John Richardson (1950-2014)
He was brought up a good Bible-reading, creed-reciting Anglo-Catholic which, he once told me, was ‘a good grounding in what you were supposed to believe, but not a very good grounding in why you were supposed to believe it.’ He dated his conversion to August 1971, in the summer before his final year at Keele University (where he studied biology, psychology, and philosophy). It took him a year to understand what evangelicals in the Christian Union were really talking about, and a further two years to be persuaded of it. He was invited to be publicity officer for the CU, before he had even joined it!
In his early days as an evangelical he was very much a charismatic, and trained for ordained ministry at St John’s College, Nottingham. From there he served in a Birmingham parish before becoming chaplain of North East London Polytechnic. In 1993 he spent 10 months studying at Moore College in Sydney, and thoroughly enjoyed the rigours of the course, which turned him into something of an evangelist for the study of Hebrew and Greek.
In 2000 he became Associate Minister of Henham, Elsenham, and Ugley near Bishop’s Stortford, and seized the opportunity to start blogging and tweeting as The Ugley Vicar. The Chelmsford Anglican Bible Conference was his brainchild, as was the Junior Anglican Evangelical Conference (JAEC), and he was well-known as the writer of short booklets such as What God Has Made Clean, and Revelation Unwrapped. His booklet, God, Sex, and Marriage helped many who were struggling with singleness and John himself was seemingly a confirmed bachelor until 2008, when he married Alison. He was also a keen amateur painter and astronomer.
At the National Evangelical Anglican Congress in Blackpool (2003) he famously donned a purple (ish) clerical shirt, and delighted in telling us how he was ushered into all kinds of places as a result! He was not in favour of women’s ordination, and consistently encouraged evangelicals to pass Resolution C to signal their opposition to this. His blog carries an automated script declaring that, ‘The Church of England has only consecrated one Conservative Evangelical bishop of ‘complementarian’ views since 1997. Since he retired in October 2012, it has been without ANY of that persuasion for 523 days and counting.’ That number continues to increase in John’s absence, as a testimony and lamentation.
In May last year he put a poem on his blog, called 'The Lifeguard', about salvation from ‘death’s dread terrors'. Space precludes a long quotation from it. But at the end, to reassure his friends and readers that he was not then on his deathbed, he wrote ‘(PS: In case you’re wondering, I’m OK.)’ That, of course, remains gloriously true now. As he once wrote about a friend of his named John, ‘Today he rejoices upon another shore, and in a greater light.’