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TIU: Hi Madi please introduce yourself! From what I know of you already I don’t think you were raised in the area?
M: No I am originally from St. Helens near Liverpool. I was born in Everton and raised in St. Helens which is where my parents lived. I spent the first half of my life there until I was eighteen. And then in that moment where you don’t realise you are leaving home but you are – I went off to live in Paris for a year before I went to university. I worked as a nanny for a pittance! But it was a great experience.
TIU: Were you raised within a church environment?
M: I was. Both of my parents are – or were – believers. My dad is sadly no longer with us. My mum is Roman Catholic and lives in Penrith. My dad was a Church of England minister, a vicar, in a very deprived area in St. Helens, one of the most deprived parishes in Europe. People sometimes think it’s obvious that I do what I do because my parents believed but its like your parents might like plain crisps and you might like salt and vinegar.
TIU: Yes I understand.
M: My experience growing up was of a warm loving household – one of five siblings, hardship and no money. My dad got paid very little but we had good friendships, lots of love and lots of freedom. No one was forced to go to church. They were very honest people and open and shared their ups and downs. Through that they had an impact and obviously a strong faith but my dad wasn’t always a believer for instance he became a Christian in his mid thirties and had a completely different life before that. So we knew of that hinterland and we know why he felt called to this particular area of the UK, (he was from New Zealand originally). My Mum was born in London but was raised in Spain, Italy and the UK.
TIU: You are all well travelled?
M: I’ve travelled and my parents have travelled. I am married to an immigrant and I am the mother of an immigrant. My husband is South African but was raised in Canada. We had a child in Canada and brought her here. We are travellers hungry for life. Looking for experiences. And that was very much part of my childhood. Back then we were obviously rooted in the parish and the area right on the dual carriageway where we lived. We were familiar with all the difficulties of being there including lots of instances of deprivation, drugs and arson. Our garage was burnt down, bikes were stolen several times, twenty house robberies and then we stopped counting. That was life but in that I saw faith at work so that was a thing for me – what does it mean to be a person of faith in this environment? If it works here then I am in and that is where I am now.
TIU: Tell me more about Paris…
M: I finished school and had a place at Newcastle University to study Geography. I was almost into the holidays I knew I wanted to take a year out and I was introduced through a friend to a couple. He was French and she was English and they were looking for some home help and so I went to work for them. I helped mum do chores around the house and look after the three boys. It gave me an opportunity to learn – I had GCSE French already but obviously I was more exposed to the language. They gave me bed and board, meals and tube tickets so I got to see Paris which was fantastic. I had some family in Paris at the time and I managed to put a little bit of money away for university.
TIU: And then onto Newcastle for a Geography degree. At what point in your life did you decide to follow your current route?
M: One day in my third year at university I came back from lectures on a Wednesday afternoon I remember it clearly, I felt really restless in my spirit. That’s the only way I can describe it. I didn’t know what was going on so I went into the kitchen where two of my flatmates were making toast. Most of the housemates were Christian and I said to them, “Guys would you pray with me I feel really stirred in my spirit and I don’t know why”. So they dropped everything and put their hands on my shoulders and prayed. As soon as they started praying I heard the word “Preach” in my head. It kept repeating, “Preach, preach”. One of the boys said, “I think God has given you the spirit of your father”, and that resonated spiritually with me. There was something about it all but I didn’t know what it meant. So that was that I just parked it and carried on with the rest of my day. But I have had these moments throughout my life. Another time when I was at a conference about eleven years old with my family. Sometimes in the Christian life God will give you an image or a picture of something. It comes to you as a pictorial image or something, it is clear to you when it happens and I had this weird picture come to mind of a peach.
TIU: Would you say that happened in the third eye? Much like a psychic might describe?
M: I can’t compare it to anyone else’s experience – its a clear picture. It speaks of God, it communicates something of Jesus Christ and it resonates.
TIU: But you can recognise it immediately?
M: Yes and its also like a burden to share it with people. When I was in my eleven to fourteen year group and the leaders asked if anyone had a picture or a word to share I went up to share my image of a peach. The impression I had was that there was someone in the room who was presenting all nice on the outside but had a hard heart, just really hard on the inside. So I shared. As I was sharing it one of the leaders stood close by and said, “I think you are a minister”. It was something about the way I communicated. So that was another moment – you can take it or leave it its not going to condition the choices that I make in my life but it was an observation and I registered it. After university I worked in door to door sales for an American company. I was looking for a real challenge I didn’t want to toe the line and during an event where companies come and present work options I thought it was the most challenging, demanding, unusual job I could think of to do. It was a summer job after graduation, training in sales, communication, showing up at people’s doors. A hundred per cent commission based in Montana of all places.
