Revd Nigel Williams

Nigel will be installed as the Dean of St Asaph Cathedral on 17 September 2011.

You can email him here

Five minutes with...

...Revd Nigel Williams, the new Dean of St Asaph Cathedral

St Asaph Cathedral is getting ready to welcome a new Dean in the Autumn after Revd Nigel Williams was appointed to the role by Bishop Gregory.

A fluent Welsh speaker, Nigel is currently Vicar of Colwyn Bay and will start his new role at the Cathedral in September as the current Dean the Very Revd Chris Potter becomes Archdeacon of St Asaph.

Communications Officer Phil Topham spent a few minutes getting to know Nigel and finding out his plans for the Mother Church of the Diocese.

So first of all, just how pleased are you to be taking on the role of Dean?

I am pleased now – it’s taken a while to sink in – but I am delighted. It feels quite daunting but it’s exciting at the same time. It’s a tremendous privilege but with privilege comes responsibility and there are so many opportunities. It will be a case of prioritising and hearing from the people who are involved here to find out what their passions and expectations are.

What’s your vision for the Cathedral?

To build on what’s already happening here – there’s a huge amount happening and Chris has done an enormous amount of work in developing the Cathedral, certainly with the music festival and a whole manner of other things.

What I am looking forward to most of all is the worship. Working with Val, Vittoria and Michael, with Alan and John, the choir and the Cathedral congregation and utilising all the resources available to celebrate the Christian Faith in our observance of the festivals and the liturgical year.

I also want to develop the pilgrimage side of it. I want it to be a place where people come, mainly as the mother church of the diocese so we have parishes and deaneries coming here, hopefully on away days. I want to accommodate their needs, to have a chat with them beforehand, see what they’d like to do and then for it to be a place where they come and then we will work with them to see what’s going to be useful for them at this particular moment in time in terms of meditation and worship.

I want us to reach out to the community of St Asaph and the people who live here and interact with the community in terms of people who come here and then to pilgrims further afield and hopefully work with coach companies and encourage them to come here, give them a guided tour and work with them on the tourism side but in a pilgrimage kind of a way so they feel they have been on a spiritual journey.

That builds on the work Chris and Jenny Potter have done with the Pilgrim’s Way, doesn’t it?

Yes I hope it will be one of the key stages on that pilgrimage. It would be nice to work on something that can be a bit more of a Pilgrim’s rest where people can have some refreshments I think as well but we’ll have to see how things go. Certainly it will be a stop on the journey, a time to be still and quiet, just to take things in and to be and just to sit in God’s presence really and offer that ministry.

Now, the Cathedral is famous for the William Morgan Bible and you’re a first language Welsh speaker. How important is that for the heritage of the Cathedral?

Extremely important. There’s something about Welsh spirituality in terms of the language and as soon as the service moves into Welsh it seems to switch something on inside for those who are from that spiritual background. There is a language, a poetry that goes with worshipping in Welsh. That’s true of the Book of Common Prayer as well as the Bible and I think people forget that, that the translation of the Book of Common Prayer was as important as the translation of the Bible. To have worship in your own native tongue is important. People pray in Welsh and they expect God to speak to them in Welsh. In the Cathedral church people have the right to expect worship in Welsh.

In terms of the William Morgan Bible itself, it’s a big pull to the Cathedral isn’t it and something you would want to build up even more?

Yes because it draws people of all denominations together. It’s a pity, but in the Welsh culture there are many things that divide us and there have been so many splits across Wales and even in localities like some of our villages groups. Historically they have broken off and set up other denominations but the one thing that unites us is the William Morgan Bible and we know we owe an enormous debt of gratitude for that ministry and it brings us together in our common heritage.

The Cathedral itself is a magnificent building, how do you feel about taking that on?

Architecturally it’s amazing but it does offer some challenges! The Sanctuary is a long way away from the Nave and I’m not sure what we can do about that. It’s also going to be a very delicate operation to do anything in there because we don’t want it to look cluttered. It has a fantastic architect in Robin Wolley who is daring and bold but of course it is very sensitive in terms of conservation and ambiance. Overall it’s tremendous, it offers so much scope and of course it has no pews which is absolutely fantastic!

People connected to the Cathedral are sad that more tourists don’t come here – it’s hard to stumble across St Asaph, how can we attract people?

We’re going to have to put St Asaph on the map somehow. We are going to have to draw people in. It’s nice that there is controversy about the HM Stanley memorial at the bottom of the hill which is giving people a sense of curiosity and I think that’s brilliant because people are talking about St Asaph. Now we need to get them talking about the Cathedral as we have fantastic things there, William Morgan and William Mathias -we’ve got such a heritage of people.

There’s Asaph and Kentigern to start off with but then there’s a whole range of Asaph disciples who went off to found churches elsewhere. Also, the people and places of the whole diocese need to be reflected in this Cathedral church and that will give plenty of scope for people to come in, to find out, to explore and to discover.

Nigel will be installed as the Dean of St Asaph Cathedral on Saturday 17 September, 2011