.

Meanwhile the work continued to press in on me with its demand. Unemployment continued to be a major issue on Tyneside and the Board ran a couple of advice centres set on Estates outside the City Centre. Our community work scheme funded by the manpower Services Commission continued until the Commission itself was wound up. There were reports to be written and various issues to be highlighted and debated in Synod. A pioneering partnership was negotiated with the Children’s Society. But AIDS and HIV were a dominant theme during this period of time.

I had been approached by the wife of a friend of mine whose Brother had died of an AIDS related illness in London. His memorial in Carlisle had been a difficult affair because the central focus of his life, as a Gay man had been denied.

I was challenged to address the ignorance and fear and to ensure that such a thing might not happen in Newcastle. Out of this initiative a number of important things happened with support from Brian Roycroft the then Director of Social Services in Newcastle.

Links were built with the Hospital and the work being undertaken with Haemophilia sufferers infected with contaminated blood. AIDS North, a telephone counselling service was started, with support from the PCC of St Andrews Church. But perhaps the most interesting initiative was a training session which I offered personally to each deanery in the Diocese via the Rural Deans.

There was a 100% take up of the offer which in itself was an indication of the fear which AIDS and HIV had engendered amongst people generally. The training consisted of me inviting before hand one of the Clergy to be involved in a role play.

The brief that I gave them was that there had been a request from the husband of a parishioner to talk about a personal matter.

They had no other indication of subject or of what was being asked of them in terms of advice or practical help.

I developed three scenarios. On one occasion I visited one of the three City deaneries and in the counselling session I introduced a character who was the bi-sexual partner of the PCC Secretary who had become infected during un-protected sex with someone he had met at a Gay Club in Leeds.

The session went well and I thought that I had got the point over really well and the ‘volunteer’ cleric, a smart, bright, young female deacon had excelled.

It was only after the session was over and we were leaving the meeting that one of the Clergy came up to me and asked after Janet and then enquired whether Janet knew what had happened.

The dangers of role-play!

When the time came to leave Newcastle for a new home and job in Birmingham my actions were subject to the fullest of feminist scrutiny. Maybe as a result of their American experience, maybe because they were becoming more aware of the issues involved, the three girls challenged me over the decision to move away from all that they held dear and to embark on yet another new adventure.

As we followed the furniture van down the M6 my eldest girl wept over the City she was leaving behind, the friends and a significant part of her life up until that point. Ironically the real victim of that move turned out to be our youngest William whose transition to his new school was disastrous. Our middle daughter took matters into her own hands when she returned to Newcastle two years later, to University.

Of course the real reason for our moving was the Church. Initially I had hoped to stay at St Andrew’s and to develop a new role in the City centre, perhaps combining the City chaplaincy with the role of Vicar. But the Bishop argued, first that he needed the stipend to pay for the Social Responsibility Adviser, second that I would be a threat to any possible successor and third that there were no jobs he could offer me. I was invited to consider the possibility of discussing my future with the Archbishop’s Appointments Adviser, Canon Ian Hardaker.

The pastoral consequences of our move to a new City, the girls and William to new schools, Janet’s MS which was becoming more obvious with time, the fact that we had to buy our own house with a 100% Mortgage at 11% interest, that we left Newcastle with considerable accumulated debts. None of that was given any consideration by the Bishop or any one else, although on a personal level but unofficially, the Archdeacon dropped by on a Sunday morning and asked how we were managing. How different from our arrival nine years before when nothing was too much trouble and the previous bishop’s wife arrived with Fish and Chips.

Despite this, however, I believed that I was being called forward and that if we moved forward in faith our faith would be rewarded, God would not fail us or desert us. It was a tenet of my earliest conviction that I had a vocation that I would always seek to discern God’s call and act faithfully.

Vocation

Vocation

At my Ordination retreat the Bishop's Chaplain had led a session

on Vocation and he asked us to talk about how our vocations had started and how the call to which we were now responding had first made itself known.

On reflection I knew that I should have invented some story because the Chaplain was one of those top drawer career clergy heading for a Bishopric from the day they leave theological college and even now, in what was his second job, really just a second curacy, he was looking for new clergy, people with whom in due course he could staff his future diocese.

But no, amidst the stories of people who were inspired by the lives of saints, encouraged by faithful vicars and school Chaplains who recognised and encouraged their true vocations; I described how I went to the church youth club with a couple of friends from the local area and saw a girl called Susan Palmer, whose father ran a corner shop and who was from an altogether different social strata from me.

Realising that I stood little or no chance of her talking to me at the youth group and hearing that she was in the church choir, I decided to join the church choir myself in order to qualify for the choir outing to the seaside and the hoped for possibility of getting her alone on the back seat of the bus on the way home.

It was true and from this fairly unlikely starting place I began to attend church regularly, despite being thrown out of the choir because I couldn't sing to save my life.

If anyone had ever suggested the possibility, not that anyone had, I would have laughed uproariously. I certainly wasn’t the kind of person to think about the church and all the God stuff. I was no creeping Jesus. I had never been an altar boy, I had been baptized, and one thing led to another until I was attending a confirmation class and then talking seriously to the new curate about how you offered, that apparently was the word used, for ordination.

Looking back over the four years that it had taken from 1965 when I went to The Bernard Gilpin Society in Durham until 1969 when I graduated from Salisbury Theological College. Those four years of study, tutorials, essays, reading, interspersed with holiday jobs in bars, cleaning windows, whatever I could get, were to all intents and purposes an escape route from what working class future fate had in mind for me.

