Yesterday the Nottingham Evening Post ran a fascinating feature on Rev Christopher Harrison, who is moving from the parishes of Aslop, Fenny Bentley, Parwich, Thorpe and Tissington to Central Nottingham.
Under the title “Thatcher and drugs and rural Derbyshire – Nottingham’s new vicar tells his story” here are some extracts:
For Christopher, 51, is on the cusp of taking up a new challenge as the vicar of three of Nottingham’s most prestigious city centre churches, All Saints, St Mary’s and St Peter’s.
“The three Nottingham churches have a traditional liturgy but they are quite modern in outlook and there’s a lot of engagement with the community,” he said.
He believes his disparate experiences of the tough and the talkative, from council estates to parish council meetings, will stand him in good stead for his Nottingham career.
He studied economics at Cambridge, then landed a role as an advisor at the treasury, eventually running the office of Jock Bruce-Gardyne, MP, economic secretary to the Treasury.
The Tory government was then in its heyday. It was the era of Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson.
During his five years at the Treasury, Christopher dealt with Howe and Lawson, although his encounters with Thatcher were limited to a disapproving scrawl on correspondence.
“I never met Thatcher but I remember making one submission to her. It was returned with a very dismissive comment at the top!” he recalled.
Christopher’s heart was never really in the work, hence his training for ordination, which began in 1984.
Following a three year theology BA at Cambridge, he got a job as a curate in Camberwell – the parish now notorious for the killing of 11-year-old Damilola Taylor.
“It was a multi-racial area, with poverty, deprivation and high levels of crime,” he said.
“There were some horrendous estates which were breeding grounds for drug abuse.”
He’s currently vicar of five parishes and has discovered a surprisingly modern outlook exists amid the Saxon sandstone churches, and village traditions like shows and carnivals.
“It’s actually a very interesting mixture of the modern and the traditional,” he says. “Some of our congregation work in the cities; other families go back to the 1600s. People think villages are sleepy places but they’re actually very lively. There’s a very strong sense of community.”
He has his own website and was behind an April Fool prank this year which announced a new church bell system at Parwich would allow them to download ringtones. One parishioner suggested they go with Crazy Frog.
His return to city-living will start on February 22 when he takes up his Nottingham post.
Click here to see the full article.
PARWICH.ORG 
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