Alex is to be ordained as a deacon on Sunday 26 June and will serve his curacy at the Peel Parishes.
Alex is married to Anna, and they have two girls aged 6 and 4. In September 2020, after 12 years working in town planning, Alex moved with his family from Banbury to Trinity College in Bristol to start ordination training. Moving in the midst of a pandemic wasn’t easy, but they are grateful for God’s grace and faithfulness throughout, including a strong and supportive college community.
Alex believes passionately in the power of the Gospel to transform lives and communities, as they learn to live Jesus’ command to ‘love one another as I have loved you’ (John 13:34-35). Alex believes that the parish church has the potential to offer a distinctively Christian response to the challenges of loneliness, factionalism, and fragmented living by rooting people into their local communities, fed by God’s Word and empowered by God’s Spirit to grow in unity and diversity as Christ’s body worshipping and serving in a particular place.
Alex began ordination training with a fear that it would be dominated by strong opinions and divisive debates around points of theological difference that seemed far removed from the simple truths of the Gospel. In practice, whilst he certainly found the experience of preparing for ministry to be rigorous and challenging at times, he also encountered much grace and gentleness among the college community. He says ‘The culture was one of genuinely respecting difference and seeking to find ways of maintaining our bonds of Christian fellowship whilst being open to engage with different views and perspectives. This made the challenges of ministry formation and academic study so much easier to bear’.
Alex and Anna met at the University of Birmingham, and began married life together living in south Birmingham, before moving to Northamptonshire for Alex’s work. Alex started his career in town planning working for Walsall Council as a Trainee Planning Assistant, and Anna worked for the RSPB in the Midlands Region. They are very much looking forward to returning to the Midlands with their two girls.
For those who are currently exploring what God is calling them to do, Alex says that it is important to trust the process to God and not think about it in terms of ‘success’ or ‘failure’. He says ‘I believe that Christianity is a living faith – a call to faithful living in the present, informed by what we know of God from our past experience, and spurred on by his promises for us, his church, and his world for the future. Therefore I believe the best way to explore God’s calling on our lives is to trust the ending to God. This means having enough confidence in God’s call to keep moving forward with it, whilst holding it lightly so that it does not replace Jesus as ‘the reason for the hope that is in you’ (1 Peter 3:15).