| HE HAS been Area Dean for less than a year, but the Revd Edward Carter is still trying to make sense of what a deanery is all about. Wallingford Deanery, in Oxford diocese, has two large centres of population in Wallingford and Didcot, “each with their own ecumenical groupings and civic life”, with a number of rural villages, and 19 churches in all.
There are eight or nine stipendiary clergy in the deanery chapter, which meets every other month; a number of NSMs and licensed lay ministers; and the Archdeacon asks Mr Carter how he is “getting on with his deanery plan.” His hope is to get the parishes to grow closer together, and to encourage them to pray for each other, he tells me.
To this end he took part in the Historic Churches Trust “Ride and Stride” day, cycling round all 19 of his churches, and stopping to pray in each. The welcomers, mostly sitting at tables by the church door to help other sponsored cyclists and walkers tick each church off on their list, were surprised when he knelt at the altar rail and prayed aloud for that church and its local community, and Mr Carter was delighted when one welcomer came and knelt with him.
His own parishioners at St Peter’s, Didcot (above), had sponsored him for more than £300; but he also used the opportunity “to show what I would like to happen”.
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