“I just knew God existed”
Our Family Story: Reverend Claire
Part of our Church Family Stories series at St Mary’s, Bideford
Ask Reverend Claire when she first knew God was real, and she doesn’t reach for a theology book. She goes back to a country lane near Guildford, and a little girl walking home from the village school.
“I just remember walking home and thinking how wonderful God was,” she says. “I never doubted there was a God — to make this amazing world, the trees and the birds and everything beautiful about nature. I just knew God existed.”
Claire grew up in a vicarage, one of four children — two sisters and a brother. Her father was the vicar, and the family lived in a big rectory with a garden made for playing in. It was, by her account, a happy beginning.
It didn’t stay uncomplicated. When her father moved to a new parish, Claire and her brother went to the local primary school — the same school where Dad took assemblies. “We were bullied quite a lot for being the vicar’s kids,” she says. The family moved them to another school, and that one turned out to be wonderful: creative, warm, the kind of place that gives a child back their confidence.
The teacher
Claire read for a degree in Cheltenham and trained as a teacher in Exeter, specialising in RE and English. Then she did something quietly brave: she looked at a map, decided she wanted to see a different part of England, and took a job at a school near Chesterfield in the year after the Miner’s strike.
She stayed for three years and taught the way she’d been taught at that good primary school — creatively. “We acted out Bible stories. The kids were fantastic.”
It was during those years that something shifted. Claire had been worshipping at a small, traditional church with lovely people, and she joined a 20+ group linked to a more evangelical church nearby. They went to Spring Harvest together.
“That’s where I’d say I was filled with the Holy Spirit. I had quite a dramatic experience of being prayed for, and suddenly the Bible just sprang into life. I just wanted to pray all the time. It was wonderful.”
She came home better equipped, she says — but still with a sense of being called to something more.
Uganda
That something turned out to be a girls’ school in Uganda, where Claire spent two years with the Church Mission Society alongside a friend called Miriam.
Fifty girls to a class. Rote learning. Every lesson opened with prayer. And a chapel where worship sounded — and looked — like nothing she’d known.
“You’d hear the drums as you walked up the mud track. And when you went in, the girls worshipped with their whole selves. It wasn’t just your mouth. It was really dancing and praising God.”
They were also, she adds fondly, thoroughly naughty. Exams mattered enormously — a girl who failed would have to repeat a year, and her parents would have to find another year’s school fees — so a few of them got inventive. “I remember catching one girl with answers on a tiny piece of paper. She screwed it up, put it in her mouth and started chewing.”
What stayed with Claire most was the hunger to learn. When the electricity failed — which it often did — the girls would sit in their dorms and work by the lamplight. “Education was the key to success. That was the dream.”
Coming home to the UK was the hard part. Back teaching near Sheffield, Claire found herself facing students who took their education entirely for granted. “It really made me angry,” she says, “when you’d seen how it was respected in Uganda.”
The call, and the long wait
Near the end of her time in Uganda, Claire had been fasting and praying when the call came — plainly and unmistakably.
“I just heard God say: Claire, I want you in my Church.“
She was overjoyed. She went straight out and bought a copy of the Church Times, ready to move into a church there and then.
It took years.
She went forward for selection and wasn’t recommended. “I think I was too young, really. And not ready. I’d just come back from Uganda, and I was out of touch with what was going on in England.” She was deeply disappointed.
What followed was the shaping. Eighteen months in Leeds working with homeless men — men who had lost their jobs, their homes, their marriages to alcohol. There was Billy, hauling a black bin bag up to the office window on a rope with his whisky inside it. There was Vinny from Glasgow, the most lovely man, who would disappear for days after payday and come back black and blue.
“When I prayed with these men, it was like Jesus was in the room. Prayer was so authentic. They’d lost everything, but their faith was still there. It was such a privilege.”
Then an advert caught her eye again — the same way the Church Times had, the same way the job near Chesterfield had. Claire’s life has a pattern to it: she reads something, she recognises it, and she goes.
This one was for a missionary movement based in Sunningdale — ecumenical, which mattered to her, drawing together people from different traditions who had all arrived at the same conviction from different directions. She joined the community there for two years.
There is something quietly circular about what she did next. The young teacher who had gone out to Uganda with the Church Mission Society, wide-eyed and unprepared, was now on the other side of the desk — part of the process of training volunteers and sending them out. She knew exactly what they were walking into. The heat, the class of fifty, the electricity that comes and goes, the homesickness that ambushes you in the third month. The far harder business of coming home again afterwards and finding that everyone else’s life has carried on without you.
And she went back. Not as a volunteer this time, but to support the ones on the ground — out to Uganda again, Zambia and Tanzania. Returning to a country you once served is its own strange experience: the same red dust and the same drums, but you arrive with different eyes, and you notice what you were too new to notice the first time.
Living in community suited her — it always has. The vicarage full of children, the shared house at theological college she’d not yet reached, the church family she’d eventually find in Devon. Claire is not a woman built for doing things alone.
And then she tried again for ministry.
She had every reason to be frightened of it. The first time had left a bruise; she’d been told, in effect, not yet, and it had taken her years and three quite different lives to be able to walk back into that room.
But she was not the same person now. She had taught in two countries. She had sat with men who had lost everything and prayed with them. She had trained others to go where she had gone. Whatever had been missing at the first attempt had been filled in — not by study, but by living.
“This time it was like a knife going through butter. It was just the right time.”
Ridley, Northampton, and the Cathedral of the Canals
Claire trained at Ridley Hall in Cambridge — two years of theology, brilliant lecturers, and life shared in community. “We prayed together, we worshipped together, we lived together. It was fantastic.”
