Turn back the hands of the clock, way back to 19th century New England in the United States.
It’s pre-electricity era when neighbourhood street lamps were lit by men on horseback.
It was from that era of “lamp-lighters” that retired Anglican Archbishop of the West Indies, the Most Reverend Drexel Gomez, sketched the image of a committed parish priest.
“Back then, people always knew the journey a lamp-lighter took by the lamps he had lit along the way,” said the Archbishop. “I have used that story many times in sermons that a priest touches people’s lives, he or she helps to light up a lot of lives. Ordinary people are helped tremendously by priests by being there to talk and listen to them and be a source of great comfort.”
Gomez, the first black Anglican Bishop of Barbados who later became Bishop of the Bahamas, knows effective priests when he seems them. One of them, he said, was Canon Dr Llewellyn Armstrong, who was celebrating the 50th anniversary of his ordination as an Anglican priest in Barbados in 1963.
Gomez was in the City to deliver the sermon at a special two-hour service celebrating Armstrong’s ministry. It was held at St Leonard’s Church, a Barbadian religious edifice in Brooklyn.
“Canon Armstrong has been extremely effective in the area of assisting people and has much to be grateful for, the ways in which God has sent him to touch the lives of people and a light a way for them,” asserted the Archbishop. “He had a successful ministry.”
In his sermon, Gomez focused attention on three areas of Armstrong’s work. The first was proclamation of the gospel, teaching and preaching. “He is a very good preacher.”
Next was his involvement in education in Barbados and North America. “During his years in education he was very much involved in teaching” at the elementary, high school and tertiary levels, the Archbishop insisted.
“He has had a significant and positive impact on people and has many stories to tell about the persons he has taught and was instrumental in their lives,” Gomez told the congregation.
Next was the “sacramental life” of the church, the “pastoral care, counselling and reaching people,” the primate explained. And that’s where the “lamp lighters” came in.
Little wonder, then, that the Archbishop lamented the “way in which Armstrong’s ministry was clouded in recent years by the problems he encountered with the authorities” in the Long Island Episcopal Diocese.
First, he was “inhibited” from functioning as a priest and later deposed or defrocked after an ecclesiastical court trial last year.
Even before Armstrong was officially deposed, he left the Episcopal Church and was accepted as a priest by the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a diocese of the Province of Nigeria, which like the US Episcopal Church itself and the West Indies Province of the Anglican Church belong to the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Today, he is Rector of the Resurrection Anglican Congregation in Brooklyn.
“It has been an exciting ministry for the past 50 years,” Armstrong said. “I have always seen myself as a servant who tried at every turn to equip myself to serve people. Indeed my ministry is about people . . .”