Our Chaplain & Sermons
Our chaplain to the chapel is the Rev’d Canon Nigel Cooper.
Nigel arrived in December 2022, having retired at the start of that year as the University Chaplain to Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge for seventeen years. Before that he had been rector of two villages in Essex, Rivenhall and Silver End, also for seventeen years. He served his curacy in Chelmsford and trained for the Church of England ministry at Ripon College Cuddesdon and Oxford University. He was made deacon in 1983 and ordained priest in 1984. He is an honorary canon emeritus of Ely Cathedral.
Nigel read NatSci at Queens’ in the early 1970s, doing Pt II Zoology. He then taught for four years in Romford.
He has continued his interest in biology throughout the years in three strands. As a practitioner he has been an ecologist in the Church of England, helping people care for the wildlife of churchyards in particular. Academically, he has concentrated on the philosophy and, more recently, the economics of nature conservation. He has led many nature and spirit retreats, mainly on the Isle of Arran in Scotland, where his family have a second home. His church contribution is now as the Diocesan Environment Officer for the diocese of Ely. This is another part-time role alongside his part-time post of chaplain.
He has not fully left ARU as he is a visiting professor in the university’s Global Sustainability Institute and the School of Life Sciences. His publication list is short, but quite well cited. He is a Chartered Environmentalist, a professional member of the Arboricultural Association, and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and of the Linnean Society.
Role as chaplain to the chapel
Churchill College is unique in many ways and one is that the chapel is ‘at’ the college and not of the college. As a result, the chaplain does not have an official role within the college. His focus is the chapel. However, if any member of the college wishes to chat to Nigel, he always appreciates company and can offer a cup of coffee to lubricate the conversation. He is mostly in college in term on Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons, as well as Sunday afternoons. Do contact him by email [email protected], he would love to hear from you.
He enjoys singing, even if not very well (he failed his audition for Queens’ chapel choir as an undergraduate). Fortunately, the Inter Alios Choir is welcoming, and he sings with the bass section.
His main task is organising and leading worship in the chapel. The routine are the Sunday evening services, mostly Evensongs when Inter Alios is singing in chapel, or said services at other times. Nigel also conducts special services such as weddings, funerals, memorials and hopes to have the privilege of also conducting a baptism sometime.
[picture of me behind the font. Caption: “Nigel at his inaugural service leading the renewal of baptismal vows.”]
Nigel takes preaching very seriously – perhaps too seriously. Several of his sermons are available as transcripts with links from this page. He hopes to add to these, both future sermons and by typing up old ones. He thinks of himself as fully orthodox, but also radical in his interpretation and application of the core doctrines of Christianity. He aims to speak to those outside Christianity, explaining what the religion might be about and why he and others practise it.
Sermons
“What might be the tasks of this chapel”
Here I think aloud about what our chapel is all about. I categorise this under the three Transcendentals: beauty, truth and goodness – I am very fond of these Transcendentals as I think they are the most obvious route into thinking about God for those who have not been brought up as churchgoers.
I praise the beauty of the chapel’s architecture and the music that goes on here. I try to justify my style of preaching as seriously Christian, but welcoming to those who disagree and wish to contest it. I speak of the support to mental health by facing up to the massive challenges the world faces ahead.
“Passing on the baton”
This was an attempt to be encouraging in the face of the future. Again, I referred to the Transcendentals, but also dwell on one of the three Theological Virtues, hope – the others being faith and love. “My repeated retort is that hope is a spiritual discipline, not an estimate of probabilities.”
I also quote J. M. Barrie, of Peter Pan fame. He said to students in 1922, “Courage is the thing.”
“The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is mystical not mathematical”
This was the third, though logically/historically the first, in a series of three sermons on the three core doctrines of the Church. From the first, the early Christians somehow thought of Jesus Christ as also God, despite their absolute Jewish commitment to one God. The Holy Spirit also joined in the Godhead, but they were less clear on how.
What possible sense can there be in saying God is both three and one?
I offered two slogans as ways to conceptualise this three-in-one.
The Father, Son and Spirit are the Lover, the Beloved and the Reflector of Love.
The Father, Son and Spirit are the Unimaginable, the Image and the Imagination.
“Jesus God and human, the richness of the Council of Chalcedon”
For rather accidental reasons, the developed understanding of how Jesus was both God and a man, did not get formulated into one of the creeds the Church uses in worship. The Nicene Creed hints at it, but the full development at the Council of Chalcedon is not frequently rehearsed in services. I begin with the text of the council.
It is well established that Jesus reveals the Father to us, but I also claim that he reveals the true nature of the human to us. I explore how the full nature of the Godhead empties itself in order for God the Word to become a human being – Kenosis. But then also explore how the human in each of us becomes taken up in Christ into the Godhead – Theosis.
“If Jesus death is the solution, what is the problem?”
Typically, the Church speaks of Christ dying for our sins and certainly there is a lot of sin and the grief it brings in the world. But by no means all the evil in the world is the result of human sin. Famously, nature is red in tooth and claw. Does the death of Jesus address that? I think it does.
The responsibility for evil reaches back to God the creator and the crucifixion is God accepting the consequences of that responsibility. But more, creation itself is the bringing to be of something out of nothingness. In his death, Christ journeys into the nothingness to bring back life. “It is the self-giving unto death that is the gift of life to creation, and which in turn then reflects back the love that brought it into being. No longer shall we feed on the slaughtered corpses of our fellow creatures, but on the Eucharistic body and blood of Christ, freely and lovingly offered through the sacrifice of his life.”
“Is there a conversation to be had between religion and science, or is it all one way”
As a biologist, it seems self-evident to me that evolution is basically correct, and I adduce some evidence for this. Yet, I also challenge a one-sided emphasis on the metaphor of ‘selfish genes’ and discuss the important role of cooperation in the history of life.
Then I argue that science, illuminating as it is, cannot answer whether there is a god or not. This is quite a common Christian position, but I explore a novel way of explaining this (some listening were not convinced I succeeded). I drew on the methods of anthropology, particularly the distinction of outsider (scientific) and insider points of view. If God is noticed from the insider perspective, it may be as something deeply interior or beckoning from the beyondness. Neither of these views are available to someone studying a culture from outside. Only insiders can debate the significance of them.