Nicolas Stacey

Rev. Nicolas David Stacey (27 November 1927 – 8 May 2017) was a priest of the Church of England and social activist. He was Rector of Woolwich in the 1960s, and Director of Social Services for Kent County Council from 1974-1985.

Nick Stacey was born 27 November 1927. He was educated at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and saw service on HMS Anson in the last months of the Second World War. He participated in the liberation of Hong Kong, and witnessed the devastation of Hiroshima shortly after VJ Day. He resigned his commission in the Navy to read Modern History at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and then trained for the priesthood at Cuddesdon Theological College. During this time he represented his service, university and country in athletics, being president of the Oxford University Athletics Club, and participated in the British Empire Games (1950), and the 1952 Olympic Games. He was a semi-finalist in the 200 metres and a finalist in the 4×400 metres relay.

Ordained in 1953 he served his title at St Mark’s, Portsea, Portsmouth, under Christopher Pepys, later Bishop of Buckingham. In 1958 he moved to be Domestic Chaplain (personal assistant) to the Bishop of Birmingham, Dr Leonard Wilson. It was during his time in Birmingham that he began to receive national attention, founding and editing a tabloid church newspaper, the Birmingham Christian News, which gained a reputation for comparatively racy journalism and a sensationalist approach to church news. This was a deliberate policy on Stacey's part, and became characteristic of his ministry. He said "We want to be a platform for the prophetic voices of the country. We want to show that the Christian faith is relevant to twentieth-century living and that the Church is concerned with all the activities of man".

In 1960 he was invited by , Bishop of Southwark, to become rector of Woolwich. He remained there for eight years. When he arrived in Woolwich he found three Church of England churches with small and unrepresentative congregations. The seemingly intractable problems of poor social housing and the resistance of the working class to the established church meant that religious observance in Woolwich was declining faster than in the rest of the country. Stacey implemented a radical programme. He recruited a large multi-talented and multi-denominational team of ministers. He closed one of the three churches, and radically reordered the eighteenth-century parish church of St Mary Magdalen. The galleries and side aisles were enclosed and offices, meeting rooms, and counselling rooms were created. A discothèque was built in the crypt, and the church's youth club was so successful that local probation officers fought to get their clients accepted as members. A coffee bar was opened in the gallery. Within four year, 1500 people a week were passing through the church doors.

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