We say farewell and Godspeed to Erica Roberts, stalwart of the Anna Chaplaincy network from the earliest days.
18 May 2025
Refresh and Resource
Tomorrow, 19 May, the Southampton-based charity Caraway will host its annual Refresh and Resource day for people concerned for the spiritual well-being of older people, including their own team of Anna Chaplains, Anna Friends and volunteers. Over the years it has been attended by many Anna Chaplains, some travelling considerable distances, but people from churches in and around Southampton also attend. Anna Chaplaincy founder Debbie Thrower is this year’s keynote speaker.
Southampton is home, but not for much longer, to Caraway’s founder, Erica Roberts. We’re taking this opportunity to highlight the enormous contribution Erica has made to Anna Chaplaincy from its earliest days, to thank her and to wish her well in all that God has in mind for her as she and her husband ‘retire’ to Devon.
Erica Roberts has made an enormous contribution to Anna Chaplaincy from its earliest days.
From small beginnings
A former paediatric oncologist, Erica was ordained in 2010 and became the diocesan City Chaplain for Older People in Southampton in 2014. Despite not officially being an Anna Chaplain, she has been a key member of the Anna Chaplaincy network from the earliest days of dreaming and planning around founder Debbie Thrower’s kitchen table.
In 2019 Erica founded the charity Caraway, which has worked in close partnership with Anna Chaplaincy ever since, developing dementia services and resourcing the local church to reach out into the community and care homes.
From those kitchen-table meetings there are now nearly 500 Anna Chaplains around the country and Caraway has blossomed, in part because they were able to pivot so quickly in response to the Covid lockdowns.
Like many charities serving those who are more vulnerable in society, it was actually quite a good time to grow. Caraway was very open to ways of working differently and we were lucky to be working with a lot of creative people who were very happy not to close things down, but think outside the box. So in an odd sort of way, lockdown probably accelerated Caraway’s growth and we came out of Covid already a stronger and larger organisation.
Because of Erica’s diocesan role, and the growing reputation of Caraway, she has been teaching and training across the diocese, equipping both lay people and ordinands to minister with older people.
We are a new charity, but people have seen our track record so there is a sense of sustainability. Caraway is all about enabling others, whether it’s the local church or other organisations. Now we have twelve Anna Chaplains in the Southampton area, ten of whom are licensed to Caraway, and the others are licensed to their local churches. But we train together, work together, supervise together and network together. It’s not ‘my charity’: it belongs to God. I am just part of a movement that is growing and evolving and that’s a really lovely, exciting thing for me to see now, six years later.
From those kitchen-table meetings there are now nearly 500 Anna Chaplains around the country.
A deep, deep call
Despite a very natural pang about leaving, Erica’s move is in response to ‘a deep, deep call from God that it’s time to move on’.
Our language limits who God is, who the Holy Spirit is. I think I used to see the Holy Spirit in the biblical way – the classical way of the whisper, the wind, the fire, the dove descending – but now I think it’s all about movement. The Holy Spirit doesn’t stay still, and there has been that sense for me, personally, and for us as an organisation, that there’s always movement, like leaves fluttering, and it’s about trying to discern where the Holy Spirit is taking us.
I suppose my new language for the Holy Spirit comes from the Ignatian tradition and that’s very much thinking about the movement of God, and moving towards God and moving away from God. So there’s that deep sense of knowing when we’re stepping into where the Holy Spirit is moving. Maybe it’s a personal decision, or maybe it’s a trustee meeting and around the table everyone’s excited, and there’s that sense that the Holy Spirit is there in the flurry of the leaves swirling.
Covered in prayer
Erica believes that the really significant thing that has contributed to the growth of Caraway is the trustees’ decision ‘to intentionally cover the whole of what we were doing in prayer’. For the past two years at eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning, five or six people – including colleagues from other charities such as Embracing Age and Communicare – come together to pray for every aspect of the work and for the spiritual needs of older people across not just the city but the country.
We’re saying come Holy Spirit. Let us step into where you are going to be moving.
We’re saying come Holy Spirit. Let us step into where you are going to be moving.
A shared endeavour
For Erica, one of the most exciting places they’re working is in the Lords Hill area of Southampton. It’s where the city’s first paid Anna Chaplain was appointed.
Margaret Hague, our Anna Chaplain there, has stayed as a volunteer after charity funding ceased, and she has been an incredibly prayerful chaplain, and instrumental, I believe, in some of the changes that have happened in that part of Southampton, which has got the highest level of deprivation and assisted living.
There are now three Anna chaplains in Lords Hill, two Pentecostal and one Methodist working and supported alongside the Anglican Church, which is a Holy Trinity Brompton church plant.
Isn’t that a wonderful sign of God at work across denominations?!
There’s real sense of the Spirit working in that area, with a bubbling up of volunteers and significant others to join the team. We felt so strongly that God was calling to that place right from the beginning and we committed our funding and resources to Lords Hill in faith. Now there’s that sense that when you step into something God is calling you to, then you see growth.
Again, that growth is the work of the Spirit and the fruit of prayer as the chaplains and the volunteers pray constantly for the Holy Spirit to show them the right people to talk to and the conversations to have when they visit.
As a result:
They have some very amazing, transformational stories of being there at the right moment; a prompt to knock on a door or make a phone call and they find that someone has been just been bereaved, or someone is at the end of life. Of course, the Holy Spirit is doing a broader work, but also a very individual work as well.
This is still just the beginning. We mustn’t be complacent. This is exciting, and it’s moving, and it’s growing because it needs to.
A wider stage
Erica sees a burgeoning interest in all the different services Caraway and Anna Chaplaincy offer.
I can’t even tell you how many people we have now on board, but we’ve started a new carers’ course and we’re now running it for the fifth time. And that grows and there’s a waiting list. As a charity on a wider stage, we’re doing this because we believe that these people are worth this support and our desire is to be on that journey with them. We believe that’s where God wants us to be.
With almost 500 Anna chaplains across the country, Erica feels immensely grateful and privileged to have been in at the beginning of Anna Chaplaincy as well as Caraway, but she has a caveat:
What I would say is, this is still just the beginning. We mustn’t be complacent. This is exciting, and it’s moving, and it’s growing because it needs to. We’ve got a growing aging population and we’re going to hear more and more negativity about how this going to be a problem demographic, for society and politically, but we can step into that and be the ones that care.
The church is being asked to look out strategically for the children and families and youth and students and we all understand that and support that. But actually, the kingdom of God is about everyone together, and we have to value each person, whatever their age.
And I just love Zechariah 8:4–5: ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each of them with cane in hand because of their age. The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there.”’
So when Zechariah was prophesying about the return from exile it wasn’t just, oh, let’s build up everything with the youth. It started with old men and women and I think that’s a beautiful picture and it’s the picture I’d want to leave us with. It’s a beginning. Let’s be excited about what God is doing, and let’s keep stepping into it.