TOWERSEY VILLAGE

Ian, the son of Norman and Kathleen, was born in the Hallam Hospital, West Bromwich in 1965, and until the age of 27 West Brom remained his home. Ian's mother died when he was five, and, until he was eleven he was looked after, with his father, by his Aunt Ann and Uncle Joe. He then moved into a flat with his father for the next six years.

Ian started his education at Lyng Primary School, and then moved on the George Salter High School, an extremely rough establishment where fighting and bullying was rife. At the age of sixteen he entered a Sixth Form College for the next four years to study Art, and English, and catch up on some O Levels that he had missed at school.

When he was seventeen, his father died. For the next year he stayed with his cousin and their children, before living on his own for the next five years but with continued support from the family. From his school days until he was eighteen he did many of the usual teenage things, including a large amount of rebelling. He was a member of a gang, who were more of a social menace than anything more serious. He is now very thankful that he escaped some of the more serious consequences of that time.

When he reached the age of eighteen he became a Christian, mainly as a result of a girl friend taking him to church, and then he heard Billy Graham preach at the Aston Villa football ground and committed his life to Christ. This led to him going to Holy Trinity Church at Old Hill in the West Midlands regularly. He had many questions: about God, and life, and death, and the then curate helped him, over the course of the next two years, to work through these questions.

He was unemployed for a year, during which time he met Pat, who motivated him to go for interviews, and he began work in a community project funded by the Princes Trust as a Youth Worker. From there he joined Birmingham Polytechnic as a Junior Officer, a job which mainly consisted of carrying boxes for the computer engineering department. He taught himself computer programming and attended a one year computer training course through day release, which led to him spending the two years as a Junior Programmer in the Systems Team.

The next appointment was as a Software Project Leader for Wolverhampton LEA, giving full time computer support and programming for the Authority for the next five years - in all these jobs he was part of a team, which he felt to be very important.

Ian first experienced the call to Ministry at the age of eighteen, but felt that he needed more experience of the world (other than being a member of a gang!) before he committing himself. He married Pat when he was twenty two and spent the next five years getting used to married life. He and Pat were very involved in their local church, becoming Deputy Churchwardens, leading in Sunday School, as members of the PCC, Worship Group and as Youth leaders.

At the age of twenty seven, Ian successfully passed the selection process for Anglican ministry, and he and Pat headed off to St.John's Theological College in Nottingham, where he studied for three years before being awarded a B.Th degree. He then was ordained as a curate to Christchurch, Chilwell in Nottingham, a large suburban church with a congregation of about 300 adults and 100 children in a parish of 16,000. During all this time Pat was working as an Education Social Worker, first in the West Midlands, and then in inner city Leicester.

Ian saw the advertisement for the Team Vicar for Thame and Towersey three years ago, and was attracted by the challenge of being Vicar of two such diverse parishes, so he applied for the post and was appointed Team Vicar of St.Catherine's, Towersey, a very old and well established church, and Barley Hill, a more recently formed church congregation meeting at Barley Hill Primary School, the parish covering the Lea Park area of Thame.

Ian has been a West Bromwich Albion supporter from the age of four, and always used to go to all their matches with his father. He has enjoyed enormously their all too brief sojourn into the Premiership.

Ian's sports were the martial arts (judo, karate, and taikwondo), football and cricket, and athletics - he ran for his school, has run one half marathon, and can still be found puffing and panting around Thame and along the Phoenix Trail.

His hobbies are art and literature, walking, and music with a catholic taste. He and Pat enjoy food and drink and love most things French. During the past two years he has developed a very keen interest in gardening - the first time that he has had a garden to experiment upon.

Ross Dike

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