Some biographies illuminate a person and a historical period. Other biographies change your life. Tim Gorringe’s biography of Alan Ecclestone falls into the second category for me. When I read about a priest who created a “Parish Meeting” that lasted for over 20 years and was essentially a weekly meeting of the whole parish that replaced the regular church council altogether, I had to learn more. So I called up Tim Gorringe and we figured out a way to host a dialogue “across the pond” between Arkansas and the UK.
In this conversation, we spend a lot of time talking about the function of the Parish Meeting as a way of applying faith to the whole of life in and through that rather remarkable social body, the parish; then also discuss Ecclestone’s practice of visitation, his late in retirement authorship, and his life as an “organic intellectual” (Gramsci).
It’s the kind of conversation that will knock the top off your head and completely transform how you think about local parish life and the work of a parson, because Alan Ecclestone really was a revolutionary priest.
Watch for more about Ecclestone this fall on the blog, and if you’ve not read Tim Gorringe I highly recommend his biography of Ecclestone, or his Theology of the Built Environment, a rather remarkable exploration into the theology of buildings and cities.
Alan Ecclestone, Revolutionary Priest