(Janelle is a member of the Steering Committee and one of the FCG representatives on the Network for Pastoral, Spiritual, and Religious Care in Health)
Hello, I’m Rev Janelle Kingham, Lead Chaplain at George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust, a district general acute hospital in Northern Warwickshire. Let me begin by saying, I cannot imagine not being a hospital chaplain. But - to be honest, I had no real intentions of ever becoming a Chaplain, much less a Lead Chaplain. I left high school, fully intending to become a nurse, then a medic. I loved the idea of medicine and that it could help people when they needed it most. I started on that road.
As life never seems to keep us on a straight path, I left my intended undergraduate degree course in nursing after half a year and ended up via a winding road doing my undergraduate honours degree in theology at a university in Toronto, Canada, fully intending to become a Pentecostal pastor in the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada.
It was after I graduated, slightly disillusioned with church politics, that I came to the UK for just 10 months. I left the hustle and bustle of a large Canadian city and moved to the Midlands. I had no idea what would come next.
Those ten months turned into four and a half years of working for my local church in the Midlands. It was here that I reconciled my passion for full-time ministry and went through ordination with the Assemblies of God Great Britain. During those years I met my husband, and we settled. Again, the winding road took a turn I never anticipated – redundancies were impending, I knew in my heart God was pushing me into something new.
Waiting for what felt like no-man’s land, a random conversation with a family member ended me up in a large acute hospital in Coventry for three and a half hours, where I experienced what hospital chaplaincy was; I did a few visits with the then Lead Chaplain and then he was called to ITU. He looked at me and said, “Are you up for this?” and I blindly said, “Sure. Let’s go.” I didn’t tell him I wasn’t really a fan of hospitals – in any way, shape, or form. This afternoon was a one-off punt.
I spent the next two hours with a family in ITU as the mother and wife passed into eternity, and experienced being the space-holding, compassionate humanity that is chaplaincy. Somehow, and I know this to be God now, this was part of helping a father and his two sons begin to reconcile all that had just happened and the new life that lay before them.
As I walked out of that ITU, I can still remember the exact tile I was standing on when I felt God speak to me and say, “This is where I want you now.” So, I kept going back. First as a volunteer, then as an employee when the opportunity arose. It was after seven and a half years at that Trust that I moved to my current Trust and continue to feel the call of God to sit in the mud of life with people and continue taking the ‘punt’ that God will always show up when I need Him most. And you know what? He always does. I suspect He always will.
