New priest for village church
The Bishop of Portsmouth has appointed the Rev Chris Spencer to be the new parish priest at St Wilfrid’s Church, Cowplain.
Chris is currently working as priest-in-charge of St Ann’s Church, Rhyl, in north Wales. He is part of a team in the Aber Morfa Mission Area, which is in the Diocese of St Asaph.
He will be licensed in September as the new priestin-charge of St Wilfrid’s Church, just ahead of the church’s centenary celebrations the following month.
And he has promised that mission and outreach will be at the heart of his vision for the area.
‘St Wilfrid’s is an exciting place to be, and I hope to be able to carry on the good work that is already going on there,’ he said. ‘My passion is to bless people, to inspire others to get to know God better, and to build a loving community that blesses those people we meet.’
Chris grew up in Leicestershire and became a Christian at the age of 11.
He first felt a calling to be a church leader aged 12, and he spent time serving in different churches, on mission opportunities in the UK and abroad, and working with children and young people.
He worked in a variety of jobs in local government and landscape gardening before becoming a youth worker with Youth For Christ in Kent.
In Poole, he met Emily. The couple married and now have two children, Chloe, 12, and Leah, six.
Chris studied theology at
St John’s College, Nottingham, and moved to Wiltshire, where he was ordained as a deacon and served at St James, Southbroom, in Salisbury diocese.
He then served for five years as a church and community worker in the Bristol and South Gloucestershire Methodist circuit and associate minister of St Anne’s Church, Oldland, in the Bristol diocese.
Much of his work there involved outreach that took place in the community, including being chaplain of a local heritage railway line at Avon Valley.
In 2019, he moved to the Aber Morfa Mission Area, which includes six churches in Bodelwyddan, Rhuddlan, Rhyl and Towyn, initially as curate.
He was ordained as a priest in St Asaph Cathedral in 2020.