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From the Revd Richard Washington September 2024
 Revd Richard Washington
Team Vicar, Great Yarmouth Parish
First of all I must say how blessed and grateful I feel to have been called to serve you and the Parish of Great Yarmouth as your new Team Vicar. After just over three years serving and learning as Curate in the Benefice of Attleborough with Besthorpe, I am looking forward so much to meeting you all and to the joys and challenges ahead. It’s great to be joining Simon and Liz as your clergy team, and to be becoming part of the church family
So a little bit about me and how I came to be appointed to serve you
I am the product of a British father and a Dutch mother, although my father sadly died in 2021. My parents met in the late 1960s in Amsterdam, where my father had transferred as part of his job at Lloyds Bank. My elder brother Michael and I were born in Rotterdam in 1969 and 1972 respectively. We moved to Haywards Heath in Sussex in 1974
Initially Michael and I were not brought up with any Christian faith or church in our lives. However, in 1978 we moved to New Jersey in the United States and started attending a local Episcopal (Anglican) Church. Here we flourished and I was baptised in 1983, aged 10, a moment of great spiritual intensity of which I still have a vivid memory. At the same time, in 1982, I had started to attend a boarding school in Dorset with a strong Christian ethos. I thus became familiar with the Church of England and was confirmed in 1986 by the Bishop of Sherborne. Through some of my teens and into my early 20s I started to develop the idea that I might have a vocation to priesthood. I even made a few enquiries about this through my local vicar, by then in Herefordshire where my family had moved in 1993 (we’d returned to England from the USA in 1988). However, nothing came of this and life began to lead me far away from these early stirrings of vocation
After school, I studied History at Oxford and then Classical Drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. I started a career as an actor in the mid-1990s. This was the usual roller-coaster journey of work and unemployment which most young actors live. The dislocation of life and especially the huge amount of traveling meant that, like many young people, I drifted away from church and faith
In 2006, I decided to leave the acting life behind me and studied for a master’s in European politics at Birkbeck College, London. This went well and in 2010 I won a scholarship to study an advanced master’s at the College of Europe in Warsaw. After a year of study I was taken on as a member of academic staff and then started working in the administration, eventually becoming Director of Communications and Recruitment and latterly Strategy
Totally unexpectedly, it was in Warsaw that I had a number of life changing spiritual encounters which propelled me back to faith and the Church. Even more surprisingly, the sense of vocation I had had years before came back quite forcefully. God wasn’t letting me go this time! In May 2018, Bishop Robert (the Bishop in Europe) agreed to sponsor me for training, with my course beginning in September 2018. This was part-time, non-residential course provided by the Cambridge-based Eastern Region Ministry Course. During my study I continued working in Warsaw, with weekly classes online and residential weekends at Belsey Bridge in Ditchingham
In the meantime, I had discerned that I wanted to return to England to serve the church here. I made enquiries about various Dioceses in the Eastern Region to see if they would take me on as a curate. And so it happened that I was taken up by the Diocese of Norwich and offered a curacy at Attleborough with Besthorpe
I was ordained Deacon at Norwich Cathedral on 27 June 2021, and thus began three wonderful years serving in the town parish of Attleborough and the village of Besthorpe, with the Revd Matthew Jackson as my training incumbent. I have served wonderful people, been treated with such love and kindness, and learned so much of what it is to serve God as a Minister of His Church
It is from this happy and very blessed experience that I now come to serve you as Team Vicar. I hope and pray that I am ready to offer you all that God has given me and taught me through my life and through my time as Curate. I know that I will be joining you at an exciting time for the Parish, as you work to build on the past with new projects for the future. Looking at the August copy of Parish Life, I am inspired by the slogan on the back: ‘One Church Many Places’. I am really excited about getting to know all these places: the three churches themselves - The Minster, St Paul’s and St Mary’s - as well as Pathway and the many other places in the town where God is doing his work through your commitment and service. I am really looking forward to playing my part in all this work!
Revd Richard
photos courtesy of Great Yarmouth Parish
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