Jake and Hannah begin coastal 20s to 40s job share

Scarborough has just gained two new 20s to 40s Multiply ministers in a unique, half-and-half, job-share. The Revds Jake and Hannah Madin, who married a year ago in York will be bringing their partnership into their ministry after being jointly appointed to serve at St Mary’s with Holy Apostles, Scarborough as 20s to 40s ministers.

It’s the first such ministerial ‘job-share’ in the Diocese of York and the innovations don’t stop there. At their joint licensing service, led by the Bishop of Hull, the Rt Revd Alison White, Jake and Hannah were presented with a variety of unusual symbolic gifts including a balloon filled with glitter, a pan, and a picture of their wedding in October 2018.

“We had chosen some of the gifts ourselves,” explained Hannah. “The balloon represents Archbishop John Sentamu’s words that the church needs ‘less meetings and more parties’, the pan represents hospitality, something we feel is important to mission, and the wedding picture (courtesy Alice Cunliffe Photography) that we will be ministering as a couple.”

Before moving to the coast, Jake (27) and Hannah (29) were curates in York – Hannah at St Paul’s Church Holgate and Jake at St Hilda’s, Tang Hall. But they met several years ago as trainee ordinands studying at Cranmer Hall in Durham, and for two years had to conduct a long distance relationship when Jake started his first curacy in Walsall, back in his home diocese of Lichfield.

Both are excited about their new ministry although as Jacob confesses he wasn’t quite as keen initially. “The 20 to 40s ministry appealed much more to Hannah than it did me. Hannah was in a pool of people who took part in a discernment process while I was going to take up another role.”

“But after a year of doing separate curacies in the same place,” adds Hannah, “it just felt sad that we were going our separate ways all the time and unable to invest in the same communities. So we started talking about the idea of working together.”

The idea was made possible when St Mary’s with Holy Apostles in Scarborough was identified as one of the locations for a 20s to 40s initiative. “There is a real mix here at St Mary’s” says Jake. “The church here is quite like the church I was at in Walsall in lots of ways. It has lots of civic responsibilities in the town, there are lots of connections they have with 20s to 40s with lots of baptisms and weddings, and it also quite an impoverished area with a lot of overlap to ‘People in Poverty’ ministry. That’s what brought me round in my thinking – that in this particular context with this particular church we could see that both our gifts could be complimentary.”