An Introduction from Fr. Paul

Hello! Thank you for having a look at our website. We hope you're finding it useful and informative. Please do email us if you have any suggestions on how we might improve it.

This is just a short piece by way of introduction. My name is Paul Cowan, and I was appointed Team Vicar of St George's, Wash Common in September 2006. I am married to Hannah, and we have two young boys, Samuel and Joel, both of whom are pupils at Falkland School next door (but we still succeed in sometimes arriving late in the morning! :-).

Fr. Paul Cowan

I've been in one form of full-time Christian ministry or another since about 1990. Prior to St George's I did a one-year placement to Oxford Diocese's link diocese of Kimberley & Kuruman, South Africa. Before that I was the curate at All Saints', Wokingham, and before that trained for ordination at Ripon College Cuddesdon. And, in what now seems the distant past, Hannah and I both worked in Tower Hamlets, East London, for an independent ecumenical Christian charity that provided an intensive residential alcohol and drug therapy program for homeless men (Charis). We are both qualified counsellors and spent nine years facilitating group therapy and one-to-one counselling. We met through work (I do enjoy telling people that we met when we were both in rehab!), and had been working in the same small office for three years before we started going out together (as Hannah is keen to tell people, I was a bit slow on the uptake!). And further into the dim and distant past, I managed a halfway house in central London for young homeless people

St George's is a great church with a lively, fun and committed Christian community; if you live in the area or are passing by, do visit us. I'm confident that you'd receive a warm welcome.

God bless,
Paul
Rev. Paul Cowan