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| Nationality | British | ||||||||||||||
| Born | 27 November 1927 | ||||||||||||||
| Died | 8 May 2017 (aged 89) | ||||||||||||||
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Rev. Nicolas David Stacey (27 November 1927 – 8 May 2017) was a priest of the Church of England and social activist. He was Rector of Woolwich in the 1960s, and Director of Social Services for Kent County Council from 1974 to 1985.
Nick Stacey was born 27 November 1927. He was educated at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and saw service on HMS Anson in the last months of the Second World War. He participated in the liberation of Hong Kong, and witnessed the devastation of Hiroshima shortly after VJ Day. He resigned his commission in the Navy to read Modern History at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and then trained for the priesthood at Cuddesdon Theological College. During this time he represented his service, university and country in athletics, being president of the Oxford University Athletics Club, and participated in the British Empire Games (1950), and the 1952 Olympic Games. He was a semi-finalist in the 200 metres and a finalist in the 4×400 metres relay.
Ordained in 1953 he served his title at St Mark's, Portsea, Portsmouth, under Christopher Pepys, later Bishop of Buckingham. In 1958 he moved to be Domestic Chaplain (personal assistant) to the Bishop of Birmingham, Dr Leonard Wilson. It was during his time in Birmingham that he began to receive national attention, founding and editing a tabloid church newspaper, the Birmingham Christian News, which gained a reputation for comparatively racy journalism and a sensationalist approach to church news. This was a deliberate policy on Stacey's part, and became characteristic of his ministry. He said "We want to be a platform for the prophetic voices of the country. We want to show that the Christian faith is relevant to twentieth-century living and that the Church is concerned with all the activities of man". [1]
In 1960 he was invited by Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark, to become rector of Woolwich. He remained there for eight years. When he arrived in Woolwich he found three Church of England churches with small and unrepresentative congregations. The seemingly intractable problems of poor social housing and the resistance of the working class to the established church meant that religious observance in Woolwich was declining faster than in the rest of the country. Stacey implemented a radical programme. He recruited a large multi-talented and multi-denominational team of ministers. He closed one of the three churches, and radically reordered the eighteenth-century parish church of St Mary Magdalen. The galleries and side aisles were enclosed and offices, meeting rooms, and counselling rooms were created. A discothèque was built in the crypt, and the church's youth club was so successful that local probation officers fought to get their clients accepted as members. A coffee bar was opened in the gallery. Within four years 1500 people a week were passing through the church doors.
Stacey was not without his detractors. His abrupt style and ability to garner publicity for his project alienated some of his fellow clergy in the diocese:
But Stacey didn't neglect the traditional model of parochial ministry. An intensive parish visiting programme was begun, with the large clergy team visiting attempting to visit every household in the parish systematically. An adaptation of the Prayer Book baptism service was devised in an attempt to be more welcoming. Stacey fostered links with the civic bodies of the area, and encouraged links with the Royal Arsenal.
Despite all this effort, after four years Stacey judged the project to have been a failure. Regular worshippers had increased from fifty to one hundred, but most of these did not live in the parish. Stacey's reaction was characteristic. He wrote two articles for The Observer in December 1964 and May 1965. In the articles he described his "mission's failure" and recommendations for the survival of the Church of England. The articles caused a storm of publicity, and were not at all well received. Bryan Wilson, the eminent sociologist of religion, described the latter article as not "how the Church could survive" but rather "how the Church might surrender". [3] Eric Mascall called Stacey a "gimmick manqué".
Undeterred, Stacey restructured his ministry team. Most of the clergy sought secular employment, working in the parish in their spare time and at weekends. Stacey himself earned most of his income through journalism. However, after another three years he realised that he was ready for a change from Woolwich parish, and, realising that the Church was unlikely to offer him another post, he began to seek secular employment.
