God in the life of Felicity Randall

The Mothers’ Union has been part of Felicity Randall’s life since she was a child and on 26 March in Christ Church Cathedral she was commissioned as President of the Oxford Diocesan Mothers’ Union. She wants to raise the profile of the MU and to encourage people to see it as a modern society worth belonging to because of its strong belief in family life and its commitment to issues such as Jubilee 2000. Raised in a vicarage and married to a vicar, Felicity nevertheless pursues an independent course rooted in the simplicity and directness of the saints of her native Northumberland.

I have been going to the Mothers’ Union since I was a child. The meetings were in the afternoon and they had cookery demonstration and made rag rugs for church bazaars. I remember an occasion, when I must have been under school age, listening to a man speaking about Africa and deciding that I was going to be a missionary. At the end of the meeting he came over and patted me on the head and said that I had been the only person listening.

My father was Vicar of St Matthews, Newcastle and my mother, as a vicar’s wife, was very much the unpaid curate. She was also Mothers’ Union Enrolling Member for 47 years and was once asked to be Diocesan President of Newcastle Diocese but had to decline because she didn’t drive a car.

As children we went to church too much and got put off. I have always been very envious of people who have a great conversion experience. I sometimes think that when you are brought up as a Christian, it’s just a matter of routine and you don’t think about it. I was confirmed when I was nine. My father prepared me for it and I don’t remember anything about the preparation or the confirmation which I think shows that nine is too young.

I went to St Hilda’s, an Anglican convent in Whitby, and about two weeks after I got there I decided I was going to be a nun. But they started holding it against me that I wasn’t behaving well enough to be a nun. So I gave up the idea and decided to be not very well behaved.

In Oxford I didn’t go to church at all. I didn’t think about God either because as far as I was concerned going to church was just going to church and nothing to do with God. My brother was training for ordination at St Stephen’s House and there was this other student there who just wouldn’t go away. In the end I got used to him being around and married him and I don’t regret it at all.

The problem of being a vicar’s wife resolved itself in the end partly because I have never known any other way of life. For me life in the vicarage is what life is about. I cannot imagine being the wife of someone who goes out nine to five. However, I was determined not to be the unpaid curate and to do all the things that my mother had done and Ian supported me in that. After we were married I had a patch when I didn’t go to church and I have always made a choice about what I do – for instance I love working with children – whereas I could see that my mother had guides and Sunday school and Mothers’ Union and that sort of thing imposed on her by the expectation of my father.

I never really thought about my faith until we went to Cowley. I didn’t take the children to church because they were not welcome. And then I suddenly decided that I wanted to take them so I chose the most difficult service I could think of and took them along to that. They behaved beautifully and we were accepted back but that did make me think not only about my own faith but about the Church in general. Not all that you find when you think like that is particularly flattering to the Church as a whole.

We always say that every service is an all age service and that children are welcome. St Peter’s Didcot came very close to an ideal from the families point of view. It had a Eucharistic pram service which is quite unusual followed by a toddler group. Numbers fluctuated but sometimes we could get up to 25 mums with 40 children. It was absolute bedlam but totally brilliant and so accepting for everybody. When someone phoned about wanting to get the baby baptised you could say: ‘Come along on Tuesday morning the vicar will be there’. And they would come and find a Eucharistic service and other mums and small children who saw it as a normal thing.

I think the church needs to be much more open to saying to families that Sunday isn’t necessarily the only day when you go to church. You can still be a Christian and believe in God and come to church on a Tuesday if it’s better or a Wednesday or whenever. But then the church also needs to be welcoming if people do come on Sundays because somewhere there has to be a link between the Tuesday or Wednesday morning and the Sunday service because you hope that some of them will make that jump.

The Mothers’ Union has always stood up for family life and for Christianity within the family but it’s a big problem breaking down the image that it’s for married women only. Anyone who has been baptised in the name of the Trinity can become a member – men, women, married, unmarried and those who have partners rather than spouses. Our image is very out of date. In reality the Mothers’ Union is very accepting, very forgiving and very in touch. I am most proud of our involvement in Jubilee 2000 which was a watershed for the MU and really changed people’s attitudes to us. We are now involved on United Nations commissions and things of that sort.

During my time as Diocesan President I hope to raise the profile of the Mothers’ Union and to encourage people to see it as a modern society which is worth belonging to because it’s strong belief in family life is something people are seeking now. I would like to raise its profile amongst the clergy and in the Church as a whole and also in the community so that more people might begin to think ‘Oh yes I would like to belong to that’. I also want to make people aware that you don’t have to go to traditional branch meetings, that you can be a Diocesan member and still support what the MU stands for and the work that it does.

Of late my own faith has gone back to my roots and to Celtic prayer and Celtic Christianity. It is partly childhood memories of going on an annual pilgrimage across to Holy Island in the days when there wasn’t a road and everybody walked across and partly the simplicity of the lives of the Celtic saints. I have always felt that Cuthbert and Hilda were very much part of my understanding of Christian faith when I was younger. The direct message they were trying to put across still speaks to me. It feels like a coming home.