Chaplaincy News
In September, a new meeting and prayer space will be made available for the work of our Chaplaincy. The Tinling Room will serve as a place for prayer and quiet reflection for pupils and staff.
Mr Hammersley (Chaplain) will also be introducing The Maynard Society which will give interested pupils an opportunity to pray for others, talk about the Christian Faith and to ask deep questions about God and the Christian Good news.
The Tinling Room and Maynard Society are named after two Old Lerpoolians (OLs) who quite without knowing it were instrumental in beginning a Student Christian organisation which spread around the world and has impacted many thousands, if not millions of people.
In his first year at school in the 1850s, Alfred Martin Maynard made a close friend in James Tinling. They both shared a sincere and deeply held Christian faith.
One day, JS Howson, the Principal at the time, found the two boys in a shady corner of the school Hall. He demanded to know what they were doing. They explained that they had met to pray for their friends. Howson’s response was ‘go there as often as you will for that purpose’. One of their friends appreciated their efforts in prayer, and recalled years later, ‘how much we owed in the way of good example to these two’.
Both Alfred and James went up to Cambridge University, where they sought permission for a daily prayer meeting to which any member of the university would be welcome. On 24 November 1862 Alfred Maynard led the first daily prayer meeting at the university and the practice was continued by successive generations of Cambridge students. In 1876 the group became the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union. Over the following decades this model was replicated in Universities across the country (UCCF – Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship), and eventually the world becoming the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) in 1947. Both these organisations are still active today and many Christians, under God, owe their conversion and maturation of their faith to the work of these fellowships.
Both Tinling and Maynard went on to ordination as ministers in the church. Alfred Maynard became vicar of Wembley, and later vicar of Totland Bay in the Isle of Wight. He retired to the Isle of White where in 1918 he died. James Tinling was ordained into the congregational ministry in 1875; he worked in Finchley and then the City Road until his retirement in 1898, when he moved to Ealing. There he lived until 1933 when he died at the age of 91.
Mr P Hammersley