1. Home
  2. News & events
  3. News
  4. Weekly intercessions – Steve’s Spanish souvenir

Weekly intercessions – Steve’s Spanish souvenir

Date:
Mon 17th July 2023

When the Revd Steve Foster returned to a cooler way of life on the North Yorkshire coast after two years as Anglican Chaplain to the seven congregations of the Costa Blanca in the Diocese of Europe, he was surprised to start receiving forwarded emails from around the globe thanking him for a valuable resource he thought he’d left behind in the Spanish sunshine.

Steve’s appointment followed what he describes as “A rather pleasant holiday in Tenerife” with his wife, Ruth, in 2012, during which he bumped into a former colleague in the Howden Team Ministry, the Revd Mike Smith. Mike explained how Chaplaincies in the Diocese of Europe work, and Steve and Ruth found their holiday expanded to a ministry lasting two years.

Senior Chaplain the Revd Peter Edwards asked Steve to develop an idea for Intercessions at each Sunday Eucharist that could be led by lay members of the congregation.

“He wondered if for a short time I would write prayers following the Common Worship headings and post these on the Chaplaincy Website,” explains Steve, “the idea being that anyone unfamiliar with leading Intercessions would be able to log onto the website and find something already prepared for the following Sunday, and that hopefully after a while the Prayer Volunteers would be able to write or find their own.”

Steve readily agreed, and began to post some prayers, based on the Lectionary Readings for the Day and including local or world situations, those in need of prayer and the deceased. The idea soon led to all seven churches having a decent sized rota of Intercessors, many of whom said that Steve’s weekly postings were helpful and encouraging.

Steve continued writing the prayers for the next two years until he and Ruth moved back to Robin Hood’s Bay just after Easter 2016, but he agreed to continue with the weekly prayers until there was an archive of all three liturgical years, A B and C.

And then emails began to arrive from all over the world thanking the Anglican Chaplaincy of the Costa Blanca for the very useful intercessions, which seemed to be just the job when having to step into the ‘Intercessions Breach’ at the last minute, or simply to lighten the load of a regular commitment to leading prayers in church on Sunday.

Steve recalls, “I was once recognised when Ruth and I were on Holiday in Cyprus and went to the Anglican Church, Ayia Kyriaki (by St Paul's Pillar) by the Churchwarden who was using our prayers in the service. She had seen my picture on the Costa Blanca website!”

There were 17,000 ‘visits’ to the Costa Blanca Chaplaincy website in April 2023, with the majority being on the ‘Prayers for Sunday’ page and ‘The Archived Years’.

“Sadly Father Peter died in 2018 but by then the success of his idea was clear,” says Steve. “All of the seven Churches in Costa Blanca now have Lay-Led Intercessions and many others worldwide are making good use of our efforts.”