Hello, I’m Anderson – yes that’s my real first name, odd I know, the story of how I got my name involves my brother and a west Indian cricketer but it’s a long story.
I have many interests – I have a real passion for lifelong learning and enjoy learning new or developing my understanding of things, currently I’m learning about fused glass and developing a greater understanding and respect for glass and the myriad of colours and textures that can be at your disposal. I’m also, despite being dyslexic, a lover of words, I enjoy writing poetry and short stories, I enjoy being artistic with letters and words, as I see them as shapes and colours and enjoy layering words and colours to get people thinking and talking, to get them exploring what the words and colours mean, to develop people’s understanding and curiosity of words and colours. I’d also like to do some work around sound and images in the future but that’s not for now! I also enjoy going for walks with my nearly one year old border terrier, called Cosmo, who is a real live wirer and gets in so much trouble. I have for many years been interested in the ministry of healing encompassing four main disciplines, these being listening, prayer, healing and reconciliation. While serving my curacy at St Mary Magdalen, Sheet, I took part in and lead services of Healing, also with help from the team at Acorn I helped develop a group of trained listeners some of who were Lay Pastoral Assistances, two of these people would sit in the front pews in the church building and if anyone needed a listening ear or prayer, they were on hand to do so. I also helped lead a one-off service in the evening for the ministry of healing, instead of people coming forward and telling us what they wanted pray for, at this service we asked them to come forward and we prayed without any knowledge, I felt a really strong presence of God at work in that service, the spirit ministering through us, I found it so freeing and exciting. I feel a real call to the chaplaincy model of ministry (I was an assistant chaplain at QA Hospital Portsmouth, doing the ward rounds and seeking out those who requested a visit from a Chaplain, praying with those in the last hours of life, listening to the staff and families visiting ill family members gave me a real insight into ministry, I become aware of the holistic approach, seeing each person as body, mind, spirit and soul. In my final year I did a placement at the University of Portsmouth shadowing the chaplaincy team, a real eye opener to humanity in all its messiness and complexities) meeting people at the point of their needs, I find it exciting to watch God the wild spirit at work changing and transforming, I look to the story of the women at the well as a model for ministry, it’s 100% God at work, I’m just a vessel, from this passage I get three words namely encounter, encourage and engage which form my mission for ministry, I can elaborate on these further if you want to know more. Foundational to all this is prayer, I lead twice a week a prayer time for around eight dispersed people from Northern Ireland, Oxford, Sheffield and Blackpool and other places in the UK, all these people have in some way been hurt by the established church but still want to worship the God of their understanding, I lead the group with a Methodist Minister, it’s a great group and they have really supported me. I had a breakdown a few years ago, I was trying to juggle caring for my mum, a full-time job at which I was being made redundant from and training for and developing my ministry, it was a hard blow and I got no support, yet God, being God, wouldn’t let me go despite my best efforts, I was wounded through all this but I feel I have been transformed and renewed in my call from God. I’d like to develop a ministry of listening to help people find their true God colours, then watch them fly with God’s wild spirit and transform this world in colour. December 2021
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