But it hadn’t been a sudden brain wave that had set me on the path towards ordination. By now my family were living in Stoke on Trent, I had left school with the Headmasters words following me down the corridor, ‘Smith, it will benefit neither you ‘nor the school for you to remain here a minute longer than is necessary’.

My Mother was mortified and dragged me down the hill to the Normeir Tyre Company who were advertising for a Trainee Salesman. I left school on the Friday and started work on the Monday.

That job was probably the most responsible job I ever had, given that rather than training as a salesman I was mending punctures, fitting tyres, balancing wheels and refitting them to cars that then went out on to the public roads.

After a year of that job I undertook the Civil Service open competition and was appointed as a Clerical Assistant the most junior Civil Service grade.

The job was in the Town Centre of another of the Five Towns, Longton and I used to take myself off for a walk around at Lunchtime. I would stare into shop windows, call into the record store to hear the latest music releases, buy the occasional LP and think as I walked about the future and where life was leading me.

Occasionally I passed a large austere building forming an island in the centre of a cross roads, with traffic passing on both sides. The Church was dedicated to the Saviour, it smelt sweetly of what in due course I learned was incense, but there was a back scent of beeswax and polish hiding a faint smell of human odours, sweat and socks, and something else that I couldn’t quite explain.

I would sit in the semi-darkness which was only barely lightened by daylight filtering through windows high above the central aisle, the main aisle windows themselves offering little light because of the dark stained glass that obscured the outside world which hummed away gently in the background. The mix of traffic noise and human voices formed the rhythm section of the city.

Sitting there became a daily ritual, I would leave the office at lunchtime, refusing various invitations to share a drink, play cards or football, and head down to the traffic island cross over and enter the dark sanctuary.

Despite confirmation class and attending services and listening to sermons I was completely untutored in religious matters but as I read various notices and magazines, I began to understand the clues and read the signs and symbols and it began to dawn on me that this strange ritual environment, its darkened interior embracing me with its soft, gentle, scented air held a clue to the dis-ease in the world outside.

The Saviour to which the church was dedicated was the Jesus of the New Testament and when I found a Bible and started to read, I would become so engrossed that on occasion I would be late for work.

But in a world where it was possible for monsters to emerge who so denied their humanness that they could visit wickedness on innocent children, the question had to be asked how could this be and how could a God who claimed to be good allow such a thing to happen.

Later I learned that this was called the Problem of Evil but as I read the pamphlets, read the history of the church and reflected on the idea of a saviour I began to understand that there was a connection between this large, warehouse of a building standing on its isolated and isolating traffic island and the events affecting people right now.

It began to become clearer to me, and I was as I say untutored in all of this arcane material and so was working all of this out for the first time for myself, that the goodness of God, is that he is prepared to let people work things out for themselves, get some things right and some things pretty dramatically and awfully wrong. Then rather than come steaming in to put things right sends another person to share in the mess and try to sort it out as a human being rather than as a god type.

According to the pamphlets I found at the back of St Saviours this character is the Jesus whose story is told in the gospels, in a sense he was there to help people become human, to hold on to their humanness, and to ensure that humanity triumphs in the end, or as that weird and wonderful last book in the bible claims in the end, God wins.

So I found myself reflecting as I walked back to work, whatever evil comes along, our humanness is guaranteed because of Jesus, the cross was a problem still and there was a lot that puzzled me, but if evil people have their way then our humanness will eventually be eroded, we will be less and less at ease with ourselves and our neighbours and eventually evil will win, so its not really all the mumbo jumbo or the hymns or the services or even the  incense that matters its that this Jesus person continues to stand up for truth at any price, even the high price of dying and absorbing into himself, the sinfulness.

I was still spending some lunch times, with work colleagues and some days the weather was too poor to be walking out and risking having to spend the afternoon in the office wearing damp clothes. But I still managed to get down to the church and to spend time in the semi-darkness trying to fathom out answers to the questions spinning around in my mind.

Sometimes I read from the New Testament, sometimes there was a new pamphlet in the small library at the back of the church, but sometimes I would just sit and reflect on the words of the pop songs that I enjoyed

Eventually a curate came to our parish. Horace Harper was a man almost ascetic in his quiet commitment and his sense of pastoral care began to make an impression on me. Eventually the sense of vocation arose as an expression of how I could spend my life in the pursuit of the worthwhile work in which Fr. Harper was clearly engaged.

The secret of Susan Palmer remained a mystery and my naive sexual experimentation was regularly forgiven by Fr. Hamer who counselled restraint but seemed able to live with the fact that his counsel was routinely ignored.

And it was this, as I explained, that had in the end made the most profound impression. That the church in the form of Fr. Harper, could live with the shortcomings and failings of the community he sought to serve. 

It seemed to me that as Fr Harper has expressed it, I had been loved into believing and eventually into offering myself for the Churches ministry an offer which to both our surprise had been accepted. My attendance at church was somewhat erratic and at that time I had no formal academic qualifications at all but nevertheless eventually I was successful at my Selection Conference and recommended for training.

The Chaplain with a raised eyebrow archly responded, to polite

ripples of laughter from the others present, by observing that it

had probably been a ' clerical error '.

In fact it had been more than that. Fr Harper later told me, when I was appointed as a Residentiary Canon and Vice-Provost of Bradford Cathedral, that he had been told in no uncertain terms to stop wasting his time with such a hopeless case as I was deemed to be, by his Vicar.