In 1968 Stacey was appointed Deputy Director of Oxfam, a job he stayed in for only 2 years. He felt that Oxfam was well placed to do what Bob Geldof attempted 30 years later - lead a national campaign to Make Poverty History. This would have involved educating the public on the enormity and complexity of relieving poverty in the Third World which could only be done by massive British government aid. Oxfam's trustees were afraid it would lose its charitable status and Stacey resigned. As in the Church he was ahead of his time.
Stacey's next move was to become in 1971 the first Director of Social Services for the 300,000-strong population of the London Borough of Ealing. Social Service departments had been created as a result of the Seebohm report which brought together in one local government department children's and young people's services, the mentally and physically handicapped, the mentally ill and elderly to create a 'cradle to grave' caring service.
It was a controversial appointment because Stacey was neither a social worker nor a local government officer. In spite of this three years later he was appointed to be Kent's Director of Social Services, one of the three largest departments in the country, with 6,000 staff caring for 50,000 clients serving a population of 1.5 million. The publication 'A Study in Leadership: Nick Stacey and Kent Social Services' written by Don Brand, published in January 2009, explains, 'Stacey inherited a department needing extensive modernisation in an authority with little appetite for change. Seen from outside, Kent was a dead-beat place. It wasn't somewhere you went to work, it wasn't cutting edge....the place was absolutely dire and in many ways it was quite brave of Nick to go there.' By the time Stacey left in 1985 he had transformed Kent into one of the leading departments in the country with a national reputation for imaginative innovation and a strong influence on government policy.
He was responsible for pioneering from scratch two projects which were to become national government policy. The first was to introduce Professional Fostering for delinquent and troubled teenagers. Hitherto pre-puberty children in care were mainly fostered while teenagers were placed in institutions. Stacey was convinced that putting a lot of unloved, insecure, often delinquent and troubled teenagers together exacerbated their problems while the institutionsto which they were sent became springboards for borstal and prison.
Carefully selected and well supported professional foster parents were paid a fee so that if a married couple fostered two youngsters they would earn for a very demanding job the equivalent of a teacher's annual salary. Foster care fees cost about half what it costs to keep a youngster in an institution. Professional Fostering was a great success and was introduced nationwide.
The second scheme, monitored from the start by the University of Kent, was Community Care for the Elderly. Instead of sending old people unable to care for themselves into old people's homes, each old person was individually assessed to see what services they would require in order to stay in their own homes. A package of care tailored to each old person's particular needs - from getting them up in the morning to putting them to bed at night and providing a daily meal - was provided by social work staff. Very often it was cheaper than the cost of care in an old people's home.
His autobiography, Who Cares, written shortly after he left the stipendiary ministry, is a trenchant and honest description of his experiences in the Church of England. Although out of print, it is occasionally available through second-hand book dealers, and is essential reading for historians of the Church of England in the twentieth century.
The Woolwich Project was probably the best last chance for a traditional, intensive model of parochial ministry. Much of what Stacey pioneered has become commonplace in the Church of England (for example, his fostering of ecumenical teams and shared premises), and some of his more radical proposals (such as nine out of ten clergy working in non-stipendiary ministry) may yet be required by the Church.
Summing up in his booklet on Nick Stacey's role in Social Services Don Brand says: 'Leading and managing social services requires men and women of the highest calibre with vision, intelligence and judgement. His success shows how imaginative leadership can overcome the constraints of bureaucracy.' Stacey showed the way for charismatic and dedicated people to follow in a demanding and fulfilling job.
Stacey claims his work as a Director of Social Services gave him a greater opportunity of Building the Kingdom of God than he would have had if he had stayed in the ecclesiastical structures. He said: 'I accept that I have failed to have much influence on the Church but I am grateful to God to have had an opportunity to have had some influence in what has often been described as the Secular Church.'
