My Ordination Story: Helen Gardner
22 June 2026
A Musical Crochet Hook
“It’s a bit like falling in love. It’s ridiculous, it’s inconvenient, a blessing and a burden. It’s God’s timing not ours.”
Helen Gardner doesn’t do things the conventional way, and as it turns out, that’s precisely the point.
She grew up as the daughter of Ward Allen, a comedian and magician who was the highest scoring specialist act in the 1970s TV talent show Opportunity Knocks. Her childhood was anything but ordinary. Her grandparents were “three times a day Methodists” in a Durham colliery community, but Helen’s world was dressing rooms and summer seasons, surrounded by mystics, psychics, flamethrowers and trapeze artists.
“You develop quite a healthy sense of diversity,” she reflects. “God loves everyone in all their fullness and richness and diversity of gifts.” That instinct, that everyone belongs and that faith isn’t confined to church buildings, never left her.
Finding the Word for It
After fifteen years as a family worker in the Methodist Church in Cornwall, people kept assuming Helen was already ordained. She always batted it away. Then her father died, and she discovered he had told his doctor she was already a minister. He had seen what she hadn’t.
Helen had never met a deacon. But when she googled “Methodist deacon,” something clicked. “It was me. It sounded like me. It felt like me.”
The ordination promises spoke directly to her story: to support the weak, bind the broken, welcome the stranger, seek the lost. “The bits,” she says quietly, “that other people would step away from.” As she puts it, “I have been all of those things during my life. And it was particularly at my lowest moments that God had shown me themselves the most.”
The Hook
Helen’s sister, who died suddenly earlier this year, had been a crochet artist, and her work helped Helen reflect on her calling. She wanted to be a crochet hook, catching loose strands, binding them together, helping something beautiful take shape in community.
But she’s also her father’s daughter, and in show business there’s always a hook.
“In a piece of music, the hook is the thing that changes the rhythm, catches people’s attention, makes them think in a different way. My overall aim in ministry is to catch people’s attention in a good way, not drawing attention away from God, but showing them something of the God I believe in, so that they can find the God they believe in.”
So she settled on describing herself as a musical crochet hook. She loves a metaphor. And then she discovered that the starting point of a circle in crochet is called the magic circle, and as it happens, her dad had been in the North East Magic Circle for fifty years.
Seeing Hearts
During her ordination year, Helen walked 2026 miles to raise money for the Girls’ Brigade she helps to lead. And something happened along the way. God started showing her hearts: in pavements, in pebbles…even in a McDonald’s Happy Meal pickle and a pie crust, fresh from the oven. Eventually she was finding twenty-two of them on a single coastal walk in Cornwall.
She started sharing them on social media, and people began finding their own. Some were able, for the first time, to say “I think this was of God.”
The day she walked into her sister’s house after she had died, there was a heart shape on her late mother’s curtain. It wasn’t there the next day. “I took the photo to share with other people, because God loves them. And in the darkest of times, God’s love can be manifest.”
Order and Freedom
You might expect someone so creative and wary of religiosity to baulk at promising to 'share fully in the life of the Methodist Diaconal Order and keep its discipline.' She didn’t.
“As someone with elements of neurodiversity, compliance and structure could be something that would turn me off. But interestingly, that was what drew me in. Being within a body with shared values brings order where there’s chaos. A structure that frees you to be fully yourself. That’s exactly what I knew I needed.”
She’s clear, too, about mutual accountability. “When I act, when I speak, when I write, I’m doing so as Deacon Helen. I’m representing the entire religious order.”
If You’re Scared, That’s a Good Sign
Helen now has regular conversations with people wondering whether they’re called to diaconal ministry. Her first question is always the same. “Are you scared?” The answer is normally yes, and that, she says, is usually a good sign.
“With me, it was a restlessness. I didn’t want to do it. What God calls us into is like falling in love . It is often completely inconvenient and ridiculously consuming. It’s a blessing and a burden. It is something we could avoid but it is also essential to live fully. I think we are called to fall in love with God and the ‘us’ God sees. I pray we can fall in love with life afresh each day.”
She remembers explaining to everyone why it wouldn’t work, and then reframing all of it. “I understood that all things are possible with God. The situation I was in when I candidated, and the situation after, were very different. And that wasn’t me. That was God.”
Helen Gardner will be ordained as a Methodist Deacon on 28 June 2026, at St John’s Church, Bloxwich. She serves in the Lincoln circuit.