God in the Life of Alan Wilson

I was born in Redford Barracks in Edinburgh, stuck in a kitchen drawer and taken to the hospital. It was the only time in my life that I have ever arrived before time.

My mother was a Hungarian dancer. She was wild and wacky and generous and stunningly beautiful and she couldn’t boil an egg. She and her sister were working in nightclubs in Alexandria and missed a boat back to Trieste and lost their passports and in 1939 became stateless. They ended up working in Cyprus. My father fetched up in a nightclub there the day after VE day and there was my mother.

The classic thing for army families to do with young children in the 1950’s was to park them with relations, and we lived with my father’s sister, my Auntie Hazel. She provided the stability and was a wonderful Anglican William Barclay sort of Christian. She never pushed anything but she told us Bible stories and took my brother and me to Sunday School at St Margaret’s Barking.

Strong sense of equality

Both my parents were great survivors. My mother was a live-on-your-wits person and very suspicious of strangers. But she had a sense of somebody looking out for you in a very powerful way and she would go along to church every now and then. My father had started off starchy and Church of Scotland but all that got shot to pieces during the war when you became aware that it didn’t matter whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant you still get shot. He also had a very strongly formed sense of equality which I think comes from the Scottish background. In that sense our upbringing was very clean and open.

My wanted us to go to Sevenoaks School where there had been extraordinary experiments in education during the nineteen sixties so we moved to Sevenoaks. As a teenager I had a friend who went to a Baptist Church and I went along with him and bought into that in a very big way because it was the sort of faith where you believed in it so you did it. I like this positive, optimistic, 'can do' attitude.

In terms of becoming an Anglican there were two shows in town in Sevenoaks in the 1970’s.There was St John’s which was practically Vatican 1 and had prayers for the Pope. It all ended up at the pub which I thought was extraordinarily cool. Then next door to Sevenoaks School was St Nicholas, one of the largest evangelical churches in the country where there were some extremely beautiful girls. So I was semi-detached to both. But whether it was Catholic or Evangelical I took my religion in a rather hot vindaloo way.

The junior RE master at Sevenaoks was one James Jones now Bishop of Liverpool. He made it seem that the most worthwhile thing you could do with your life was get to get involved with Jesus Christ. He really cared about God. I think James has more to do with communicating that to me than anybody else.

Getting to the bottom of it

So by the time I went to Cambridge I was an evangelical committed Anglican Christian. I had a scholarship to Cambridge to read history so in a perverse way I thought 'why not do something else?' Theology appealed to me because it was about people and there was also a sense of wanting to get to the bottom of something you cared very much about. In my last year I began to question the idea of ordination. .Basil Hall, my Director of Studies at Cambridge and and a former URC minisiter, signed me up to the thought of doing research. Another possibility was the law. I had a mouth that motored and that was good for a barrister but I didn’t feel as committed to the law.

I decided on Wycliffe Hall theological college because I needed to be somewhere near Oxford and it was a place of tremendous integrity. They cared about you saying your prayers and they cared about the Bible and that suited me. They also cared that you loved the Lord and it seemed to me that if you are going to be a Christian minister that’s part of it at any rate. At Wycliffe I first met charismatic evangelical Christians who had this very intense experience of the Spirit and I always felt like the person with their nose pressed up against the glass on the outside of that. It never happened for me but if God ever did do that for me and told me to go off and be a missionary in Peru, I'd do it.

When I was ordained in 1979, I was technically an NSM because had an academic post paid for by Oxford University. I lived in Eynsham working part-time with Peter Ridley. He was another wonderful influence in my life and I began to feel that the parish ministry was what I wanted to do andsigned up for a curacy with him. I also met Lucy in Eynsham and we fell very much in love. The old saying that vicars are either made or destroyed by their wives is true. We have been married now for 18 years. I know it sounds silly and trivial but she has been wonderful.

Brokenness and grace

Among the other people who influenced me when  I was growing up was Roy Hessian, who taught about the power of brokenness and grace. There has been a tendency among some Christians, especially English Christians like Pelagius, to lose sight of God's grace in their efforts to do their best for the Lord. In fact Christianity is about God's free grace which means you are home and dry before you start. The sense of that has never deserted me.

Another thing that has influenced me in the way I pray and work is the Benedictine Rule. For 20 years I have gone with the same five people for a week every year to a Benedictine abbey. We go to Mass with the monks but then we have sessions where we sit around and talk through what's happened in the last year in our personal lives, how the job's going and about 'what gives me hope' for the next year. This annual review is very important to me.

Rule of Benedict

The Psalms have also become very important to me. If you are praying you can use words or not use words; it doesn't matter. But if you are going to use words, why not God's words?

The Rule of Benedict doesn't give you a formula for being a Christian. It's a call to discipleship based on conversion, stability and obedience. 'Conversion' could be about permanent revolution or else just commitment to the way of life. I don't go to church because I think it's going to do me good, I go because it's the way of life to which I'm committed as a Christian person. Once you start giving every place of worship Egon Ronay stars you are treating it like a restaurant and it makes it very difficult for you to pray when you do go to church. There is a monastic principle: when you eat you eat, when you sleep you sleep, when you worship God you worship God. 

Benedict also talks about stability which is of course so important in marriage. Finally there is obedience – that ordering of life and knowing what matters which is what Benedictine spirituality is all about. It’s a very forgiving ordering of your life, not about hair shirts. It is about saying if you want to be perfect you are going to need community, structure and the word of God and prayer - all integrated and working together because you can’t use your prayer life to make yourself a different sort of person without any other changes in your life.

One of the dangers of being an internal candidate for the job of bishop is that you think you know all about it when you don’t. Bucks is an incredibly varied area and I think that learning to live with diversity and make something of that is a great point of interest.

It seems to me that Bishop Colin Bennetts got the idea of evangelism on the map while Mike Hill did an enormous amount to encourage and inspire that instinct. I think we are now getting to a phase when people are saying: 'Now we have talked about it, how do we really make changes in our lives which are consistent with what God is calling us to be?'

We live in a society where everyone is restructuring. They have tried a new logo, a new packaging and a relaunch but Benedict would say that the business of being the people God wants us to be is what it’s all about. It’s the same for bishops. In the end I hope people will feel that I listened and I prayed and I was there for them and that we followed Jesus together.

Photograph by Frank Blackwell