In 2005 he was awarded the Cross of St Augustine, given personally by the Archbishop of Canterbury "for outstanding service within the Church of England whether centrally or in the dioceses, or the Anglican Communion as a whole, and to those who have contributed to advancing relations between the various Christian communions and churches." [4]
In 2006 Stacey was interviewed as part of the British Library's oral history series, National Life Stories, under the title "Pioneers of Charity and Social Welfare". [5] In the interview about his role in the development of Social Care in Britain, Stacey revealed that during his time as Director of Social Services he did not uncover abuse that warranted referral to the police. A few weeks after Stacey died in 2017 the BBC's Religious Affairs correspondent, Callum May, wrote an article on the BBC website that linked those remarks with Kendall House, a Church of England-run children's home in Gravesend where vulnerable girls were routinely medicated, restrained and abused. Among the residents was campaigner Teresa Cooper, whose persistence across three decades led to the Kendall House review, which finally brought the full story of abuse to light. The independent review's 2016 report [6] found the institution to have inadequate governance and oversight, made 19 recommendations for the Dioceses of Canterbury and Rochester, and concluded that they should apologise to the women who had suffered abuse. The BBC article implied that Stacey, a Church of England parish priest in the 1960s, oversaw Kendall House and must have known of the abuse and failed to report it.
A complaint to the BBC was upheld and the BBC accepted that as a Church of England home Kendall House was not overseen by Stacey, that he was not responsible for Kendall House and that it was not "unavoidable that Stacey would have known what was going on but failed to report it". The Church Times, which also ran the story, published letters clarifying the mistake. The revelations of abuse at Kendall House served to underline the importance of Stacey's pioneering role in the introduction of Professional Fostering. Professional Fostering removed vulnerable children from institutions such as Kendall House and placed them in family homes. The initiative was subsequently introduced by Social Services throughout the UK.
Documents held on Kendall House show Rev. Stacey was directly involved there and had direct contact with the acting GP and social workers involved with Kendall House.
Stacey's daughter Dame Mary Stacey was appointed a High Court judge in 2020. [7]
The Church of England is the established Christian church in England. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain by the 3rd century and to the 6th-century Gregorian mission to Kent led by Augustine of Canterbury. Its adherents are called Anglicans.
A parish is a territorial entity in many Christian denominations, constituting a division within a diocese. A parish is under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of a priest, often termed a parish priest, who might be assisted by one or more curates, and who operates from a parish church. Historically, a parish often covered the same geographical area as a manor. Its association with the parish church remains paramount.
A curate is a person who is invested with the care or cure of souls of a parish. In this sense, curate means a parish priest; but in English-speaking countries the term curate is commonly used to describe clergy who are assistants to the parish priest. The duties or office of a curate are called a curacy.
A pastoral council is a consultative body in dioceses and parishes of the Catholic Church that serves to advise the parish priest or bishop about pastoral issues. The council's main purpose is to investigate, reflect and reach conclusions about pastoral matters to recommend to the parish priest or bishop as appropriate.
A parochial school is a private primary or secondary school affiliated with a religious organization, and whose curriculum includes general religious education in addition to secular subjects, such as science, mathematics and language arts. The word parochial comes from the same root as "parish", and parochial schools were originally the educational wing of the local parish church. Christian parochial schools are called "church schools" or "Christian schools."
In Christianity, a minister is a person authorised by a church or other religious organization to perform functions such as teaching of beliefs; leading services such as weddings, baptisms or funerals; or otherwise providing spiritual guidance to the community. The term is taken from Latin minister. In some church traditions the term is usually used for people who have been ordained, but in other traditions it can also be used for non-ordained.
A parochial church council (PCC) is the executive committee of a Church of England parish and consists of clergy and churchwardens of the parish, together with representatives of the laity. It has its origins in the vestry committee, which looked after both religious and secular matters in a parish. It is a corporate charitable body.
The Archdiocese of Washington is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory, or archdiocese, of the Catholic Church for the District of Columbia and several Maryland counties in the United States.
