Every year, more than 2,500 people enter The Open Championship via various routes. Most of those who fancy a pop at making it to the event proper go in via Regional Qualifying. Pros and top amateurs keen to test their skills and their mettle on a grander stage aim to move on to Final Qualifying and perhaps even the big event itself.
Looking at the Regional Qualifying entry lists, the name of Joe Griffiths wouldn’t immediately jump out. He’s a 33-year-old +2 handicapper out of Wellingborough Golf Club, paying the entry fee for the first time to have a shot at glory; A life ambition that plenty of scratch and better golfers realise during their playing careers.
But Joe is a little different to the average punter booking themselves in for a big day at Regional Qualifying. The day before Regional Qualifying, Joe will be at Peterborough Cathedral for an even bigger day in his year – On 25th June, Joe will be ordained into the ministry to begin a curacy at St John’s Church in Corby. Joe may be on the road to becoming Britain’s best golfing vicar.
“It’s going to be quite a couple of days,” he says. “I’m hugely excited and more than a little nervous.”
Joe hadn’t always intended to go into the ministry. He wasn’t a Christian at the time he went to university in Leicester but, going to church with his future mother-in-law in Kettering, he found, and built, a relationship with God.
“To be honest, at the time I just went to church to earn some brownie points with the girlfriend’s mum and the chance of a free lift back to uni,” he chuckles. “But it’s funny how things pan out.”
Even then though, his journey to a career in the church was a long one. He took a job selling street lighting straight out of university and then considered joining the army after feeling a calling in that direction. The minister at his church gave him some sage advice though and suggested the army he was being called to might have been the army of God.
“I was newly married with a child on the way so I decided to pray on it, that’s Christian language for ‘thinking about it,’” he says. “I came to the realisation that the church was the right avenue for me to go down.”
It’s then a long discernment process in the Church of England in which candidates decide whether the ministry is right for them. It took Joe some five years to go through that process.
Golf Has Been A Constant For Joe
Joe will be ordained on 25th June, the day before Regional…
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