Ministry Team Letter for the Month

Dear Friends,

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I have been asked to write a short article to introduce myself to you.  I can’t tell you everything about myself here, so I am going to tell you something about why I believe in God and why I hope to be ordained in September.

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I have always been fascinated by the world around me and by science in particular, but I realised as a child that there were questions that science could not answer. I worked out that there was no way of disproving the existence of an all-powerful God and, though I rather doubted that such a God existed, I found myself praying that if I were wrong and He did, He would reveal himself to me. Soon after that I had a couple of experiences where I felt aware of a presence with me that was so compelling it drove me to start trying to find out as much about religion as I could. My family didn’t go to church, so it took me a while to understand what Christians believed and why, but once I did, I found the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus convincing. And if Jesus had been raised from the dead then there must be a God who had raised him, presumably the God that Jesus claimed to know as his Father. Eventually I decided that the only way that I could find out for sure was to try living as a Christian, and, as I did so, I found that many of my prayers were answered and I increasingly experienced that sense of God being with me, and my faith grew and my doubts receded.

 

At first I thought I would have to be a nun or a missionary, but then I found out that there were other ways of following Jesus.  I thought about being a vicar, but at that time women could not be ordained as priests. I decided I was called to be a scientist and spent some years researching extragalactic gas clouds until I got married and ended up as a full-time mother of three, and then as a carer for my mother and my aunt, both of whom had dementia. Somewhere in those years I trained as a Reader (now called Licensed Lay Minister) and as a secondary school teacher and I was happy working part-time in school and part-time in the parish. However, after my husband ended our marriage I had to teach full-time and had almost no time available for church beyond Sunday worship.  I loved teaching but knew God was calling me to do more in church. So I talked to various people and began a process that took me to a selection panel and then to theological college. For the last two years I was back to teaching part-time, while training for ordination at Sarum College in Salisbury.

 

I’m really excited to be here in Wareham and am looking forward to learning a lot more about ministry, but most of all to having lots of opportunities to talk about my faith in Jesus to people both inside and outside the Church, and to encouraging people to get to know God better. Many thanks to all who have made me feel so welcome already and I’m looking forward to meeting more of you soon.

 

Yours in Christ,

Helen Williams