Welcome Dan Inman!

For a long time, I have loved this corner of London for the superlative British Red Cross charity shop on Old Church Street (which has supplied me with knitwear for several winters now), John Sandoe Books, and finding solace in the Peter Jones café on dreary winter afternoons.

I had also known about St Luke’s and Christ Church from my friends Mother Emma Smith and Fr Jack Dunn (a fellow canon with me in Chichester) and I also had the pleasure of working with Jeremy Summerly when I was a chaplain in Oxford. Based on their extremely positive reports of the parish over the years, it’s with real enthusiasm that I’m joining you this summer as your new associate vicar.

I come to you from Chichester having never lived in London. Chichester seems to have a fair few people who have lived in Chelsea themselves at some point (albeit often during a period when you walked down the King’s Road barefoot smoking something illegal). I come to you after five years as a residentiary canon, first as Chancellor, and, more recently, as Precentor. As such, I have variously had responsibility in the cathedral for schools, learning and engagement, the care of visitors and pilgrims, liturgy and music and, with others, sharing in the pastoral care of our congregation. I’ve also loved being chaplain to our choir school and being a governor of the University of Chichester and am very much looking forward to working with Christ Church Primary School and the Chelsea Academy in this new role.

Prior to the cathedral, I was, for three years, the director of ordinands for the Diocese of Chichester, living in Brighton. It was a role which was largely about working with individuals exploring their vocation in life, but it also sent me out across Sussex promoting ordained ministry. Both as a canon and DDO I have learnt a vast amount in eight years – not always easily, not least during the pandemic – about God, ministry, and what it means to hold ‘treasure in clay jars’ (2 Corinthians 4.7).

I often asked candidates for ministry about what it is that brings them most joy in their day-to-day lives as a means of exploring what it is that God might be calling them to. Asking that question of myself recently, it became clear to me that this was in fact pastoral care and teaching. As such, while being a canon has brought many exciting opportunities, it has also required a large amount of committee work, trustee roles and paperwork. While contemporary parish life is not immune from this, of course, I did nonetheless feel that the next step for me was not more of the same (or worse) but, in fact, a return to the heart of pastoral ministry in the Church, namely the parish.

Having been to school in Hampshire and read Theology at Oxford, I trained at Cuddesdon, undertook my training in the very lively rural parish of Deddington with the Barfords in north Oxfordshire with a selfless incumbent, and, subsequently, returned to The Queen’s College as its chaplain and a junior research fellow for three years.

I’m a church historian by training so I have also done bits and pieces of lecturing, writing and teaching along the way, and, more recently, have enjoyed leading retreats and writing about spirituality. In particular, Chichester has given me a real love for exploring the relationship between faith and the arts (the cathedral is famous for it in the twentieth century) and while there I’ve had the joy of working with three liturgical artists in establishing the ecumenical Chichester Workshop for Liturgical Art (www.chichesterworkshop.org) which seeks to renew the tradition of traditional liturgical art in British church life. I hope I can share some of this with you, and, to support that aspect of my vocation, I’m undertaking a (very) part-time MA at the Warburg Institute over the next three years to deepen my knowledge of Renaissance art, in particular; August is going to be largely being spent recovering my A-level Latin.

The heart of Christian ministry, for me, finds some recognition in Prospero’s question to Miranda in The Tempest: ‘What seest thou else?’ (1.2.61). It’s about learning to enlarge our vision of life in the presence of Christ, in our joy and grief, in the sunlit uplands of life and in the shadow of death. To do so is the amazing privilege of being a parish priest and perceiving, with those entrusted to my care, that ‘something else’ which is often nothing less than a glimpse of ‘Heaven in ordinary’. I hope I can serve you well in this respect and look forward to getting to know you all, and the parish more generally, this coming autumn.

Fr Dan