I am…
My name is Rev John Wood, and I have been Vicar at St Ann’s Church in South Tottenham since 1994, also helping run a charity called Hope in Tottenham since 2014. But the work that has been brought into Hope in Tottenham is work we’ve really been doing almost since I started at St. Ann’s many years ago. So HiT was an attempt to bring all our community engagement work into a charitable framework which meant whether you had faith or you didn’t have faith you could be comfortable working with us, which  strategically seemed to work really well and opened up avenues of opportunity and funding and progression which wouldn’t all have been there if we’d kept within a more narrow, church – based focus.

Following my father’s trajectory
My father was a very high-profile bishop in the 1980’s. He was always a very credible role model for me and unlike some priests people actually listened to him when he preached! He had been a chaplain in the Royal Marine Commandos in the Second World War, so he’d come up against death and chaos and real life. He was a curate in London during the Blitz and used to lead services on the platforms of tube stations where everyone had come to escape the bombs so I often slightly in awe of his ministry. I actually decided to become a priest when I was 15 at a Confirmation retreat where they told us to pray in silence for 10 minutes (and I am not very good with silence). I just got to thinking about what I was going to do with my life and it seemed to come to me very clearly that I was going to be a priest. I then spent the next 15 years fighting against that call but succumbed when I was invited to be a curate (not a youth worker) at a church in Northwood Middlesex. To my great surprise I had a clear sense that invitation was of God as the church was white, middleclass, suburban and wealthy, the very type of church that I absolutely didn’t want to work in! So it’s been a challenging journey and I’ve found that reluctance to have entered the church has been useful in resisting your personality being subsumed by role. I think it’s also helped in not taking myself in that role too seriously.

It’s all in a name
When you’re ordained and have a collar put around your neck you are called a deacon. That means you can’t celebrate communion and you can’t directly bless people. It generally acts as a years’ probation. At the end of that time you’re usually then ordained as a priest. A priest can celebrate communion, bless people and eventually become a vicar. You can have a lot of different roles within the church but if you’re not a priest you can’t fulfil certain roles in leadership – as a vicar or a bishop for example.

Before the church
I worked on an NHS cancer ward as an auxiliary nurse and then travelled around colleges and universities in the UK working with Christian student groups to giving money to subsidise Bible purchases by people who couldn’t afford them otherwise. I got 500+ students to join something called the Bible a Month Club, so that people whether in Cambodia, Guinea-Bissau or Honduras could afford to have a bible in their own language, an early experience of fund – raising and advocacy. After going to university myself I went to Uganda in 1981, then in the middle of a very nasty civil war, where over 400,000 would up lose their lives. It was a life – changing experience, teaching History and English in a large mixed co-educational boarding school where I was the only English person! After 5 terms I went to work for Scripture Union, a youth and schools movement where I was asked to visit and support Christian student groups in around 50 Kampala secondary schools. We had our own gospel band made up of students from the national university who I used to drive around at weekends to perform big gospel concerts for 700 kids at a time. It was a lot of fun but also a bit crazy, running Army road blocks of unpredictable soldiers and being paid £4 a month. Unforgettable, seminal and life – changing.

An entrepreneur at heart
I think that I enjoyed teaching and I love Christian ministry even more, but since coming to St. Ann’s I’ve also had to learn how to be entrepreneurial. I really love making things happen and generating the money needed to maintain projects and start new ones. I was quite attracted to the possibility of going into business when I was young and after Uganda being in the NGO world, anything to do with people and projects and making a difference and making things happen. I’m not a bureaucrat and I’m not a bean counter but at the end of the day probably a people person more than anything else, even entrepreneurship. Then you’re back full circle to Christian ministry.