Orthodox Parish, Holy Prophet Elias, Exeter and Combe Martin, Devon

The founder of our parish, Archimandrite Barnabas, was born Ian Burton in 1915 in mid-Wales.  Drawn from an early age to faith that centred on sacramental mystery, he joined the Anglican order of the Cowley Fathers in 1932, and after a period studying theology at Lampeter he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1939.

After several years of inner struggle as to the canonical authenticity of Anglicanism, he became a Roman Catholic in 1949.  However he found the authoritarianism of the Roman Church difficult to come to terms with, and he became increasingly drawn to Orthodoxy. 

He was received in Paris in1960 and ordained later in the same year, taking the monastic name of Barnabas. He spent some years immersed in Orthodox monastic practice under Archbishop Nicholas (Eremin), Exarch in Paris of the Moscow Patriarchate, returning to England in 1965 to look for a suitable site to establish a monastery. Eventually he learnt of a property at Willand in the south-west of England, where he moved on 31st July 1967 to found the monastery of the Holy Prophet Elias, under the aegis of Bishop – later to be Metropolitan - Anthony of Sourozh (Moscow Patriarchate) in London. From the first he was helped by a young local convert, Norman Wilkins,  who had found the property. Norman was soon ordained deacon, taking the name of Nicanor, and was in due course to become assistant priest of the Devon parish.

Other key figures in the growing community were John Marks, a drama teacher from North Devon who was received in 1971 and ordained priest on Thomas Sunday 1974, and Peter Scorer, who as the child of an émigré mother had known Bishop Anthony virtually all his life, and had recently returned from three years’ study at St Vladimir’s Seminary near New York to take up a teaching post at Exeter University. Peter was ordained Deacon in 1973.

History of our Parish

Father Barnabas’ lifelong wish was to establish an Orthodox monastic tradition in Britain.  What in fact happened at Willand was not a flowering of monasticism, but the gradual emergence of a scattered but committed Orthodox community throughout Devon. 

People from an Orthodox background joined with English converts and those on the road to conversion, most travelling long distances to take part in Orthodox worship.

By the time Fr Barnabas left in 1975 to return to his native Wales, still in the hope of founding a monastery, there was a small but active parish in North Devon, worshipping at the house of  Father John Marks in Combe Martin, and a eucharistic community in Exeter, both fruits of the Willand parish, and both continuing to attract new members. 

In 1987 Metropolitan Anthony decided that the two communities would be better combined: from Easter 1987 they have functioned as one parish drawing members from throughout Devon and beyond.  Worship takes place in two churches – the Church of St Simeon and the Prophetess Anna at Father John’s house, and St Anne’s Church in Exeter, a mediaeval chapel of ease which we are fortunate to be able to rent on a long-term basis.

From the beginning Fr Barnabas, and later Fr John, insisted that the Orthodoxy nurtured in Will and should not be straightjacketed by ethnicities, but should be the local expression of the universal church. The local aspect included and continues to include a particular reverence for the saints of the early British church, so many of whom preached the gospel of Christ in the South-West.  The community in North Devon remains predominantly made up of English converts to Orthodoxy (plus their children and more recently their grandchildren.)  In Exeter the presence of the University has always provided a steady trickle of visitors from Russia, Greece and Cyprus; more recently the accession of Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic states to the EU has brought us a wider ethnic mix of people who nonetheless quickly assimilate into our community.

The insistence that we were not the Russian Orthodox Church in Devon but simply the Orthodox Church became an issue in our relations with the Diocese of Sourozh after the death of Metropolitan Anthony in 2003. For some years large numbers of people had been moving from Russia to England, particularly to London.  Following Metropolitan Anthony’s death, it became clear that the hierarchy of the Moscow Patriarchate saw the primary task of the Diocese of Sourozh as being to minister to the spiritual and cultural needs of these newcomers as their Russian Church. In 2006 Bishop Basil of Sergievo, who was Metropolitan Anthony’s chosen successor but was seen by Moscow only as a temporary ruling administrator, felt that his position had become untenable and asked to be accepted into the Ecumenical Patriarchate under the Exarchate of Archbishop Gabriel. About half of the parishes of the Diocese of Sourozh elected to follow him, of which the Parish of the Holy Prophet Elias was one. 

Following the resignation of Bishop Basil in 2009, the parishes of the Exarchate in Britain were reorganised as a Deanery, of which Fr John Marks is currently Dean.

Archimandrite Barnabas

Metropolitan Anthony

Fr John Marks