Profile of Fr. Gregory
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Fr Gregory Hallam, (d.o.b. 19/06/53), is a married priest of the Orthodox Church. His wife, Khouria Helen works as an Insurance Clerk and they have a grown up daughter, Jenny, (Genevieve).
Fr Gregory serves an English language parish in Manchester, UK, dedicated to St. Aidan, an Orthodox Saint of the Celtic Church before the West went into Schism.
This is his story from the first indications of faith as a boy to the present day.
Early Years
My family were not church going ... my mother having a strange
attraction-repulsion toward Anglicanism and my father belonging to a long
line of lapsed Methodists. For some strange reason though my parents put a
little sentimental Margaret Tarrant picture of a little boy at prayer in my
bedroom. When I was really young this made a profound impression on me
without really understanding what it was all about.
I went to a Church of England Primary School but we never saw the Vicar and
I can't remember ever praying in assembly either. The only experience I had
of the Christian church before 11 was an annual trip with my school to a
local Anglican Church for a service for Ascension Day (I remember nothing)
after which we went home early.
I must have read the word "God" somewhere along the line because I remember
asking my mother when about 9 how she knew (I assumed she must know) that
God existed. She simply said:- "He just does." This was terribly
unsatisfactory to a logical, scientifically inclined young boy so I promptly
put the question out of mind.
When I was about 10 I had developed an abiding interest in astronomy which
has stayed with me until the present day. I was brought up in the Peak
District in Derbyshire and in those days before the increase in light
pollution you could still see an astounding amount of stars on a good clear
night. From about 12 I had concluded that none of this immensity could have
existed without a creator God but this belief was not in any way a personal
faith. Jesus Christ certainly didn't come into the picture at all.
Also at this time, being of a scientific
inclination, I decided to conduct an experiment. If God existed, He should
be contactable unless he had no interest in communication, in which case He
would strike me as being a rather inferior sort of god; indeed no-God at
all. So, I decided to say a prayer that night and see what might happen. I
can neither remember the prayer now, nor what happened, but something
wonderful, if fleeting, certainly did happen. I suppose that kept me
searching.
I remember next thinking when I was a little older that you could either be
beastly or nice toward people and on the whole I thought the latter to be
better than the former. I decided, therefore, that I would try and be nice
to people.
Years past and my time was taken up with schoolwork of a most arduous and
intensive kind. I think I became stunted because of this, emotionally,
psychologically, spiritually. I became a sort of intellectual nerd and
rebellious adolescent. I left home as soon as I could.
My Life in Christ - Anglican Days
This all happened in one month in 1975. My employer moved me to a new town.
The only thing is I moved out as a newly converted Christian. Rewind the
tape 3 weeks. At the end of August 1975 (the end of August always has been a
propitious time for me) I spent some time at a YMCA house in Manchester (I
won't bore you with why). I met there a group of Anglican (mainly)
Christians who lived a sort of common life of mutual support and witness. I
was captivated by their love, their ability to pray from the heart, their
practical concern for each other and for me. Only one person ever said
anything to me directly, namely that Jesus had died for me.
Some weeks later I was in a new town, no friends, on my own. I hooked up to
the local Anglican church there and spent precisely one year growing in the
faith and being confirmed before moving back north where I stayed in
lodgings for a further 3 years and a new Anglican parish. Although my
introduction to Christ had been in an evangelical milieu this church was of
a more Anglo-Catholic persuasion and I gradually drew more from this
tradition but also from charismatic renewal which was then active in that
community.
It was from here that I was called for training to the Anglican priesthood
in Salisbury where I spent 3 happy years gradually becoming better
acquainted with the Anglo-Catholic tradition. It was here though that I
started to get a little disturbed by the scepticism that had engendered the
"Myth of God Incarnate" movement and the growing ascendancy of liberal
theology within the Church of England. I started to look beyond Anglicanism,
mainly through patristics to the East from my spiritual nourishment, still
determined though to be an Anglican priest on the grounds that I could
become an Orthodox Anglican Catholic by staying put within the inclusive
nature of Anglicanism. How wrong I was but I had to learn the hard way. It
was at Salisbury in January 1981 (I think) that I first attended an Orthodox
Liturgy at the Greek Church in Southampton, unusually for that time a
Liturgy in English! I was blown away by the transcendent beauty and human
warmth of that service but it didn't really cause me to question my vocation
as an Anglican priest.
I was ordained in 1982 reasonably confident that Anglicanism could remain
true to her roots and mature into a "Western Orthodox" position thereby
fulfilling her historic calling. Looking back now, this strikes me now as a
laudable but merely pious hope. In the light of what was happening in the
Church of England at the time I should have known that the chances of such a
western Orthodoxy coming to fruition were remote.
Disenchantment and New Beginnings
In the 1980's the Church of England began to retreat further and further
away from the orthodox catholic legacy of the Caroline divines, the
non-Jurors and the Tractarians of the Oxford Movement and orthodox
evangelical tradition. I began to see that even this legacy was compromised
and I looked increasingly to Orthodoxy as representing and fulfilling what I
had always believed, (albeit incompletely), as a Christian. A high point of
the 80's though was my marriage and then the birth of our daughter. At least
my life in that dimension came to a happy fulfilment even if it seemed that
other things were falling about around my ears!
By the late 1980's my theological position had consolidated around certain aspects that eventually pushed me into Orthodoxy as being the only place where these truths were holistically believed and practiced. The most important of these were:-
(1) The centrality of the bodily
resurrection of Christ for all Christian doctrine and experience.
(2) The anthropology of divine image and likeness as the
infrastructure for the Incarnation and the theosis (deification) of the
redeemed.
(3) The impossibility of the 'filioque' clause in the amended western
form of the creed in the context of a full appreciation of the person and
work of the Holy Spirit.
(4) The Cappadocian fathers teaching concerning the Trinity.
(5) The seven Ecumenical Councils.
(6) Orthodox worship and life.
The trigger for my departure from the Church of
England proved to be a contentious departure from catholic apostolic order
in the ministry of the Church in the decision of General Synod to ordain women to the priesthood in 1992.
For me the primary issue
concerned the assumed authority to change the unbroken tradition of the
Church in both east and west without seeking any consensus for such a change
outside Anglicanism in those churches that had retained the threefold order
of bishop, priest and deacon, (Rome and Orthodoxy of course). By 1993 I had
decided to leave the Church of England and seek admission into the Holy
Orthodox Church together with a group of 20 or so like minded people, mainly
from his last Anglican parish.
With a number of other former Anglican priests I made contact with the
Patriarchate of Antioch in the Summer of 1993, initially through the
Archdiocese of North of America. Later, responsibility for our group of
communities was formally transferred to the Patriarch and Bishop Gabriel in
Paris. It was here in what was to become the Archdiocese in Western
Europe that we were all received into the Orthodox Church and some of us
ordained top serve new communities in the Antiochian Orthodox Deanery of the
United Kingdom and Ireland. The rest is in the
Archives!
