The Reverend Paul Carr must be one of the few people who can think of Billericay in Essex without recalling the BBC series Gavin and Stacey, in which Billericay is the town where Gavin’s family is fictionally located. For Paul it is the beloved parish which he has recently left to become the Chaplain at Paphos in the south-west of Cyprus – the job he describes as “an adventure.”
He brings with him a very individual CV, which includes being a music promoter, a prison officer, a second row forward at a famous rugby club and someone with a following of hundreds (or did he say thousands) through his website and social media ministry.
Paul’s accent locates him immediately as a man of the north-east. (Don’t make the mistake of calling him a Geordie: they’re from Newcastle. He’s from Sunderland – he’s a Mackem as they say in those parts!). His father was a disabled miner and Paul left school at sixteen to become the wage earner for the family. He now has an MA. His life was typical of teenagers in that area at that time, and when one of his best friends committed suicide at the age of twenty-one, he decided that something had to change in his life. He had been to Sunday School as a child as most people did in his age group at that time in the working-class areas of the north, but now he set out to find a new meaning in life and found it in Christianity. He insists that this was a rational choice, based on evidence and comparison with other religious groups that he tried. During the following years, as he puts it,
it moved from my head to my heart. It was a movement that turned my life downside-up.
After a few years in sales management, as fortunes changed in the north-east, he applied for a job as a prison officer, and served time (so to speak) at Wormwood Scrubs and Walton prisons. A short spell at Durham was ended because he knew too many of the inmates from his past! During this time, he had become more involved in church, becoming a house church leader, before he felt the call to be a prison chaplain, having seen the work they did, and hearing other people tell him that it would be just the job for him. His wife Paula was very supportive, so first he became confirmed and then went through a selection process before arriving at Oak Hill Theological College in London. Oak Hill is notable as a ‘low church’ College, which suited his outlook, as a convinced evangelical, though he jokes that it was the proximity to the Saracens’ Rugby ground that swayed him. In fact, he played in the second team / veterans as second row during his time there.
After ordination and a Curacy, prison chaplaincy having lost its appeal, largely because he had been seriously injured in an incident during his final days as an officer, he thought about other forms of chaplaincy. He says he had never been attracted by the prospect of parish ministry, but found he loved every minute of it. “God had His hand in my life,” he says. The fact that he spent more than fifteen years in his last vibrant parish speaks for itself. He saw his role as being an interface between the worshipping community and the wider community, and that sums up his entire approach to parish ministry. Since arriving in Paphos he has already been appointed as Chaplain to the Royal British Legion and has made contact with the local Rotary Club. He hopes to engage with many other groups and societies over the coming months. His view is that there are lots of organisations that seek to serve the common good and he wants the Church to be recognised by, and counted among them.
One special way in which Paul interfaces with the wider world is through his website (revPACman.com). Following an operation in 2016, as a way of spending his convalescence, Paul set up the website, initially in a small way, but now it has grown beyond his expectations. The Vicarage they occupied in Billericay had a large garden and another way to ‘meet the public’ was his regular ‘Gigs in the Garden’ and music concerts in his churches. All of his events ended with a blessing. Paul has a tremendous interest in music and has been a promoter since his twenties. He speaks of ‘house gigs’ in his lounge (capacity crowd 40). Those gigs included a warm meal and dessert. Both their children are talented musicians and often acted as the ‘warm up’ for the main act. His favourite style of music is ‘Americana’ but he enjoys both playing and listening to all kinds of rock music, and his repertoire includes playing in a brass band. Over the years some famous people have been part of the entertainment, including Ricky Ross, lead singer of Deacon Blue (as if you didn’t know) and someone he describes as ‘Nashville Royalty,’ Beth Neilson-Chapman. All Paul’s events were great fund raisers for the church. Look out Paphos!
When the children (Ben and Annabel) left the nest, Paul and Paula were itching for a new horizon and that was what brought them to Paphos. Paul was licensed at Synod where he recognised just what he was part of in his new Diocese. Though he has never worn vestments before, he is loving worship at Agia Kyriaki. “They are training me,” he says, and when he considers that he is worshipping in a church that has seen worship for seventeen centuries, all he can say is, “wow!” He laughingly refutes the rumour that he had a reputation as a ‘hard-nosed screw;’ but he is happy to claim:
once I locked people up; now I am helping to set people free.