SEARCH Journal

A challenge accepted!

THE INVITATION to work with Canon Ginnie Kennerley as associate editor of SEARCH comes as a privilege and a challenge. I have been a member of the editorial committee for most of the six years in which I have lived in Dublin as a member of staff in the Church of Ireland Theological Institute and would describe those as learning years in every dimension. There has been much acclimatising to do.

After a long spell as a bishop’s chaplain in England, the move to teaching ordinands in Ireland marked a distinct change of perspective. The move across the Irish Sea is a short distance geographically but a longer one between two expressions of the life of the Anglican Communion. Moving from South Africa to Durham as a postgraduate student in the early ‘90s was a much less noticeable disruption of assumptions and expectations. All of these things have been valuable and formative in discovering how to teach Liturgy and Anglicanism, as has the fact that most of our students did not begin life in the Church of Ireland. We continue to learn together. The active support of CITI colleagues, the House of Bishops, as well as some notable contributors to SEARCH – Ginnie herself, Margaret Daly Denton, Stephen Farrell, Alan Ford, Miriam Moffitt, Thomas O’Loughlin and Andrew Pierce – has been invaluable.

* Full article available in printed copies.

Dr. Bridget Nichols

is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy and the Church of Ireland Theological Institute and associate editor of SEARCH.