ONE challenge for Christian educational institutions, according to Kleinschmidt, is ‘to keep alive the rumour of God’. This challenge underpins our approach to chaplaincy at Liverpool Hope – to create an awareness of a spiritual dimension in life, a vague recognition of the numinous, even a flickering possibility of a real being who knows and cares about us. We sow seeds for the future and perhaps some day the rumour which we have spread may grow to a conviction, fed by experience and memory, and set afire by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Fifty years ago, outside Oxbridge, there were just eight university chaplains in England. Today chaplaincies of one model or another are established in almost every institution of higher education in the country. Current statistics indicate that there are in excess of 400 chaplains working in higher education. This expansion of the church's involvement in this field has of course paralleled the major expansion of higher education itself since the war.

The chaplaincy at Liverpool Hope University College has its origins in the mid-nineteenth century when two of the three constituent colleges, S. Katharine's and Notre Dame, were founded. Chaplaincy responsibilities were exercised by male clergy, often in conjunction with a teaching role. In Christ's College, established in 1964, priests on the staff shared the liturgical and pastoral functions. Although federation in 1979 under the title of the Liverpool Institute of Higher Education brought co-operation between the Anglican and Roman Catholic chaplaincies, they continued to function as two separate entities. It was not until 1995 that a covenant to work together as one team was agreed, and in 1996 the current chaplaincy centre was established.

The college's Memorandum and Articles of Association and Instrument of Government provide for an ecumenical chaplaincy team, including at least one Anglican Chaplain and at least one Roman Catholic Chaplain. This is a direct reflection of the importance of the college mission to every aspect of its life. The team currently includes an Anglican bishop, a Roman Catholic sister of the Community of the Faithful Companions of Jesus, a Methodist minister and lay assistant, a Jesuit brother and an Anglican layman in an internship. This internship is an annual appointment which provides a formation experience for men or women testing their vocation to the ordained ministry or to lay chaplaincy.