TIU: Did you find it difficult in sales?
M: It was a really highly regarded company in America, a hundred and fifty years old that everyone knew. Friends of my sisters and people from university had all worked there. I felt it was the right choice for then and offered the experiences I wanted to lap up and it was! Very challenging but eye opening. It was knock on every door, encountering every kind of person and with ninety eight per cent rejection rate I learned some things. It helped me face my fears just showing up every day, being bold and taking risks. I’ve always liked jobs that that involve an element of risk and challenge. I did it for one summer and had this wild experience but it was so transformative and character shaping I became an organisational leader with them. During the following year I recruited other students, trained and motivated them to do it with me and so the following summer we worked in San Diego in California, a very different environment once again. Mentoring people through all that and through that time of life was really good education for me. Sadly during this second summer I lost one of my best friends at university to cancer. We were both twenty one. He said to me before I left, “I might not see you again”, and I thought don’t be ridiculous I’m only going to be gone a few months but he was right and I didn’t realise. That was horrendous and it was compounded by the fact I was in a sales job feeling absolutely wiped. People facing when you smile on the outside but feeling rotten inside. I thought, “I can’t do this job anymore I need a desk job!” At the end of that summer I was wined and dined by one of my managers wanting to promote me and I had to sit through this lunch over a glass of wine and say thank you but its my time to move on – for obvious reasons I am gonna hand in my notice and my book bag. His response after he offered me the promotion was, “If that’s going to be your attitude I’ll just give the job to someone else”. I thought, “wow”. I was at a young age looking again at what it means to be a leader. I believed all these things that the managers had said all the team morale and I thought it was sincere. It was an oh my gosh moment I was making money for him and integrity really mattered to me. So I learned some lessons not just in Christian life but in life as a whole. As a result I moved to London which was where a lot of friends had gone and I stayed with some family my cousin and his girlfriend at the time put me up for a few months. I nannied for a bit and then got an admin job in a church. I felt it was a good environment to work in and was familiar although I was not the best administrator! It was a good foundation and then a couple of years into that the curate there, the vicar in training and the vicar at the time both separately sat me down over coffee and told me I clearly wasn’t an administrator and had I thought about training for ordination? Had I considered leadership? And I had not. It had not occurred to me I didn’t feel that it was for me I didn’t feel called to it I thought there would be some sort of God thing in it and I didn’t understand that that was for me. But I took them seriously. They told me that if I was still in the admin job after six months I was basically wasting myself and would need to think about that. It was really good of them to recognise the skills and gifts I had and hold that out to me, push me to develop. I was really grateful they were both fantastic. My friend had said we needed to pray over my future. I agreed, you know – we pray and God speaks so we met together one morning with a half hour set aside to pray. We spent twenty five out of thirty minutes praying for her and her boyfriend! In the last five minutes she said, “C’mon we have to pray about you!” And in the last five minutes I had a very clear vision from God. He gave me a very clear picture of my two brothers at home in the kitchen in St. Helens arguing with each other about who would be the next vicar in the family. My dad was fourth generation ordained and it was a bit of an ongoing thing…
TIU: Did any of your other siblings go into it?
M: No they haven’t but it was a bit of a running joke that one of them would have to do it. I was at the door in this vision just watching on and they were saying to each other, “Your going to do it”, and, “No your going to do it”. I heard this voice say, “Who will wear the mantle?” And my heart leapt I just thought Oh gosh, me yes! I am up for this Of course! It was personal but I sensed God calling me and immediately knew that I needed to go away and be trained and equipped for that. I didn’t sense that it was a call to ordination as such but rather to work in the church, serving through the church – immediately I know that’s exactly what I need to do and the question that these two vicars at my church had been asking – have you thought about ordination and training? I just knew it was exactly what I needed to do. It all came together and that took me off a year later to study a masters in Theology. I did that at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada.
TIU: Is a masters degree required to take this route?
M: No not at all – if you want to be an Anglican vicar – which is what I did fifteen years later. I wanted to get out of the Anglican bubble at the time, go to a respected graduate college and learn as much as I could about everything about faith and the Bible. It was Christian studies but I did a term learning about Islam and the Quran – it was broad.
TIU: Understanding other faiths is one of the biggest issues. I don’t follow any religion myself I don’t find the answers to my questions met in any one religion thus far. But I have been able to put religion aside in order to get along with people as people. The only way to do that is to make the effort to understand the power of belief itself, perhaps.
M: It’s important but also you can try to establish what you believe and why and what evidence you have for that. To me they are not all equal but there can be good and truth found within different religions. It was enriching for me to be exposed to that.
TIU: What happened next?
