Estates - hidden and revealed
A couple of weeks ago now my colleague the Acting Archdeacon organised a study day on estates ministry in the Two Cities. In his opening remarks he made the point that here in the centre of London our estates are "hidden". Both by deliberate acts of planning and also in that they are at the back of our minds. The font where I was baptised The Church of the Holy Spirit This set me thinking about my own engagement with ministry on estates, and indeed with living on estates. I was born on an estate, the Riddings Estate in Scunthorpe where my father was the first priest in charge of the then newly built Church of the Holy Spirit . I was baptised in a font made out of a piece of unworked iron ore underneath a spire formed of three steel girders made in the Appleby Frodingham Scunthorpe steel rolling mills. Then after a brief moment in which he served in a rural Lincolnshire parish while being the deputy youth officer for the diocese of Lincoln, we moved to Leeds where...