I grew up in Belfast during the Troubles and was strongly influenced by the work of the Corrymeela Community. I have also been greatly influenced by the work and witness of the Taize community. I studied history at the University of Durham before being ordained as an Anglican priest in the Church of Ireland in 1997. I was serving as a curate in Omagh at the time of the bombing in 1998 and shared in the ecumenical response to the tragedy. I was a chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2000-2006, working with both students and the college staff. I served for five years as Minister of a local ecumenical church just outside of Cambridge which united Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Quaker and United Reformed Church traditions in a single fellowship. I spent a further year in full-time study to take a Master’s degree in Peace and Reconciliation Studies at the University of Coventry. From 2012 I divided my time between serving as vicar of an Anglican church in Cambridge and working in the area of conflict resilience providing coaching and training to church leaders and communities in how to respond to conflict and working as a mediator in disputes in churches and charities. Between 2020 and 2022 I also worked as a pastoral tutor at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. In summer 2021 I moved from the parish to concentrate on my conflict resilience work and since summer 2022 have been doing this work full time. I serve as the Bishop’s Adviser for Resilience in Conflict in the Diocese of Ely.
My approach to conflict resilience
It is my conviction that
- everyone has the capacity to be resilient to conflict
- we can all develop greater resilience through experience and training
- every situation has within it the capacity for transformation
