Tina Upton
As most of you will know Tina Upton
will be joining us after her ordination as deacon on July 13th. Here
she introduces herself.
Thank you for asking me to write for
the West
Kirby and
Caldy parish magazine: I am very much looking forward to joining you all on 13th
July. I have already met some of you,
and I very much want to meet more of you face-to-face – as many as possible, as
soon as possible – so you can get to know me properly (and I you!). In the
meantime, there are various things I can say about myself that perhaps might be
of interest.
First of all, let me introduce my
family. I am married to Clive, who
writes and presents gospel poetry. He is
very involved at St Mary’s, Upton especially with the mid-week
Communion congregation. He will be
continuing at St Mary’s. Clive was
brought up in Wallasey, and remembers occasionally attending healing services
at St Bridget’s in his youth. We were
married five years ago: our wedding service had a strong Jewish-Christian theme
to reflect my Jewish roots (in my mother’s family). We had the sort of problem many marrying
couples find, of an overly large guest list.
This we resolved by having three receptions!
I have three children from my first
marriage. My eldest daughter, Emily (21)
sat her finals in Geography at Oxford University (Keble College) in May. As you read this, she is in Canberra undertaking a summer project on
urban land use and flood risk at the university there. She is due to begin a Masters in Ecology and
Environmental Management at York University in October. Sophie (19) has just finished her first year
at St Andrew’s University, where she is studying Philosophy. She is very much looking forward to living in
a house next year with friends, although she will miss the lively social scene
of her current halls of residence. The
youngest, James (14) is already the tallest.
He is finishing year 9 at Birkenhead School, where he is especially keen on
drama, having been involved in various school productions.
To fill you in on something of my
background, I was born and brought up in central London.
I remember as a teenager agonising over what ‘A’ levels I should
do. School suggested I aimed for
Medicine, and so Sciences were a logical choice. Lacking any better idea, I followed that
suggestion. In due course I gained a
place at Manchester Medical School, which I took up after a gap year
spent studying fine art in Italy.
Over the subsequent years I specialised in Psychiatry and then in Child
and Adolescent Psychiatry. I joined the
Mersey Regional Psychiatry training scheme after my house jobs, and then
remained within Mersey Region throughout (working variously in Liverpool, Bootle, Wirral, Chester, Runcorn, Huyton,
Kirkby and also at Alder Hey, (where I worked with a
certain John Harrison!).
I moved to Wirral 21 years ago, when
my eldest daughter was just a few weeks’ old, and after return from maternity
leave I managed to persuade the medical powers that be to employ me as a
part-time SHO, and my part-time work continued from then until this
summer. While initially this was due to
childcare commitments, more recently it has been due to church
commitments. In 1998, my Child
Psychiatry training (protracted because of part-time work) was finally complete,
and I was being pushed in the direction of Consultant jobs. I felt strongly this would not be right for
me: indeed I realised looking back that each step of my career had been taken
with the hope that it would become more fulfilling, but now the prospect of
this job until retirement did not excite me, and so I resigned. Having wondered whether it might just be a
six-month break, I instead found the whole experience liberating. Soon after, though, my first marriage ended
in divorce, so I was alone with three children.
In order to juggle my commitments, and pay the bills, I completed a PGCE
and taught Psychology part-time at a Comprehensive school in Wallasey. I left this job at the end of May this year
in preparation for ordination.
Where was my relationship with God
through all this? Having been brought up
going regularly to church, and confirmed while a teenager, I ‘wandered’
spiritually when I first left home. When
my eldest was born I nonetheless sensed the importance of having her baptised,
and from that moment started to attend St Mary’s in Upton, and my faith began to grow. An important point for me was in 1989 when I
powerfully experienced my faith come to life through a Billy Graham mission,
something I am sure I will have an opportunity to explain more at some
point. From that point, my priorities
changed from a basically egocentric perspective (what do I want?), to
one where I seek to please God in all I do (what does God want?). This also led to my increasing involvement in
the church’s life.
In 1994 I began training for Reader
ministry. It was an eye-opener for me,
as I had never studied theology or anything like it before. I had previously read quite widely around
Psychiatry and Psychotherapy but I felt I had never been stretched as much as I
was with theology - suddenly I was reading about a subject that touched me not
only academically, but also spiritually!
A Bible verse which became very important to me then, and which has
remained valuable since, is Proverbs 3 v5: ‘Trust in the Lord with all your
heart and lean not on your own understanding’. However much we try to understand the world,
God knows so much more and we can also trust him far more than any
humanly-devised theory.
It was probably inevitable that after
completing the Reader training I would feel hungry for more theology, and so
studied part time at Chester University for a Masters in Theology (I finally
graduated in 2006). I was a Reader at St
Mary’s Upton for several years, until in 2004 Woodchurch
parish expressed a need of some assistance, so I moved my ministry to that
church. My role as Reader there has
been rather less in the last couple of years while I have been attending the
Northern Ordination Course, which I have found most stimulating, if exhausting
and time-consuming. It has been very
rewarding and fulfilling to follow where God seems to be leading, and I am very
much looking forward to what God has in store in the coming years for us all in
West
Kirby - trusting God with all our hearts, and not relying on our own
understanding.
Tina Upton
July 2008