Mark Townsend: Hedgepriest! Magician, Priest & Author has agreed to be part of Sacred Land documentary which focuses on the rise in suicides and mental health sufferers especially since Covid-19 and lockdowns and how we can derive a sense of well-being and healing by just being in nature.
“Amazing & Inspirational” Uri Geller
“A Priest like no other” Cherie Blair
“Master Storyteller” Barbara Erskine
Mark was ordained to the Anglican ministry in 1996. However in July 2010 he decided to hand in his ‘Permission to Officiate’ and resign his membership of the Church of England. While the C of E will always hold a special place in Mark’s heart he feels it has become far too narrow and rigid to be an appropriate place for him to continue his attempt at a fully authentic life of faith!
A member of various spiritual groups, including the Progressive Christian Alliance, Mark is now planning for something new and exciting next year – a way that he will be able to express his open vision of Christian priesthood, in a fully sacramental way, and made available to all.
Watch this space!
‘Rev Mark Townsend is a special and needed kind of priest for our times, one who can connect to the earth-based traditions of old while encouraging deep ecumenism from within our own spiritual lineage, one who can play with magic and play with mystery, awakening spiritual unselfconsciousness in us all. We need the mystical awakening he brings alive across many artificial boundaries.’ Dr. Matthew Fox
‘We live in different worlds and each of us sees the world differently. But there is only one world, one creation, one universe. Mark Townsend has a special gift of building bridges across these worlds. Deep from within the Christian tradition he invites us to reaffirm our links with nature and those religious traditions which celebrate our oneness with the natural. His work is truly a work of grace.’ Revd. Donald Reeves
‘The magician is always saying “things are not what they seem!” One wonders, therefore, why more spiritual teachers do not use magic and storytelling to communicate Gospel mysteries and paradoxes! Fr. Mark does it well-with humility, humour, and warm humanity.” Fr. Richard Rohr
‘Mark Townsend is a priest at the edge! The place where new ideas and new understandings are formed is always at the edge. It is a place that institutions, because they demand conformity to the institution, cannot go. But it is always there, out on the edges that new thinking, new imaginings, new dreams happen.’ Revd. Peter Owen-Jones
‘It has been good for me to converse with Mark Townsend, and recognize a fellow explorer of the boundaries, questioner of the powers that be, disturber of the so-called peace, payer of the price for such a ministry. Let him help you keep in touch with ‘magic’ and ‘mystery’ and discover it within yourself, especially if you are a seeker at a time when inherited forms of faith are losing their power to connect.’ Revd. Jim Cotter
‘Mark Townsend is a Christian who lives and thinks outside the box of traditional, institutional Christianity. In a time in which traditional Christianity is in a steep decline it is imperative that Church leaders encourage its pioneer priests to help us all chart new paths on which to walk into whatever the Christian or even the post-Christian future will be. Mark Townsend is just such a priest. A Church that heeds those who explore the edges is a Church seeking resurrection.’ John Shelby Spong VIII Bishop of Newark, USA
‘Mark Townsend looks for glimpses of god-light in places where many ‘clergy’ are simply unprepared to venture. He has successfully combined the treasures of his own Anglican faith with the mysteries of the nature-based traditions. A magician too, he now uses this symbolic gift of illusion to awaken folk out of their own illusions, and thus be cre-connected to the power of NOW. At a time when people are increasingly looking to nature and self empowerment to have their spirits nurtured, the world needs people like Mark more than ever.’ Ian Lawton
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