Robin Blount

Robin Blount was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1968, with a first curacy in Bletchley. The new city of Milton Keynes began life at the same time, and Robin became an enthusiast for ecumenism, having heard very little about it at theological college. In Bletchley, all the churches grew closer as planning turned into construction, and Robin joined the New Town Ministers Association. NTMA had a brief ten-year life, but made a considerable impact on shaping the Church in New Towns. A second curacy in Washington New Town was followed by a move south to Chelmsley Wood, a joint Anglican-Methodist church in a huge housing development by the M6 between Birmingham and Coventry. He worked as a Team Vicar, chiefly with local community groups. In 1976 Robin moved across Birmingham to Dudley, the second minister in the newly-formed Black Country Urban Industrial Mission. He stayed there for fourteen years, seeing the decline of heavy industry during the 1980s recession and the Thatcher years. Lastly, in 1989, he moved south to Folkestone, to be chaplain with Eurotunnel UK and to be the European links officer for Canterbury diocese. His funding was met by the Methodist, United Reformed, Baptist and Anglican Churches, a truly ecumenical post.

Robin retired in 2003 and almost immediately became a minister in the local Methodist circuit for the next seventeen years. Finally he retired again, and he and his wife Lesley moved north to Clitheroe, where they are both members of the United Reformed Church.

Articles by Robin Blount

Synodality

Bishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in a sermon before his election as Pope, quoting Rev. 3:20 and the image of Jesus standing at the door and knocking, said this: “Today Jesus knocks from the other side, from inside the Church – he wants to go out and we must follow him. He wants to go first of all to all the marginalised, to those on the margins of society and the Church, to the poor, the exploited. He goes where people are hurting. The Church is to be a field hospital where wounds – physical, social, psychological, and spiritual – are dressed and healed.”