Both of us returned to work, and I had to focus on my finals. I was determined to give of my very best, and studied night and day until the examinations which fell at the end of June – then waited anxiously for the results. I was overjoyed to see my name among those awarded a 2.1 honours degree. As I stood there looking at the board outside the Senate House in Gower Street, I thanked God for His grace which had led me to this day. Now I had to take the learning, the knowledge and the training gathered over the years, and put it to work.
I visited a few parishes to see if I was acceptable to the incumbent. One experience hurt me a little. The Principal wished me to see Canon Tom Livermore, a prominent evangelical and the Rector of Morden in Surrey. I made the journey by train, then walked to the Rectory. Canon Livermore was expecting me, and to my surprise he had his overcoat on. Without inviting me inside he said, ‘Let’s take a walk around the parish.’
As we walked he interviewed me, but I had a sneaking feeling that he had already made up his mind about me. We walked past the old parish church, then into a council estate and past the mission church. ‘That is where I would put you, Carey,’ he said, ‘if I had a job to offer, but only a few days ago I offered the curacy to somebody else.’ By this time we were almost at the station: ‘Now, how much was your fare? Well, here it is. Goodbye.’
I could not believe that anybody could be so cruel. I felt I had been dismissed as a working-class lad who could only work in one culture. Later I got to know Canon Livermore, and found him to be a friendly man and an effective leader. Everybody, I suppose, can have an off day.
Happily, we were soon offered a post at St Mary’s, Islington, in north London, where Prebendary Peter Johnston was the vicar. After years of sensing a vocation, facing the doubts, the rejections, the obstacles and the sheer hard work of intense theological study, my ministry was about to begin.
‘He never attempted brilliance, but thoroughness; he thought more of conscience than genius; more of great futures than little results. He was deaf to the praise or blame of the world.’
Tribute to Archbishop Frederick Temple
OUR FIRST VISIT TO ST MARY’S to meet Peter Johnston and his wife Phyllis, and to see the church and parish, was an unforgettable moment in our lives. After a distinguished ministry at St John’s, Parkstone, Dorset, Peter had only been instituted a few months before our arrival, and was beginning to find his feet in this very different parish. He was a bluff, determined and clear-sighted man with firm objectives and a steady evangelical spirituality. Phyllis was a sparkling woman a few years older than her husband. As they had married late in life, the energy and love they might have poured into family life they gave instead in generous commitment to others. Their open home and commitment to building Christian community became a lifelong model for us. We were immediately attracted to them, and an instant friendship developed. Phyllis took Eileen under her wing, and through the training and leadership I received at his hands Peter was to become one of the greatest influences on my development as a minister.
We joined a large and vigorous team. St Mary’s was – and continues to be – a leading London church. Under Peter’s predecessor Maurice Wood, later to become Bishop of Norwich, it had become very popular with students and nurses. Peter did not want to diminish this ministry, but he did want to make St Mary’s a church for those who actually lived in the parish, and this became the central plank of his policy. Islington in the sixties was not the ‘yuppie’ place it is today. It was a predominantly working-class district with a great deal of poverty, and there were many destitute families and desperate, housebound elderly people. Situated at the southern end of the A1, the church received more than its share of ‘gentlemen of the road’ – so much so that one of Peter’s initiatives included turning the crypt into a night shelter for the homeless.
St Mary’s was also distinguished for its firm commitment to the evangelical tradition. In the nineteenth century Prebendary Wilson had founded the Islington Clerical Conference, which had become a major annual gathering of evangelical clergy for fellowship and teaching, in reaction to the increasing ‘Catholicising’ of the Church of England through the Oxford Movement. Peter continued the Conference, and indeed developed it, broadening its emphasis to take into account relevant themes confronting the Church. However, he used to joke that St Mary’s was more famous for its curates than its vicars, and would trot out such names as the great hymn-writer and Methodist leader Charles Wesley, Donald Coggan, who was later to become Archbishop of Canterbury, and a future Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard.
My predecessor, David Fletcher, had been a very popular teacher and evangelist. I felt unworthy to be stepping into his shoes, and was secretly afraid that I might let Peter down. The senior curate was Michael MacGowan, and we were soon joined by five other staff members: David Green, Chrisanther de Mel, David Boyes, Tom Jones and John Barton. Peter was assembling a new team to serve the community.
Together with my fellow curate David Green and at least forty other young men, I was ordained Deacon of St Mary’s in St Paul’s Cathedral on Michaelmas Day 1962 by the Bishop of London, Robert Stopford. I cannot recall much of the service, except my very strong feeling of unworthiness and helplessness. I was only too well aware of my shortcomings, and the burden of my background seemed a weight too great to bear. However, I was equally aware that the grace of God was more than a promise – it was a fact in the lives of those who took the plunge. And so it proved to be.
Eileen and I lived in a tiny cottage in the grounds of the church, and there in the course of the next four years we were to bring into the world our three eldest children, Rachel, Mark and Andrew. We were poor but very happy. My stipend was very low, and Eileen recalls that her housekeeping amounted to £3.155. a week. We could not afford a car, but through the generosity of a friend were never without one to get away on our day off. We did not have a washing machine or any of the gadgets that most young married people now take for granted.
The cottage, the oldest building in Islington, was very damp, but we managed to bring up three very healthy children in it. In spite of living on our beam ends, it was a wonderful four years of training in a great parish and at a significant cultural period. London was the pulsating centre of the ‘swinging sixties’. Rock and roll was in the ascendant, and the Beatles were making their way into the hearts of the young everywhere. A heady and optimistic excitement about the future prevailed, accompanied by a cynicism towards spiritual values and tradition. The witty but irreverent That Was the Week That Was expressed the mood of the decade. The Church was not immune from the spirit of enquiry and the culture of the age. Across the River Thames, the diocese of Southwark appeared to be the vanguard of new ideas, new experiments in ministry and new approaches to gender and sexuality. In America as well as in Britain, certain theologians affirmed ‘the death of God’, by which they meant the demise of traditional ways of conceiving of Him. Harvey Cox, one of the most radical and interesting of the new wave of theologians, predicted the death of orthodox theology by the end of the century. In Britain John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, produced a sensational book, Honest to God, which seemed to call into question the nature of the Christian faith. In the view of the press and the chattering classes it signalled that the Church had realised at last that traditional ways of talking about God were no longer relevant. The Church was at a crossroads: either it entered this heady new world where everything was being questioned and nothing was sacred, or it lived on as an out-of-touch irrelevance in a buzzing, exciting new age.
In reality there was nothing new in Robinson’s book – it was little more than a scaled-down popularising of the thinking of such theologians as Paul Tillich, who had posited the image of God as ‘ground of being’ (rather than an external deity), Rudolf Bultmann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazis and claimed that man had come of age. It caused an instant sensation, however, and made Robinson