April 2024: Rev Kerr Wintersgill and Rev Moira Taylor Wintersgill
The Church of Scotland's Talking Ministry series shares personal stories from those serving in Christian ministry, along with resources filled with questions, prayers and reflections to help encourage reflection on how God might be calling you at this time.
For April, Rev Kerr Wintersgill and Rev Moira Taylor Wintersgill reflect on their own journeys towards ministry and their current role as joint ministers to two very different congregations on the West Mainland of Orkney.
My ministry: Rev Kerr Wintersgill and Rev Moira Taylor Wintersgill
Glaswegian Kerr, and Moira from Portobello in Edinburgh, met and married while training for ministry with the Church of Scotland.
The couple were ordained and inducted as joint ministers of Milestone Community Church at Dounby in the north Orkney Mainland in November 2022, a role they combined with work as joint mission development officers for the Orkney Islands.
More recently, the couple have become joint ministers at Stromness Church in Orkney's second largest town.
What led you to a career in ministry?
Kerr: When I first felt a call to ministry, my first thought was: "God! Are you having a laugh?"– I failed my English Higher twice and You want me to write an essay twice a week?" But I felt I had to be faithful and follow on. When I wasn't successful, I was mightily relieved.
Then, a few years later, a reading from Jeremiah about the walls of Jerusalem being torn down to be rebuilt gave me the strong sense that was God saying "it's time to rebuild you, so I reapplied.
I was an elder in Callander Kirk and involved in various roles in the church, but when I split from my wife, I resigned my eldership because I didn't feel I was a fit elder because I was divorced. This was why the words of Jeremiah about the walls needing to be rebuilt resonated so deeply with me.
God! Are you having a laugh? – I failed my English Higher twice and You want me to write an essay twice a week?
Moira: My family were nominally Church of Scotland, so I went fairly regularly to Sunday school and for a short while youth fellowship. For as long as I can remember I believed in God but didn't know much about the Holy Spirit and even though I joined the Church in 1992, I wouldn't say I had a live faith.
I got married and had two daughters within two years and went to live in Anstruther in Fife, where my ex-husband was teaching, but felt a long way from family and friends.
I went to bed one night feeling really down about the state of the world and a bit lonely and suddenly I was flooded with hope and light. I got up the next day and felt the same and needed to speak to someone about this profound experience. Having been involved with the Church of Scotland in my past, my first point of contact was to find out who the minister was in Anstruther at the time, and speak with him. It turned out that he was about to run his first Alpha course and I went along. I remember feeling quite anxious about it, because it was bound to be full of "good Christiany types", but that feeling went away quickly. They were an amazing bunch who were all on a journey together. That would be where my life turned around and faith became a major part of my life.
I became an elder in Duns in the Borders and ran holiday clubs and started Kids Kirk and did a lot in lay leadership with the church. I first felt a call around 1998, but I just dismissed that because I felt that I didn't know enough about the Bible. Then one day, many years later, I was hanging the washing out and I felt God say: "You are going to be a minister and a minister's wife."
At that point my husband didn't believe, so I thought that perhaps at some point he would come to faith and go into ministry, never imagining that I was going to meet Kerr!
My middle daughter, Caroline, died in 2015 and my marriage broke down. I moved to Edinburgh with my youngest daughter Maisie Grace, who was then aged five, and got a job as a pastoral assistant at Broomhouse with Rev Michael Mair. I absolutely loved that, but that sense of call was still there, so I decided to go into discernment and if ordained ministry turned out to be for me, so be it, and if not, then great, because I loved my job.
I remember driving to my national assessment conference in Dunfermline, thinking that I would rather stick pins in my eyes, but the first people I met were Kaye Gardiner and Elsie MacRae and we had a fantastic weekend – just great fun! I was selected for full-time Word and Sacrament and entered training in 2017.
On my third conference in 2019, I met Kerr, who was at his first conference at St Andrews. After that, we chatted on Facebook and we felt fairly quickly that God had brought us together. It changed the direction of our ministry because neither of us expected to be anything other than a minister on our own.
How have you found working together as a couple in ministry?
Moira: Whilst in my final year at New College, I did eight-months as a locum for Gorgie Dalry Stenhouse, a lot of it during the second lockdown. I did a lot with Kerr for that and we found that when we got the opportunity, we worked really well together.
We have got completely different styles of preaching and different strengths and weaknesses, but we have a similar approach to what ministry is. That's why it works.
Kerr: Moira is the preacher, I'm the encourager. Moira is the ideas person and very much about thinking outside the box. I do the good simple Presbyterian stuff, and I am good with IT and good with figures and good at running a session.