M: I went to Canada and did three years of full time graduate study, had a baby in my final year and we moved back to England in 2009 and the next ten years I was full time parenting with voluntary work in church and preaching regularly.
TIU: Did you find being a full time mother difficult?
M: Yes, who doesn’t? It is difficult it is the hardest job in the world. We lived in London after moving back from Canada – my husband was out working all day and I was home with our child. Then we had child two and then child three. Having three under three was incredibly hard. It was boring, lonely, monotonous – that’s all part of it but it was enriching too. It’s costly, its graft, screaming your head off, crying, longing to get any kind of time for yourself. Especially if you have other life events happening simultaneously. When I was in Canada I lost my dad suddenly – and my mum was widowed in her fifties. I’d been away and I hadn’t seen him for eighteen months – things like that happen and you have all the unresolved grief. So having children as well its the most demanding thing ever but having a loving husband who is very supportive helps. I tried to be careful in those early years of parenting. During the time in Canada I had this longing to preach to tell people about God and all that comes with that, the studying aspect, opening the Bible and saying, “Lord meet me here”, and stuff comes out and its just the most fantastic spiritual experience – absolutely love that. Coming back from Canada I was saying to a friend who leads wordship on guitar, “imagine you are only allowed to play guitar five or six times a year how would you feel”? So that’s how I feel about preaching I just have this burden to do it but it was appropriate that I only did it occasionally during those ten years of full time parenting. So that was ten years of having young kids, but being involved with the church as much as I could. I had a good community as well, good friends through church and schools. It was basically survival – we didn’t have any family members there my as mum was in Cumbria and I was in London.
TIU: And then you came up here?
M: Yes whilst I was wondering what God was calling me to do – did he want me to be ordained or what exactly was it? A friend of mine said, “Look Madi, when God calls you he’s going to to call loud and clear so just rest it”. So I did and it felt like the right thing to do so I laid it down and sure enough in 2016 I got this strong sense of now, to go for it. The children were a little bit older. Its a long process to be ordained and certainly to become a vicar its like five or six years. First you offer yourself you speak to your vicar and if they give you their blessing or backing then you enter the system. There are a series of interviews to test your sense of calling and vocation and then you go away for a selection conference and if selected it means you are selected for training. That meant a second masters degree for me. I got through all of that I went to St Mellitus which was the nearest training college to me and did this masters in Theology. Some academic training is required. I was really grateful for that because having had young kids around me for so long a lot of that side of me was knocked out. It’s a gift to be able to learn and I got that opportunity again. At the end of that you look for a place to do your curacy which is where you are still in training but under the leadership and tuition of a resident vicar, So in this case it was Rev Alan Bing here in Ulverston. I requested to be released from the area of London I was in because you need to have the bishop’s permission to go elsewhere. I was offered a place in the diocese there but I didn’t feel called to stay in London and London doesn’t need me really, everyone wants to be in London. I said to God, “I will go anywhere you want me to go but you have to let me know where it is when I get there. How will I know unless you send me the sign?” It was absolute guesswork. I said to James my husband that I would really like our children to have some of what I did when growing up. Experience of hardship and seeing another side of life. Life isn’t all a bed of roses which it certainly wasn’t when we were in London either. We were renting there it was costly and we were living in a fairly nice area but we had done house sharing and split rents in the past. London is completely different to anywhere else but I wanted them to grow in terms of what they were exposed to. James meanwhile wanted them to experience what he had growing up which was mountains and sea. I thought well this is never going to chime. The impossible dream of mountains and sea alongside what I am looking for. We were going to end up in a ring road in Leeds if I had my way. So I went sniffing round a couple of other places and didn’t get much from them. Looking for that correspondence where you feel like its right to explore further and the people interviewing you feel like you are potentially a good fit. So its a journey of discernment on both sides. I was put in touch with the Bishop of Penrith at the time, Emma Ineson, by my bishop in London and he said it would be good to talk with her as she was moving up to Cumbria from Bristol. Ulverston came up and the minute I stepped off the train I was met by Alan Bing and I just had this deep peace. I had been out for a nice boozy lunch in another parish and not really got to see anything of the area so Alan drove me all round the Furness peninsula and showed me everything. The good, the bad and the ugly. And it felt like home. It felt much more familiar to me having grown up in St Helens. I was really grateful for that introduction I met some wonderful people here both in and out of the church. So it was worth exploring! We brought the family up here and looked at the position and we all agreed this was the right place. And look at, we have mountains and sea! And we also have a real bit of work to do so it just ticked all of the boxes. I did three years as curate here and at the end of it Alan retired, without me pushing him! That was in 2022 and although it was certainly not a given that I would get the job I threw my hat into the ring and here we are. Here we still are!
