Helen Kendrick learnt over the years to listen to God’s whisper and trust in his guidance. Her message? “Great is his faithfulness!”
On 11 November 1992 I arrived home from my job as a marketing production manager in a publishing company to see the headline, “Church of England votes for women priests”. As I watched the six o’clock news a voice in my head whispered, “This is for you.” The sheer exhilaration of that moment has never left me.
I have lived in the Diocese of Oxford since the age of five, and was brought up as a Christian. I went on to study religion with literature at the University of Bristol, with no clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life. After travelling the world for a year, and getting married, my husband Christopher and I moved to Brill in Buckinghamshire, where we started attending church together.
The Revd Canon Peter Bugg and his wife Jane were instrumental in drawing us into the life of the church and demonstrating to us what a lived-out faith in a community should be – reaching out, and loving and serving those around you.
The ordination of women in the Church of England began in March 1994. After various nudges and prompts from God through other people, including Canon Vincent Strudwick turning to me at a dinner party and asking if I had ever considered being ordained, I finally found the courage to pick up the phone to the Diocesan Director of Ordinands in 1996.
I began ordination training later that year, at the same time as my husband quit his job and began a PhD. On paper it was financial foolishness, but God provided all that we needed – even an unexpected and unasked-for gift of £500 from one of my great-aunts when our car needed repairing and we had no money to pay.
Every step of the way I kept waiting to hear a “no”, but it was “yes” every time, and our lives took a whole new direction.
I was made a deacon in 1999 and ordained a priest in 2000; served my curacy in the Icknield Benefice; moved to my post of first responsibility in Sutton Courtenay with Appleford; became rector of the DAMASCUS Parish in 2017 when we became a single parish of five churches, and here I am!
My primary calling has always been to serve as a parish priest. In 2008 my husband and I felt called by God to become adoptive parents, and in 2009 our two children – then aged seven and eight – joined us. Life has not always been easy, but I have been sustained by “the still small voice” of God speaking into both our sorrows and our joys.
I will always be profoundly grateful for the generation of women before me who faced immense opposition in their struggle but nevertheless pushed open the doors and paved the way for others to fulfil their calling to serve God and his people. It has been my greatest privilege to be an adoptive mum and to serve as a parish priest for so long in one place – being alongside people in their life journey.
Words: The Revd Canon Helen Kendrick, Rector of DAMASCUS Benefice in Abingdon.
For young people aged 16–30 wondering how their future will unfold, a pilgrimage to Taizé can be inspirational – and joyful!