We look forward to welcoming our new vicar on Monday 25th September 2023. Rev Jack Shepherd, with his wife, Emily, will be joining us from Church Wigan, where Jack is an Associate Minister. Church Wigan involves all the Anglican churches in Wigan town centre and shares many features with the Mission Community that is starting in Leigh, and which Jack will lead.
Jack has managed to cram in lots of experience. Before discerning a call to ordination, Jack was an Education Assistant with Riding Lights Theatre Company, a Prayer Parish Assistant at St Michael-le-Belfrey Church in York, and Destiny Church (now ‘City on a Hill’) in Edinburgh. In between university and his ordination, he worked as a Relay Worker for the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship, a Ministry Apprentice at St Mary’s Maidenhead, and a Pastoral Assistant at St Thomas’ Church, York. During his training at Cranmer Hall in Durham, he did lots of placements!
In terms of ordained ministry, he was curate at St Paul’s in Skelmersdale, and worked as Missional Priest in the parish of Up Holland and Dalton, which included fresh expressions with primary and secondary schools, before starting as Associate Minister in Wigan. He is currently a representative for the Diocese of Liverpool in the house of Clergy at General Synod, where he has been a founding member of the new General Synod Network for Church Planting, and is part of the committee for the Evangelical Group of the General Synod. He has provided training on church planting at Cliff College, Emmanuel Theological College, and Cranmer Hall, and is currently working towards a PhD on Anglican resource churches and the Holy Spirit. He has also formed links with New Wine, Kairos Connexion and the 24-7 prayer movement.
Emily has an MA in Conflict, Development and Security where she specialised in European citizens’ responsibilities to refugees, and is currently joint CEO of Welcome Churches, having co-founded the charity in 2018. Welcome Churches seeks to help churches fulfil the biblical mandate to offer hospitality and welcome strangers by welcoming refugees and asylum seekers into the community. Before this, Emily worked at CAP headquarters in Bradford.