Betsy Everett meets a church couple who have found the call to serve God irresistable and who serve together

IAN Robinson – one-time businessman, engineer, youth rugby international – never dreamt of being a priest. When he was finally persuaded to give it a go, he never dreamt he would get through the rigorous Church of England selection process. When he did, he never dreamt he’d be a parish priest, let alone a paid one.

But if there was a dream beyond even his wildest ones, it was that the day might dawn when he could to say to his wife: “I’m the boss.”

For Linda Robinson is a woman with a mind so much of her own that at 17 she was barred from A-level English classes for a whole term for arguing. (She still got top marks). Recently ordained deacon in the Church of England, she is many things, including retired head of a 1,500-student secondary school in industrial Lancashire, but certainly nobody’s idea of an obedient wife.

“Can you capture a raised eyebrow in print?” she asks, as Ian announces, with a hint of mischief and a degree of pride, that he’s in charge. For the three-year duration of her training (if all goes to plan she will be priested next June) Linda, who has just submitted her doctorate thesis for examination, will act as his curate in Bedale, where for the past two years he has been Rector.

The statistics tell their own story: four churches in the benefice – St Gregory’s, Bedale, St Mary the Virgin, Thornton Watlass, St John the Baptist, Leeming, and the Mission Church, Burrill – covering a variety of church practice and a wide geographical area, a worshipping community of 175, plus 50 home communions a week, a relatively elderly congregation to be ministered to, five schools to engage with and a church that, nationally, has excelled in tearing itself apart, not least over the role of the women in its midst.

“I had no illusions about being a priest, especially as I was married to one and knew the demands it made. But when God gets hold of you there’s an irresistible force at work,” says Linda. It’s a good job there was: until the Saturday before her ordination in Ripon Cathedral she was still not sure she would go through with it.

“Once it happened I knew it was going to be all right. It feels like a coming together of my lifelong spiritual experience and my professional, practical experience. A kind of drawing together of all the threads of my life,” she says.

Ian began his ministry in 2008 as a non-stipendiary priest in Askrigg, under the guidance and supervision of the Reverend Ann Chapman who, along with the parishioners, saw Linda not so much as the curate’s wife – though she was – but as a valuable part of the team: vicar, curate, congregation and community.

It wasn’t long before the question arose: had Linda herself ever considered ordination? Encouraged by Ann, friends, and the diocese, she entered the process of selection for ordination. But there was a problem: in 2009 Linda had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and her neurologist had advised her to give up her demanding job as an educational consultant.

“I then had to tell him I was considering ordination. He was very supportive. But it was, and is, crackers. It was unexpected, it’s crazy, it doesn’t make sense. But I believe I will find my ministry precisely through not making sense. The Parkinson’s is certainly teaching me about being a much more vulnerable human being.”

Though neither is starry-eyed about the future of the church, or their role as ministers within it, their enthusiasm is boundless: an acre of impenetrable woodland adjoining the rectory garden is being transformed into a sculpture trail, with carved benches, story-telling areas, nooks and crannies hacked out of the trees. Ian has done a lot of the clearing himself, anxious that the space be available to the community.

Each Saturday there’s a make-and-bake session for families, with craft activities and simple worship linked to the seasons of the church’s year. The produce is then used as part of the service on the Sunday. For advent there’ll be an “angel trail” around Bedale, involving the schools, businesses, families, the town council, Catholics, Methodists, Anglicans and those who claim no allegiance at all to organised religion.

It’s a new model of the church reaching out to, and being engaged with, the community, rather than the old one of inviting people in to share exclusive, eucharistic worship.

Next year this remarkably ordinary, inspiringly extraordinary, couple will celebrate 40 years of marriage

“On the eve of our anniversary Linda, as a priest, will take her first wedding,” says Ian. And yes, he’s proud all right. Of her.