Moira: Kerr is a superb moderator. He has an amazing ability to maintain his energy and maintain his composure and be very, very fair and be very solution focussed.
Kerr is a good sustainer as well. I am a pioneer at heart and, led by the Holy Spirit, I find gaps of need and fill them. Even before I was ordained, at the church in Duns, the Holy Spirit gave me the vision for Kirk Kids. I put huge energy into it: got it up and running, ran it for a year, and then passed it on and it is still going now. That could be problematic if I was in ministry by myself.
How would you describe your approach to mission and church?
Kerr: For me, it's a lot to do with relationships and about being a community. Before you can preach the Gospel, you have to have a relationship with folk. Moira's lovely take on it is that the sanctuary should be God's living room where people are comfortable just to come as they are. They don't have to be dressed up in their Sunday best.
Moira: We both try and be authentically us, warts and all, and I think that allows others to be the same. In church, there is an amazing atmosphere. When we lead worship together we can have a bit of banter which I think helps drop the masks we all wear. There have been times in my own life when I haven't gone to church because I didn't feel comfortable sharing the negatives in my life, or I felt I might be judged, but I strongly believe that church has to be a place that people feel they can go to on their worst days as well as their best days, and somewhere they can go to explore when they feel a spark of something spiritual.
We don't want to be ministers who say: come to church, believe what we believe, and act the way we do and you will be welcome.
We need to have space for people who don't necessarily believe all that we do, but feel that there is something they need to explore and ask the question: "So, tell me what you believe?"
Was it a surprise to find yourselves called to Orkney?
Moira: Yes! I thought I'd be in a priority area because I loved working in Broomhouse so much.
Kerr: And I was single at the time and I thought I was going to have a fairly peripheric ministry of five years there and five years here because I would be able to move round.
But we both feel called to Orkney and certainly don't feel that we are going to be leaving it any time soon. We have both fallen in love with the place, its scenery and the people.
Moira: God has given us such love for the people we have been placed amongst and it's the kind of scenery which speaks to my soul, with its huge seas and the big skies. It stops me in my tracks every day.
You now have two quite separate charges, so how have you been able to balance the two different churches?
Kerr: It's an interesting experience after being at Milestone Church for 18 months and being established to going somewhere to start again. It's going to change again because Orkney is going to become a single parish and we are going to be taking on responsibility for another two parishes.
Milestone is a new church, formed when what were historically four parishes came together and the decision was made to close all the buildings and replace them with a new energy efficient, flexible building.
Stromness is a long-established parish church which hasn't had the easiest journey. Since the summer of 2022, when we first came up to Orkney, they went from, having a minister, a manse and a church to their minister retiring, the manse being condemned and being told that the building was going to close.
Moira: In Milestone, we have a really eclectic mix of people holding a broad range of theologies, but it works, whereas it is very early days for us in Stromness and we don't really know our people yet, but they seem lovely, if a little bruised.
Saying that, we have already tried to do some new things. On Easter Sunday, we instigated a 9am service at The Pier in Stromness, which we led together with our colleagues from the Episcopal church and the Baptist church. About 50 folk came from different denominations and the weather was glorious which was just as well as we had no Plan B!
I always try to get along to the Orkney Island Leaders' Meeting, which is held once a month and brings together people from all the different churches. Interestingly, we all have the same sense about unity and that there needs to be some sort of repentance about the divisions that have occurred, and the way churches have tended to focus more on their differences than their shared love of God. This has led to a monthly prayer and worship event where all the churches come together and that feels like a place we all need to go as people of faith. We need to have respect for one another's differences, but realise that we don't have to agree about everything to come together.
Kerr: We are joint ministers in both Milestone and Stromness. That has been hard for some people to get their head round. Even the fact of a couple being in ministry together is difficult. I had someone say: "Every minister says they are in partnership with their spouse". But we really are a partnership!
Moira: Another thing we share is that our ministry is led by the people. We didn't arrive in Dounby with a list of things we wanted to do. We seek God's leading to find out where the gaps are and what people wanted to happen. It is the same for Stromness. We need to get to know the people and the town and the schools and get a sense of where the need is.
Kerr: For us it's about building a sense of community, both individually and together, and helping people develop skills as worship teams.
Along with your parish responsibilities, you are chaplains for the new St Magnus Way, a 58-mile pilgrimage route to the saint's final resting place at St Magnus Cathedral. What does this involve?
Moira: Last year we organised a pilgrimage of the whole St Magnus Way done in stages. That started in April and finished in September and the positive thing about that was that it was very much local people and people from different churches that came along.
