Dear Friends, it is lovely to have finally arrived and start to settle into life here in Outwood, Stanley, Wrenthorpe and Alverthorpe. First of all a big thankyou for your warm welcome to Angela and myself and for your support at my licensing service in early June. We are both thrilled and excited to be here at this stage in the life of the benefice and look forward to sharing our lives and ‘getting to know people’ over the coming months and years.
We have not moved far, in fact from just over the M1 after serving nearly thirteen years at St Michael’s in East Ardsley. Over the years though I have moved extensively around the country for both work and church life. My roots are in Royston near Barnsley where my father was a miner until the pit closed in 1968. We then moved to south Leeds and it was from there that I went onto university where I met Angela and we married and lived in South Manchester throughout the 80s.
A call to the ministry came about in the mid 80’s which took several years to come to fruition and involved us living in Poole in Dorset. It was from Poole that I went to train for the ministry in Durham in the mid 90’s. Ministry then took us to Wiltshire followed by eight years in the Cambridgeshire fens before arriving in East Ardsley in 2006. During this time our twins Beth and Sam arrived on the scene.
Over the long hot Sundays of summer, our readings from Acts bring the early Church to life and how the disciples lives were transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit to go out and share the good news of Jesus across the known world. At the end of the day God’s people are always a journeying people, a pilgrim people. Our faith journey is one of movement be it spiritually and/or physically as we discover more of God’s blessings for us and his church as we step out in faith. We are people on the move: the Holy Spirit calls us to share God’s love in a hurting world and be a church family that welcomes all and be a place where one can ‘Find God, Find Friends and Find Yourself’.
Angela and myself look forward to meeting you and sharing in your lives as we too journey together and follow in Jesus’ footsteps and discover more of God’s love and blessings. God Bless.
Rev Glenn Coggins: Vicar of Stanley, Outwood and Wrenthorpe, and Priest in charge of St Paul’s, Alverthorpe.
