"Derek Welsman was recently ordained - and one of his first dates in his clerical diary was to officiate at the marriage of his father, Geoffrey.
"It’s a very strange experience. I suppose I approach it on a professional level - I thought get the job done - but I have to make sure it’s legally done…at the same time, enjoy the experience. I don’t think many clergymen would have the opportunity to marry their father." says Derek.
This was the culmination of quite a journey for Derek. He became a Christian when he was 15 years old, "It didn’t seem to come from anywhere.. I’d been aware of something bigger for quite a while. It was a particularly difficult time then - I was dealing with bullying …" Although 6ft 6", Derek was extremely skinny and he felt the fact that he stuck out like a sore thumb physically,made things worse, "There was no place to run, it can be a very depressing and lonely place to be. Then I found in God, someone who seemed to take a lot of that away from me."
Geoffrey doesn’t share his son’s faith, but he goes go to church now, "to see his son in action," as it were. Geoffrey describes his late wife as religious in her own way, but felt the modern church wasn’t to her liking. Geoffrey has no truck with this, "I was forced to go to Sunday school twice a day when I was young and that put me off! He’s still my boy, though, he hasn’t changed. He’ll still have a joke and a drink with you. This idea people get of priests as somebody completely different is false, completely false…"
Derek felt his mother was deeply religious, but didn’t express her faith by going to church. The week before Derek began his studies to become a priest, his mother became ill with a brain tumour and died shortly after it was diagnosed, "There’s so much you want to say,and most important is to reassure them that you love them. I could say that, but within two minutes she’d forgotten it - it was very difficult."
But Geoffrey has now found happiness again with Betty - which is where Derek comes in to tie the nuptial knot. "We met in the crematorium," says Geoffrey, "we were both doing the flowers for our respective partners. I was sitting have 5 minutes thinking time, and Betty came by crying her eyes out, and I said to her, ‘It doesn’t get any easier, does it?" As Betty and Geoffrey chatted, they discovered that Derek had just been appointed curate to Betty’s church. And when Derek baptised his own daughter, Abigail, they met in church again. One thing led to another and overall, religion has played quite a part in the life of a non-religious family.