We have still to decide what we are doing this year. We would like to ground it in some way so that the people who come to the island to do the St Magnus Way have some way to tap into the faith of the island and the people of the island.
Kerr: They have a very good app I want to help develop with resources for each of section of the walk by means of a guided reflection. It is those sorts of resources we want to make available for people doing the walk.
What keeps you excited about ministry?
Moira: I don't feel as if I am doing a job. It is such an amazing privilege to do this. It's just so energising.
Of course, I doubt myself and worry about whether I am doing well enough for God and our communities but that is when call is so important-I am not doing this alone – as long as I stay rooted in God I'm OK. Life in ministry is so varied – for example one day I went from our breakfast initiative, the Toast Stop, to doing messy Church in school to leading a stillness service in Stromness, then back to choir practice in Milestone, then an Alpha Course. It's an absolute dream to be doing all these different things with all these different people.
Neither one of us has the desire to be set aloft. We don't put on "our minister face" or pretend to be perfect – we are far from that! We've both been through a lot in life and had different experiences, good and bad. We have both done things we are ashamed of and had moments when we have shone, but it's about owning that and saying: I am who I am. I am human, I am flawed, but even so, God will use me to build His kingdom.
There are places in life where you are almost engulfed by blackness, but knowing the truth that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness can't overcome it, is something I feel passionate about sharing with people, and that life is the deep pure love of God.
Kerr: The same as with Moira, it's a love of the folk that keeps me going. It's not really work at all.
April Discernment Resources: A Time for Everything
For everything there is a season,
a time for every activity under heaven.
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant and a time to harvest.
A time to kill and a time to heal.
A time to tear down and a time to build up.
A time to cry and a time to laugh.
A time to grieve and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.
A time to embrace and a time to turn away.
A time to search and a time to quit searching.
A time to keep and a time to throw away.
A time to tear and a time to mend.
A time to be quiet and a time to speak.
A time to love and a time to hate.
A time for war and a time for peace.Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
These well-known words from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes are often recited during funeral services or at moments of changes and transition. We may have heard them over and over, and they can be loved for both their familiarity and their timelessness.
But a note of caution needs to be sounded. If we tell ourselves that there's time for everything then we can very easily persuade ourselves that no present action is required; there will be time for that later. Aren't we all procrastinators at heart? There is a time for everything, but perhaps there isn't time for everything. Therefore, some things need doing now.
There are so many things that we could be doing with our lives and so much of that which would, undoubtedly, be worthwhile. But the result often is that it can be difficult to home in on that which we really should be doing, as being of highest importance and eternal significance.
How might I serve God is surely the question of all questions and it might just be that you need to consider it now. Yes, there's a time for everything but in the words of the Moloko classic song, ‘The Time is Now.'
Have you glimpsed something of the glory of God? Are you discovering more of who God is and, therefore, who you are? Are you on the journey of falling deeper in love with God? Has following in the footsteps of Jesus become what you're about?
Might God be calling you to serve - to give your life? Is it time?
Prayer
Loving Lord, it is so difficult to filter out the many voices that compete for my attention. I want, above all, to hear you but it's not easy. Noise and clamour and distractions are ever present.
My prayer is that you would seek me out in moments of stillness, brief as they might be - and there, that you would speak. I long to serve you, Lord, and to serve according to your will.
Is this the time? Is this my time?
Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.
In Jesus' name, AMEN.
Song Words for Reflection (Mark Altrogge)
© 1982 People of Destiny International
I want to serve the purpose of God In my generation
I want to serve the purpose of God While I am alive
I want to give my life For something that will last forever
Oh, l delight, I delight to do Your will
I want to build with silver and gold In my generation
I want to build with silver and gold While I am alive
I want to give my life For something that will last forever
Oh, l delight, I delight to do Your will
What is on Your heart? Show me what to do
Let me know Your will And I will follow You
What is on Your heart? Show me what to do
Let me know Your will And I will follow You
I want to see the kingdom of God In my generation
I want to see the kingdom of God While I am alive
I want to live my life For something that will last forever
Oh, I delight, I delight to do Your will
I want to see the Lord come again In my generation
I want to see the Lord come again While I am alive
I want to give my life For something that will last forever
Oh l delight, I delight to do Your will
More information
If you would like to consider how God might be calling you to serve at this time, you may want to discuss further with your minister or be in touch with your Presbytery to explore local opportunities.
If you are interested in exploring a call to the recognised ministries of the Church, you can find more information on our vocations page and can contact ministry@churchofscotland.org.uk for a Discernment Conversation with one of the Recruitment Team.