Coming to Egremont after twenty-eight years as an RAF chaplain may be a different kind of challenge for our new Rector, Richard Lee. Against a background of declining numbers of churchgoers locally and nationally, can he revitalise his church?
It will be a wonderful change to be able to commit himself to one place for many years after tours of duty limited to little more than eighteen months at a time, and connects the town with his own experience of Seaham, another former mining town, where he was brought up. He remembers hard times in the period of that area's withdrawal from mining leading up to the bitter miners’ strike, and also eking out his subsistence as a student with jobs as a barman at a Labour Club, a petrol pump attendant and an antique carpet salesman. Before becoming a curate in Gateshead, under the inspiring leadership of Rev. David Hawtin, he spent a year as an auxiliary nurse and counsellor at St Christopher's Hospice, where it was more important to reconcile patients to certain death than to nourish hopes of miracles, and six months with the Church Missionary Society at Kaleoni in Kenya.
He brings a faith that has been hardened by experience of scenes of horrific atrocities, such as the scene in a cellar in Bosnia where a massacre had been perpetrated. Can human beings do such things? Yes they can. He has evidence and no doubt. It has been hardened, too, by the inspiring example of people who have passed on to him their own experiences, among them Ulrich Simon, as harsh as an Old Testament prophet, showing the indelible sign of his identification as a Jew in Auschwitz, from which he was the only member of his family to survive. Where was God in the concentration camps or the killing fields of Bosnia? Hanging there with the victims of the most appalling atrocities that human beings have committed. God is a suffering servant as well as a king, and should not be seen as a ruler who allows only good things to happen. We totally fail to understand the nature of God if we make our prayers a wish list for him to provide for us, he declares firmly.
He finds constant inspiration too from his wife, Deborah Bowers, a doctor at West Cumberland Hospital and from her remarkable parents, Raymond and Daphne, who were missionaries in Uganda when she was born and where she and Richard first met. He speaks proudly of Raymond's irrepressible sense of adventure, and showed a photo of him making a parachute jump at the age of eighty-two, after he had returned to England to its famously smallest and remotest church, St Olaf's in Wasdale. Their four children, Jenny, Michael, Andrew and Peter, were all educated at St Bees while he was in service with the RAF and are all following challenging careers.
Deborah sometimes reminds him that he should talk a little less and listen a little more. After years of service in a highly disciplined, hierarchical structure, in which he has served as the first RAF Principal of the Tri-Service Training College, showing people in Egremont that they are indeed "worth listening to" will be one of the most interesting challenges that he has faced, but that challenge is at the very heart of making the church the centre of the life of the town. He will be ordained on 21st January.

Peter Watson