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Three in one

15 March 2013

SHE is a Team Vicar in the Dronfield with Holmesfield Team Ministry in Derby diocese, and she is also an authorised Methodist minister, and a minister in the United Reformed Church. When the Revd Ruth Turner (centre) was recently licensed by the Bishop of Repton, the Rt Revd Humphrey Southern, to her new post, where she will have special responsibility for St Andrew's, Dronfield Woodhouse, also present were the Moderator of the East Midland Synod of the URC, the Revd Peter Meek, and the chairman of the Sheffield District of the Methodist Church, the Revd Vernon Marsh.

For her diverse ministry, Miss Turner has a varied background. She trained as a musician, and as a teacher, and was music director in churches in Derby, Oxford, and Wollongong, in Australia. She taught music in London for a few years, and for a further year in Canada.

For the past three years, she has been a curate in Chesterfield. She follows in a family tradition (above): her father, Peter, and her sister-in-law, Val, are both ordained. She is now coming to terms with St Andrew's, which has not only 40 Anglicans, a handful of URC members, and a score of Methodists, but also Pentecostalists, and quite a number from other denominations.

"In fact, there are five different demarcations in the congregation," she told me, which is something that matters when it comes to money. As for services, she had been there less than three weeks when I spoke to her, and she told me that, on the first Sunday, she conducted a communion service according to the Methodist liturgy, and, on the second, it was a "loose morning prayer". There is a music group - something that she is well used to - and an organ for the hymns.

She has already found that it is a strong community that is "warm towards the church".

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