Getting to know..... Adrian Whalley

Adrian Whalley spends five months of each year living in Nice with his husband Daniel and during his time here he is an active member of our community. You may have heard him speaking recently about his fundraising efforts in the Nice marathon or seen him singing in our ‘pop-up’ choir. Gerard Jordan got together with Adrian to hear more about his experience of Holy Trinity and about his life  as a Christian.

Adrian’s life as Christian

Adrian has always been a regular churchgoer. His local church community in northwest England where he grew up and the friends that he made there, were a central part of his early life. He remembers fondly the weekly church group where he could talk about the bible, the lessons that we can learn from it and how it relates to our daily life. He sang in the church choir from an early age and later even joined the bellringing team!

When he moved to a senior school in Liverpool, Adrian became a member of its Christian Union (which he went on to chair) and he led Saturday morning church services organised by the pupils. It was at this school that Adrian also developed his passion for athletics and cross-country running, loving the sense of escape and freedom that it gave him (whatever the weather!): “running for me is a time for thinking and freedom ....”.  Adrian’s years at university however, became for him a  time of increasing self-questioning, and particularly about how to be a  gay Christian; he explains “it  was difficult to know how to put being gay together with Christian learning, as in the  Bible there did not seem to be gay people .... ”.

Adrian subsequently moved to London to begin working as a solicitor and there he started to attend a well-known Anglican Evangelical church called ‘All Souls’ in Langham Place near Oxford Street. This church was very active; it offered a wide range of groups and was very popular with young professionals, so he was initially very impressed by the dynamism and energy of the community there. However, he recalls how one Sunday a very well-known preacher called John Stott delivered a derogatory sermon about homosexuality which upset him greatly. “I felt as if a door had been slammed in my face and that I didn’t want to go back to All Souls again” Adrian recalls  “so I spoke first with a friend from there who just told me I should ‘tow the line’ and then spoke with several of the curates, but my  conversations with them did not get anywhere either.”  I ask Adrian whether this had led him to doubt himself or his faith and he explains that despite this upsetting experience he still felt strong in his convictions about his faith and himself. “I knew God had made me like this and must have had a purpose. Although I had wondered why God had made me like this, I knew it was  for me  to discover what this purpose is”  and even though in the ensuing years church provided no clear answer for Adrian, he continued to be a regular churchgoer and his faith remained strong.

Later on, Adrian settled in Leicestershire in England and it was there that he first felt called to become an Anglican ‘Lay Reader’. He found a church near Loughborough where the Vicar supported him to undertake the relevant training. However, a change in career then led Adrian to work as a fundraiser for Christian Aid in Hertfordshire, based at the Anglican diocesan office at St Albans near London, so  he completed the training in Hertfordshire and was then ‘licensed’ by an interim bishop in Leicestershire in 2015. One’s licensing by an Anglican Bishop as a Lay Reader has to be reviewed every three years and involves reporting any change in your circumstances, so in 2018 as part of this review Adrian reported that he had recently married Daniel. A new Bishop had by then arrived in Leicester and asked Adrian to come to a meeting where the Bishop told him that he would have to look into the matter further.

Adrian recalls “I heard nothing more until four months later when I received an email from the Bishop, informing me that he couldn’t re-license me as a Lay Reader owing to his ‘understanding of scripture and tradition and the commonly understood purpose of marriage within our society’. Because I felt angry both about how I was informed and reasons for the decision, I decided to speak with the Dean of St Alban’s Cathedral who had been living openly in a same-sex relationship for many years and who introduced me to a book he had written on Christian same-sex partnerships called ‘Permanent, Faithful, Stable’.  Adrian decided to send a copy of this book to the Bishop in Leicester but received no reply. However, when Adrian subsequently moved to a different local Anglican church he talked with the vicar there about what had  happened and was delighted when the Vicar told him that although the Bishop would not License Adrian, he as his vicar could appoint him to be a Lay Reader in that church; so, since then Adrian has been able to continue assisting as a Lay Reader in his local church in Leicestershire.

Coming to Nice and Holy Trinity

Adrian would never have ended up spending part of each year in Nice had he not met and married Daniel, a Frenchman who grew in the Var a couple of hours from Nice.  Because Daniel is a practising Buddhist they had a Buddhist wedding ceremony in 2018 at the UK headquarters of SGI, a lay-Buddhist society: “it was a very multi-cultural celebration as there were eighteen different nationalities present!” he recalls.

Adrian first came to Nice at the end of 2020, as Daniel had previously thought about having somewhere here for when he retired. It was less than a year later that they took possession of their new apartment and it was only then that Adrian discovered Holy Trinity by chance, when walking along the Rue de la Buffa; so he came along the following Sunday and met Father Peter and other members of our congregation. As a regular churchgoer Adrian is delighted to  have found a friendly Anglican community where he can continue to attend services when not in England. “It is great to see how our church here has flourished in the past few years” he says. “I feel at home here and find it to be a wonderful place of learning. I love Jeremy’s preaching and the message that he gives, and I have always particularly valued being part of a church where the music is important.”  

Because he is only in Nice for part of the year he knows there are limits to the extent that he can get involved here; nevertheless, he has over the past few years run an online Lent study group for Holy Trinity and St Hughs and also helped get our Green Group started. Adrian’s interest in environmental issues developed during his seven years working for Christian Aid in Hertfordshire for whom he did many talks linking issues such as Climate Change with the scriptures, and where he also led a Green Group at a local church. It was to raise money for Green Group projects such as eco-friendly lighting that Adrian ran the Nice Marathon last November: (it is not too late to donate to this, so if you wish to then click on the Make a Donation button on the Holy Trinity website and add a note to say it is for Adrian’s efforts).

Wherever Adrian has been in life, church has remained a central part of his life, despite the experiences he has had. He reflects .....“ I cannot understand the Anglican position around gay issues. There is a contradiction I do not understand between the church’s teaching about Love and the attitudes of some Bishops. And so I continue to try and work out how to reconcile Faith with Life and with who I am.”