Good luck Gareth and Jane!

I'm thinking of Gareth and Jane Saunders today, who are moving from Edinburgh to Cellardyke in Fife.  Gareth is leaving his job as a priest with the Scottish Episcopal Church and beginning life as an Information Architect (web boffin to you and me) at St Andrew's University.  Not the most common of job changes, but there seem to be an awful lot of web-savvy clergy around these days, so you never know how many more there could be.

Just as long as there aren't too many changes in the other direction – can you imagine letting a bunch of web programmers start running our churches?  The hymn numbers would be in binary only, outreach would consist purely of sitting in internet cafes sending Bluetooth messages to people's mobiles, and services would be replaced with sychronous chat over the internet from the comfort of our living rooms.

Anyway, I digress.   Good luck to Gareth and Jane as they settle into their new life in Fife.  Gareth's been a great friend to me since we first met through Join Me and discovered that my folks know Jane's folks.  He has been a big source of advice to me on everything from HTML coding and web accessibility for my website, to the nature of the Holy Spirit and the power of prayer.

Last year I was invited by my old church to get involved in the youth work.  This meant going through a "disclosure check", whereby the the national authorities make sure you are a sound, sane character and not a raving nutter or paedophile.  I asked Gareth to be one of my referees, and put him down as "spiritual and technological adviser, and fellow cult member".  Which was, if nothing else, the truth.

I never did hear back about the application.