Diocesan News
New TCD Chaplain, The Revd Steve Brunn, is Formally Introduced
The Revd Steve Brunn has been inducted as the new Church of Ireland Chaplain at Trinity College, Dublin. Steve, who has been in post since January, was formally introduced by Archbishop Michael Jackson during Evensong in the College Chapel. The service was sung by the Chapel Choir and the Anglican Bishop of Spain, the Rt Revd Carlos López–Lozano and the Anglican Bishop of Lusitania (Portugal), the Right Revd José Jorge de Pina Cabral, who were visiting as part of the 800th anniversary celebrations, were also present.
The Archbishop preached at the service and said that many people had already come into contact with Steve. He said they had found him to be a person of compassion and commitment and paid tribute to his contribution to the life of the Chapel and the role it has and always will need to play in order to develop organically in the life of this College.
He suggested that contemporary Ireland and intellectual life were often barren ground for confident belief systems. “As a consequence, anyone who believes in God is encouraged and expected to believe tentatively, almost apologetically instead,” he said. “This type of attitude is now par for the course for people whose public work religion is; it has become an imposed expectation; it is difficult and harmful. It is genuinely as of nothing compared with the active degradation, destruction and death of People of Faith across vast tracts of the inhabited world of which we know nothing except through our iPhones and TV screens.”
He continued that open belief was often difficult for students and staff who witnessed to their faith in God in overwhelmingly uncomprehending and often negative environments. “In my own life and work, I have had the opportunity to be chaplain in a number of colleges. There is a tough tenacity about religion, about religious expression and about the religious voice in universities. Try as they might, such places find it very hard indeed to put religion out with the bin on a Sunday night in the hope that it will not return. This, as much as anything else, is because those who enter by The Front Gate of Trinity College for example enter and become contributors to a community of learning and a community of friendship and hospitality with all of its personal opportunity for experience and growth and excitement – they do so as people already with a persona. They bring their personality and their faith with them: their faith in God, their faith in themselves and their faith in their neighbour and their faith in a better world for more people; their personality and self–belief is such that they might just be the people to do some of it,” he said.
The Archbishop described chaplaincy as not being particularly religious, pious or ecclesiastical but as something that gives as well as receives and is attuned to the special and responsive environment that is Trinity College. He added that people of no expressed faith were vital to this collegiality. “It is not simply a caring profession. It is also a questing profession. It is a life of exploration and engagement with a community of learning, of teaching and of response in which people, younger and older, give of their intellectual passion for some cause greater than themselves,” he stated.
Steve trained initially as a mechanical engineer. He studied theology in Dallas Texas and in Aberdeen. He trained for the ordained ministry in the Church of England in Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and has already covered a range of interesting areas: curacy in St Peter’s Chertsey, counsellor at Royal Holloway University and incumbent of St Mary’s Oatlands in the diocese of Guildford. Steve is married to Sharon and they are parents to Joel and Emily.
For further information please contact:
Diocesan Communications Officer, Dublin & Glendalough
087 235 6472
Mrs Lynn Glanville
[email protected]