Revd Sam Foster

A pioneering journey of faith

Ask Sam Foster whether she always wanted to be a priest and the 28-year-old needs no thinking time.

“No I didn’t!” she exclaims. “I started going to church when I was aged 14 - and initially that was to please my mum.”

As the years passed, though, she found herself more involved with her local church, and then she started to feel a call to ordination but, like many, “wanted to find opportunities to run away from it”.

Some push the calling to the back of their mind for years, but Sam responded sooner rather than later: “I tried to run away a bit longer and it just - the call got stronger and my life just began to go in a particular direction and it felt like the right time; and I can see now how God’s been using me at a young age and it was obviously the right time.”

This led Sam through the detailed process of selection to ordination training at Cranmer Hall in Durham.

“Because of the tradition that I was brought up in, which was fairly middle of the road and then Anglo-Catholic, I wanted something a bit different,” she recalls, adding that the other students, from a range of church backgrounds, taught her “a lot about Christianity and faith and church”.

A four-year curacy at St Oswald’s Church, Fulford, York, followed where Sam appreciated the mentoring of a “great training incumbent”, and the number of opportunities available to explore her calling.

“I’ve had the freedom to try different chaplaincies, so I was a police chaplain for two years,” she says. “I’ve been young vocations advisor, and at the moment [interviewed in February 2008] I’m helping out with some university chaplaincy so it’s been an excellent opportunity to minister to people in a variety of different settings, and I’ve learnt a lot and met so many great people.”

In the last year of her curacy, she considered becoming an RAF chaplain - but in the end her direction moved towards something completely different.

“It’s changed because now I’m going to be a pioneer minister in the Deanery of Scarborough in York Diocese,” she explains, appending: “I’ll be helping other churches to grow, to use fresh expressions and church planting, and just working with a variety of different churches within the deanery.”

This role holds fresh, exciting challenges: “At the same time it’s daunting as well - but it’s every time you step out in faith you realise you do things in God’s strength and not your own.”

You can hear this interview now by clicking here