Her curacy took her to Northampton, under a training incumbent she describes warmly, and it gave her the widest possible variety of work — a parish, she notes, not unlike St Mary’s. Schools. Homes for older people. And a chaplaincy that has stayed with her.
It was a residential unit where young parents came to live with their children while social services assessed whether they were able to care for them. Everything about that sentence is heavy. These were mothers under the hardest kind of scrutiny a person can be under, doing ordinary daily things — feeding, bathing, settling a baby at night — while being watched and written up, and knowing what the outcome might be.
Claire went in as chaplain: not to assess, not to advise, simply to be there. “It was quite an experience,” she says, in the way people say it when the full weight of something doesn’t fit into a sentence.
It was, in its way, the same work as the hostel in Leeds. Sit with people at the point where everything is at stake, and don’t flinch.
Her first post of her own took her to a beautiful church on the canal network — All Saints, known locally as the Cathedral of the Canals, its spire visible from the water for miles around. At the 8 o’clock service they’d get people who had moored their narrowboats overnight: a congregation that changed with the tide of the water, and a church family that didn’t.
It was there that Claire’s own family story took a turn she hadn’t planned.
A young woman called Michelle came to stay — grieving, angry, having lost both her mum and dad. She stayed for nine years. Then Michelle’s sister Charlie joined them, having lost her mum too.
“I went from being on my own to having a cat, a dog, Michelle and Charlie. It was one of the most wonderful times of my life.”
Michelle went on to train for ministry herself. She is now a vicar in Wellingborough.
Bideford
After nine happy years, Claire saw an advert in the Church Times for a parish in North Devon. Two things in the profile caught her eye: they wanted to become more of a family and children’s church, and they were doing serious work with the homeless.
She had never set foot in Bideford in her life. But those two lines in the profile spoke directly to the two halves of everything she’d already done.
A family and children’s church — that was the RE teacher who acted out Bible stories in the classroom near Chesterfield, and the woman who had stood in a Ugandan chapel watching girls praise God with their whole selves. Claire has never believed that children are the church of tomorrow, waiting politely in the wings. They are the church now, and a church that has children in it sounds different: noisier, warmer, more honest. Bideford is a town with a great many young families in it, and St Mary’s had recognised something important — that a church which isn’t a place a family can walk into, buggy and biscuit crumbs and all, is a church that has quietly closed a door.
And the homeless work — that was Billy and the bin bag on a rope, and Vinny coming back black and blue after payday, and the discovery that when you pray with people who have lost everything, Jesus is unmistakably in the room. North Devon has its own version of that need. It doesn’t always look like it does in a city; it’s sofa-surfing, hidden, seasonal, tangled up with the cost of housing in a place where wages are low, and rents are not. But it is here, and it is our neighbours, and St Mary’s had already decided it was not going to look away.
“Those were the two things that attracted me,” Claire says. Not the building, beautiful as it is. Not the town, lovely as it is. The people it wanted to make room for.
She came for an interview, was grilled by the whole PCC, and drove home with a strong sense that this was the place. On the way, Bishop Bob rang. The vote had been unanimous. Would she come?
She said yes — which, she notes, is unusual for her. “I’m not very good at decisions. But I just felt it was right.”
Then she cried all the way back to the parish she was leaving! “I loved those people. I knew it would be a real wrench.”
That was fifteen years ago.
“I cannot believe it,” she says. “And in that time I’ve had the most brilliant team — clergy team, but also the church family team. Everybody plays their part at St Mary’s. We are the body of Christ. Everybody has a place.”
“It is not irrelevant. It is not boring.”
We have discovered Claire’s story, where we followed her from a vicarage garden near Guildford to a girls’ school in Uganda, a hostel in Leeds, a church on the canals, and finally to a town she’d never set foot in.
Every day is different.
Ministry here isn’t one church. It’s St Mary’s and the villages alongside it, and Claire calls that a real privilege of these years.
Ask her what has surprised her most about the job and she doesn’t hesitate: no two days are the same.
“One minute I can be taking an assembly. The next minute I can be visiting somebody who’s bereaved. The next minute I’m putting a sermon together.”
And then the meetings — because St Mary’s is a busy church, and busy churches run on people. Leaders of groups. Volunteers. Teams. Reflections for the Bereaved. The Friday Diner. All the children’s work — Music Makers, Messy Church. Open the Book, going out into the schools. The choir.
She has a lovely image for her own part in it.
“I’m a bit like a helicopter. I hover, and I come down into the things that need my attention and particularly my time — and then I go back up, and I look again.”
It’s a more honest picture of a vicar’s job than most people carry around. Claire is emphatic that St Mary’s is not run by the clergy. It is run by a large team of people, most of them giving their time freely, and her role is to see the whole field and land where she’s needed.
The children’s work took off.
If you’ve been part of St Mary’s for a while, you’ll have watched this happen.
“I’ve seen the children’s work take off — and that’s really down to the leaders.”
She names them without being asked. Bekah Tanton, who does an amazing job with Music Makers. Messy Church. Pattie, Lorna, Ann, so active with young people. Chris and Pam Beechey encouraging young children to sing in Treblemakers, and Emily, our children and families worker — “not so new now,” Claire says, “and a great asset with all her work with the youth club- Crypt Youth.”
This matters to her more than almost anything else, and it isn’t sentimentality about children. It’s the RE teacher who acted out Bible stories in a Derbyshire classroom, and the young woman in a Ugandan chapel watching girls praise God with their whole selves. Claire has always believed that faith is something you grow up inside, not something you’re handed a leaflet about at eighteen.
Ask her how she’d describe her own role now, and she reaches for the oldest image in the book, with a twist.
“Shepherd of the shepherds, really….”
What she wants
She’s straightforward about the dream.
“To have the doors of St Mary’s flung open. More and more families coming in. More and more people experiencing that God is good and loves them dearly.”
