Memoirs of an Anglican Priest
Adrian Leak
The Book Guild Ltd, 2022
The title of this book grabs the attention. Melchizedek was a priest mentioned briefly in the Bible (Genesis 14:17-20). The book is not about Melchizedek; it is the Revd Adrian Leak recounting incidents of his life from his school days to his retirement ministry.
He writes well. My only quibble being his habit of inserting a French phrase at the climax of a sentence – “sans pareille”, “de trop”, “du côté de chez”, “douceurs” – all appear within the first ten pages. Someone like me who is ignorant of French has to either not understand the quip, or stop the flow of reading to look up a translation.
In the part of the book where he describes his selection and training for ordination, he reflects on how times have changed.
Today there is a shortage of clergy, combined with an expectation that in order for someone to become a priest they must sense a personal call by God. But we don’t say someone is not allowed to become a teacher unless they sense a personal call from God to the vocation of teaching:
“‘Testing my vocation’ was an odd expression […] I wondered if Cranmer, Hooker or Lancelot Andrewes had ever […] agonised over their decision to take holy orders. It was, after all, a natural step for them to take […]
during the eighteenth century as many as sixty per cent of Oxford graduates went on to be ordained. […] there was no suggestion that any practical training was needed before these young men were let loose upon their respective congregations. […] By the time they had spent three or four years at university, where daily attendance at chapel was the norm, they would be able to recite much of the Sunday liturgy by heart.” Pages 76-85.
After ordination, from 1969-1973, he was curate-in-charge at St Mary and St Berin Church in Berinsfield, near Dorchester:
“We had two film clubs in the village. The Berinsfield Film Club [and] The Children’s Film Club. […] Both organisations shared a projector, which was stored in a cupboard in the community centre. As we hired the films from the same rental company and the boxes containing the reels looked the same, sooner or later there was bound to be a mix-up. […]
One wet Saturday morning in February the hall was crammed with the usual crowd of children aged between five and eleven, most of whom had been dropped off at least twenty minutes too early by their mothers. Their excitement had already built up a fine head of steam by the time we were due to start. Fortunately, they were so tightly jammed together that there was little room for any serious rioting. […]
I changed the reel and switched the projector on to start the big film. It was a Children’s Film Foundation production, Calamity the Cow […] But when the film began to roll, it wasn’t Calamity the Cow. It was Carry on Camping. What could I do? Stopping the machine and rummaging in the cupboard for the right film was out of the question. The overcharged mood of the children would brook no further delay. They had already been compelled to endure a long wait […] and I sensed that things were about to turn ugly. […] I had no choice but to let the film run on. But I need not have worried; the children loved it. They were too young to understand the laboured double entendres which were a feature of that genre, but they loved the slapstick, and how they shrieked when Barbara Windsor’s bra flew off. One seven-year-old told me afterwards that it was almost as funny as when the clown lost his trousers at the circus.” Pages 108-109.
June 2025
Adrian Vincent