A vestry was a committee for the local secular and ecclesiastical government of a parish in England, Wales and some English colonies, which originally met in the vestry or sacristy of the parish church, and consequently became known colloquially as the "vestry". At their height, the vestries were the only form of local government in many places and spent nearly one-fifth of the budget of the British government. They were stripped of their secular functions in 1894 and were abolished in 1921.
In English ecclesiastical law, the term incumbent refers to the holder of a Church of England parochial charge or benefice. The term "benefice" originally denoted a grant of land for life in return for services. In church law, the duties were spiritual ("spiritualities") and some form of assets to generate revenue were permanently linked to the duties to ensure the support of the office holder. Historically, once in possession of the benefice, the holder had lifelong tenure unless he failed to provide the required minimum of spiritual services or committed a moral offence. With the passing of the "Pastoral Measure 1968" and subsequent legislation, this no longer applies, and many ancient benefices have been joined into a single new one.
The Anglican ministry is both the leadership and agency of Christian service in the Anglican Communion. Ministry commonly refers to the office of ordained clergy: the threefold order of bishops, priests and deacons. More accurately, Anglican ministry includes many laypeople who devote themselves to the ministry of the church, either individually or in lower/assisting offices such as lector, acolyte, sub-deacon, Eucharistic minister, cantor, musicians, parish secretary or assistant, warden, vestry member, etc. Ultimately, all baptized members of the church are considered to partake in the ministry of the Body of Christ.
Perpetual curate was a class of resident parish priest or incumbent curate within the United Church of England and Ireland. The term is found in common use mainly during the first half of the 19th century. The legal status of perpetual curate originated as an administrative anomaly in the 16th century. Unlike ancient rectories and vicarages, perpetual curacies were supported by a cash stipend, usually maintained by an endowment fund, and had no ancient right to income from tithe or glebe.
In the Catholic Church, a parish is a stable community of the faithful within a particular church, whose pastoral care has been entrusted to a parish priest, under the authority of the diocesan bishop. It is the lowest ecclesiastical subdivision in the Catholic episcopal polity, and the primary constituent unit of a diocese or eparchy. Parishes are extant in both the Latin and Eastern Catholic Churches. In the 1983 Code of Canon Law, parishes are constituted under cc. 515–552, entitled "Parishes, Pastors, and Parochial Vicars."
Joseph Robert Cistone was an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who served as the sixth bishop of the Diocese of Saginaw in Michigan from 2009 to until his death in 2018.
St Mary Magdalene Woolwich is an 18th-century Anglican church dedicated to St Mary Magdalene in Woolwich, southeast London, England.
Trevor Randall Beeson was a British Anglican clergyman who was Dean of Winchester in the last two decades of the 20th century. He was also a writer, authoring numerous books and working as an ecclesiastical obituarist.
Teresa Cooper is a British author, speaker, and children's rights campaigner against family injustice and child abuse.
Vicar is a title given to certain parish priests in the Church of England and other Anglican churches. It has played a significant role in Anglican church organisation in ways that are different from other Christian denominations. The title is very old and arises from the medieval arrangement where priests were appointed either by a secular lord, by a bishop or by a religious foundation. Historically, but no longer, vicars share a benefice with a rector to whom the great tithes were paid. Vicar derives from the Latin vicarius meaning a substitute.
The parish with its parish church(es) is the basic territorial unit of the Church of England. The parish has its roots in the Roman Catholic Church and survived the English Reformation largely untouched. Each is within one of 42 dioceses: divided between the thirty of the Canterbury and the twelve of that of York. There are around 12,500 Church of England parishes. Historically, in England and Wales, the parish was the principal unit of local administration for both church and civil purposes; that changed in the 19th century when separate civil parishes were established. Many Church of England parishes still align, fully or in part, with civil parishes boundaries.
Jeffrey Joseph Walsh is an American prelate of the Catholic Church who serves as the sixth bishop of the Diocese of Gaylord in Michigan.
The Rev Nicolas Stacey obituary The Reverend Nicolas Stacey, reform-minded Anglican – obituary Rev Nicolas Stacey
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