Our Minister

Rev Andrew Longshaw
Hello, my name is Andrew, and I am the Superintendent Methodist minister for South Petherton and Crewkerne Circuit. I have Pastoral charge of Crewkerne, South Petherton, Netherhay, Kingsbury Episcopi, Chard, Comb St Nicholas and Ilminster and Broadway Hill Methodist Churches.
I have been a Presbyteral Minister for twenty-four years and I have worked in; Birmingham, Newcastle-under-Lyme, North Liverpool, North Cumbria (Carlisle), and Wakefield, in West Yorkshire. So, as you can see, I and my wife Lizzy have moved around the country serving God. However, that is not all of me; Previously my profession was as a senior lawyer, in the Civil Service. I studied law and sociology at Warwick University, after studying politics and philosophy at Ruskin College, in Oxford. I mainly worked in the area of Constitutional and Administrative law and undertook appeals procedures, regarding cases to do with social welfare law. Then, everything changed when God called me to the ministry. After feeling all secure and settled, in a well-paid job where career and financial progress were the standard expectation, I was cast upon the ocean of God’s will. I studied theology at Queen’s, in Birmingham. That was a great time in an ecumenical setting, which prepared me for much of my ecumenical work around the country, particularly in Liverpool and Cumbria, where I also served as the District Ecumenical Officer.
I am a kind and caring minister and therefore place a great deal of importance on pastoral care. I also like to be actively involved in the communities I serve, and so try to get out and about to meet people. We have been very blessed in that our other great love is travelling and to that end we have been to wonderous places around the world. More recently we have seen the Northern Lights in Finland, travelled around the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific, and been on an adventure cruise to the high Arctic, travelling up the Norwegian coast to Svalbard, in the Arctic Ocean. I believe that I am a person who doesn’t like to continually look back at what I have done, or where I have worked but to let that inform and contribute to the work I do now and in preparing for the future of this Circuit and churches I serve.
Blessings
Rev Andrew.