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Ruth Gouldbourne
I grew up in a manse, and the standing family joke is that I swore I would never marry a minister. This is a vow I maintain I have kept, since the man I married, Ian, is not a minister. Fortunately, he did not make a similarly rash vow, and we have been married for 22 years.
When we married in the mid 1980s, I moved to London to be with him, and he had already started attending Bloomsbury. So while I was completing a theology degree and then a Diploma in Pastoral Studies at Spurgeon's College, we were members here.
The denomination asked that I spend some time working in a local church in order to complete my initial formation as a minister, and the obvious place to do it was where I was already involved. So for about 18 months I worked at Bloomsbury in a capacity that nobody ever quite managed to name. A magazine article from the time refers to me as a "what", since somebody once said to me "You're a what?" – and the name stuck!
Towards the end of the 1980s, I was ordained here at Bloomsbury and moved to Bunyan Meeting Free Church in Bedford, where I was part of the ministry team for nearly seven years.
In 1995, I moved from Bedford to teach at Bristol Baptist College. My role there was as tutor in history and doctrine, and I was also College Chaplain, involved in the spiritual formation aspect of ministerial formation. While there (and considerably after the original deadline), I completed my doctorate in issues to do with the 16th century radical Reformation and gender questions, and then spent the next five years trying not to publish it.
After 11 years it was time to move, and it was a real privilege to receive the invitation to come as part of the ministry team back here at Bloomsbury. I was inducted in July 2006 and am still in the process of settling in. It's not an easy process when I keep expecting to meet myself 20 years younger as I turn corners in the building!
It's exciting to be here. Every church has its own identity and pattern of life, and Bloomsbury is no exception. The sheer variety of people here, on Sundays and during the week, is quite bewildering and fascinating. The demand to keep thinking about what the gospel means in a place such as this is a real challenge. There are no easy answers, and faith, prayer and reflection have to be real to survive in this context; not necessarily having all the answers, but being willing to struggle with the questions.
My vision for Bloomsbury is that we carry on with our deep tradition of exploring faith and life; taking seriously relationships in our immediate living and in the wider world; and that as a fellowship we provide a space in which many people can meet each other, discover more of themselves, and enter deeper into living out the identity as beloved children of God.
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