John Richardson 1950 – 2014

John Richardson died aged 63 at the end of March.

John was held in great affection by many across the divides of churchmanship. Physically he had a ‘benign essential tremor’, which could at first be mistaken for timidity. Yet he was widely admired for his tenacity, and unshakeable in his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and in his stand for Anglican orthodoxy.

Conversion and CU

He was brought up a Bible-reading, creed-reciting Anglo-Catholic which, he once told me, was ‘a good grounding in what you were supposed to believe, but not a very good grounding in why you were supposed to believe it’. He dated his conversion to August 1971, in the summer before his final year at Keele University (where he studied Biology, Psychology and Philosophy). It took him a year to understand what evangelicals in the Christian Union were really talking about, and a further two years to be persuaded of it. He was invited to be publicity officer for the CU, before he had even joined it!

In his early days as an evangelical he was very much a charismatic, and trained for ordained ministry at St John’s College, Nottingham. From there he served in a Birmingham parish before becoming chaplain of North East London Polytechnic. In 1993 he spent ten months studying at Moore College in Sydney, and thoroughly enjoyed the rigours of the course, which turned him into something of an evangelist for the study of Hebrew and Greek.

The Ugley Vicar

In 2000 he became Associate Minister of Henham, Elsenham, and Ugley near Bishop’s Stortford, and seized the opportunity to start blogging and tweeting as ‘The Ugley Vicar’. The Chelmsford Anglican Bible Conference was his brainchild, as was the Junior Anglican Evangelical Conference (JAEC). He was well-known as a columnist in EN and as the writer of short booklets such as What God Has Made Clean and Revelation Unwrapped. His booklet God, Sex, and Marriage helped many who were struggling with singleness and John himself was, seemingly, a confirmed bachelor until 2008 when he married Alison. He was also a keen amateur painter and astronomer.

In May last year he put a poem on his blog called The Lifeguard, about salvation from ‘death’s dread terrors’. Space precludes a long quotation from it, but at the end, to reassure his readers that he was not then on his deathbed, he wrote ‘(PS: In case you’re wondering, I’m OK.)’. That, of course, remains gloriously true now. As he once wrote about a friend of his, named John, ‘Today he rejoices upon another shore, and in a greater light’.