From the Keswick Convention to Word Alive to local church ministry and beyond – it is hard to overestimate the scope and significance of Philip Hacking’s ministry. He died on 6 December with 93 years of life and nearly as many years of gospel ministry behind him.
Philip was born in 1931 into a working-class family and grew up on the terraced streets of Blackburn, Lancashire. He attended the Church of the Saviour, a fairly new Anglican parish. It had a significant impact not just on his life but his ministry with the patterns that were laid down there. Philip wrote: ‘Prayer and Bible study and expository preaching were the order of the day, and I discovered the joy of seeing the treasures of the Bible unfolded’. They would remain the ‘order of the day’ throughout his ministry. He remembered too how ‘as teenagers we were encouraged to lead our own youth groups and to be involved in Christian witness’. Strikingly, at the same time as Philip, three others from the row of terraced houses in which he lived were called into ordained ministry.
Philip read History at Oxford, the first in his family to go to university. But it was at the Keswick Convention in 1952 that Philip stood with his fiancée Margaret to commit themselves to serving God wherever and however He might use them. Nurtured by St Ebbe’s and the OICCU and trained at Oak Hill he was both ordained and married in 1955 and served as a curate in St Helens, Lancashire where their daughter Catherine was born in 1957. Stuart, their son, arrived in 1960 by which time the family had moved north of the border as Philip had become rector of St Thomas’ Edinburgh the year before, the youngest rector in Scotland at the time. They came south again, at least as far as Sheffield where Philip was vicar of Christ Church Fulwood from 1968–1997.
