New vicar to bring flocks together under leadership

A NEW vicar is leading the congregation at Holy Trinity Church in Henley.

Rev Sam Brewster, who joined the church six years ago, has succeeded Rev Duncan Carter.

Rev Carter has now taken on a supporting role ahead of his retirement in May after 35 years with the congregation.

The pair will continue to work together until then to enable a “smooth transition” between ministers.

Rev Brewster, 38, has been running Trinity at Four, a separate congregation which meets at Christ Church in Reading Road.

Now he has become vicar, the two congregations have been brought under one leader.

Rev Brewster said: “Six years ago my family moved to Henley to start a new congregation attached to Holy Trinity.

“We started meeting at Holy Trinity but then grew to an extent that we couldn’t accommodate what was going on anymore and so we decamped to Christ Church.

“My main responsibility since I have been here was to start and run that new congregation and I have worked pretty closely with Duncan on that.”

Rev Brewster said the overlap between ministers was “unusual” in the Church of England as there would usually be a period before a new vicar is appointed.

He said: “With Duncan retiring, it became an inevitable question as to whether it would be suitable for me to take on the wider role of vicar.

“I think the folk over at the diocese, our head office, just felt that it made a lot of sense. It creates continuity for me and the church here as whole.

“There has been a thorough appointments process but because of the slightly quirky set-up we had, I was interviewed as the sole candidate for the role.

“We feel very fortunate to be able to have no gap at all and just have this overlap period, which is essentially like a handover period.

“It is a huge change for Duncan to be able to gradually hand over more responsibility to me but that is wonderful for both of us, as this never normally happens.”

Rev Brewster is slowly taking over the morning service held at the church from Rev Carter and will be solely responsible for it from May.

He said: “Although Trinity at Four and Holy Trinity have been all part of the same church, they have quite a separate identity, partly down to leadership.

“We now see this as a great opportunity to come together much more as a single church family. Me being leader of both congregations will obviously be a great help in terms of people feeling that we’re part of the same thing.”

Rev Brewster wants to reinforce this by drawing up plans to renovate the 176-year-old church.

He said: “The hope is to redevelop this building so that our afternoon congregation Trinity at Four can meet here. We have so much happening here so to have the 4pm service in a different church is a bit disjointed.

“We’re hoping to do internal redevelopments – nothing external – it’s important for Henley residents to know that because they get nervous about building on churches.

“Broadly speaking, some of the ideas at the moment are that the end of the church, which is more or less unused space, is to be screened off with glass so the light comes through but creates a self-contained space.

“The organ, which is in a terrible state of repair and doesn’t really get used anymore, will also be removed to create an extra space.”

Other ideas include installing a balcony at the end of the church facing the altar and creating a kitchen to serve tea and coffee and the installation of stairs and a lift to a new top floor to be used for youth work.

Rev Brewster said: “The hope is that over the years to come, we make the morning congregation much more diverse in terms of age and try to grow it so that we’ve got two congregations which are serving the full age range – children and adults.”

Currently the 4pm service attracts around 70 adults and 50 children with the morning service held at Holy Trinity attracting about 25 adults.

Rev Brewster said that as leader he will continue to do what the church has always done. He said: “The church exists fundamentally because of Jesus. It wouldn’t exist without him. The church’s job has been to make Jesus known. That will continue to be our purpose, the way that we phrase it is to be rooted in Jesus and fruitful for him. What that looks like is loving and serving our community.”

Rev Brewster said he became a Christian as a teenager at a summer holiday camp. He then went to study music at Selwyn College at Cambridge university where he was encouraged into Christian ministry.

He said: “I grew up in a home where we went to church. I guess in that sense, those Christian ideas have been familiar to me from a young age. I went to a boarding school where it was much harder to be involved in a local church. I became spiritually quite disengaged at various points in my time at school.

“Arriving at university was a key moment for me. At Cambridge, I met Christians who were thoughtful, intelligent and passionate about Jesus and I got plugged into a local church in a more meaningful way for the first time.

“I did couple of years working essentially as a youth worker up at a church near Leicester. I really enjoyed that, so I put myself forward and I got ordained about 11 years ago, when I was 27.

“You then go to vicars’ college, like teacher training but for vicars at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, which is specifically for training vicars.”

Rev Brewster said being the vicar of Holy Trinity is a “real privilege” and he loves serving the Henley community.

He said: “We love Henley, we love the people here. Jesus said, talking about himself, I’ve not come to be served but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many.

“So he laid out his life in service and I think that’s a great model for all leadership and particularly for Christian leadership. It’s a daunting benchmark.”

Rev Brewster lives in Henley with wife Lucy, who runs mid-week activities at the church, and their four children, Amelie, nine, Joanna, seven, Barnabas, four, and Esther, two.

He was completing a curacy in Maidenhead and while there members of the congregation that lived in Henley told him they wanted a more family-focused service, which led him to set up Trinity at Four.

Rev Brewster said: “Churches here in town have struggled, I think it’s fair to say, to engage much with families and so we thought well maybe there might be an opportunity to partner together with one of the existing churches in Henley. It was driven by a sense of need to connect with a younger generation.”

Rev Carter said being vicar, which he describes as “a life more than an occupation”, he has enjoyed being involved in the “precious” moments in people’s lives.

He said: “I have spent more than half of my life here having moved here in 1990, when my oldest child was just a month old.

“I see people growing in their faith in baptism, weddings and funerals and helping and supporting them, being a vicar is something that calls you.

“I had been a youth worker in St John’s Wood in youth clubs working with 40 to 50 skinheads and the club happened to be held at a church.

“I was repeatedly asked by people to think about working for the church. I had grown in the faith at college and I asked my home vicar what I should do.

“He eventually helped line up an interview to discern if this what I am going to do going forward and they said yes. I started in a church in Essex.”

Rev Carter has four grown-up children, Rachel, Sarah, Thomas and Isabel, who were all educated at Trinity primary, where he has been a governor since his arrival, and at Gillotts School.

He said that he thought of moving church previously because that was what he saw other vicars doing but he realised that he didn’t want to, having built connections with his congregation.

Rev Carter said: “I am governor at Trinity Primary School and I find that parents now at the school where children when I first came. The key to the life of a church is sharing a message of God and love and sharing what the Bible says.

“The stay of worship is a little less traditional than it used to be but the message is timeless and had remained the same.”

Rev Carter said it was the time to step back. He said: “It’s the best job in the world. All I have to do is share the good news of Jesus.

“I would love to stay and continue my work, as a Christian you never really retire as we are disciples of Jesus and that never stops.”