I grew up in Cardiff where, in the city centre, you can find St. John The Baptist Anglican church. As a child I was much more interested in what was opposite the church: Cardiff Market wherein was all the excitement of competing vendors manning their stalls and shouting their wares to passers-by. There was a lot of fish as I recall; the whole place stank of fish. I bought goldfish in a plastic bag for threepence.

Coincidentally, this Sunday’s Gospel reading is about John the Baptist and it includes this verse:

As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness:  ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

The path of St. John’s new vicar has not been entirely straight. Rev. Sarah Jones, started life as a boy, married at the age 20, decided she was supposed to be a girl, had a sex change, renamed herself “Sarah” and became an Anglican vicar.

I have no reason to doubt her sincerity. What seems odd is that up until now so many new Anglican vicars have been gay; now the transgender phase is beginning. Rather like Cardiff Market, the odour of something fishy is wafting through Western Anglicanism.

From here:

The new vicar of Cardiff’s city centre parish St John The Baptist has ambitious plans to make it more open to the whole community.

[….]

She had an unusual route into ministry. Leaving school at 16 after her parents’ marriage broke up she had to change her original plans:

“I wanted to go to university but that disappeared overnight. I got a job in a music shop and I realised that I really enjoyed interacting with people”. Over the years she had a variety of jobs in sales and training in the music business and in industry.

However this is not the most unusual part of her background. Sarah was brought up as a boy and is the first Anglican priest to have undergone a gender change before being ordained into the church.

“I looked like a boy and there was no reason to doubt it when I was born. However I knew from the age of six or seven that I was more one of the girls than one of the boys.

“I was slightly different. I did fit in and I wasn’t bullied but by secondary school I knew deep down inside that I should have been one of the girls.

“However I thought that I just had this feminine side to me but that I could carry on with a normal life.”