Our Vision

 SCM’s vision is to offer participants ways to go deeply into the Christian path through encouraging, demonstrating and providing meditation/contemplation method and experience. We feel that having spiritual experience of Christ’s teaching is fundamental and powerful. We find it often leads to insight quite naturally, and in this way, it informs our understanding. We value travelling together as community very much and sharing experience and understanding.   

Our team

Jo Parsons

     Religion and spirituality have been central to Jo’s life since early childhood. She was raised as a Christian and remained an active participant in the Anglican and later an evangelical church until her late teens, when she became disillusioned with regular religion, unable to find in it a source of nourishment for her yearning for a deeper spirituality.      In her early 30’s Jo reengaged in the spiritual journey, finding this first through Yoga practice and philosophy and later through Buddhist meditation, both of which introduced her to meditation practice leading to inner experience. With a regular personal practice, she returned to the Abrahamic traditions through its inner pathways, firstly the Jewish mystical pathway of Kabbalah which helped her map out and find names for inner experience.      By her 40’s Jo (Sufi name, NurJamil) had found universal Sufism, the inner path originating in Islam, as an ongoing mystical training and practice.  Simultaneously she returned to the Anglican Church and the life and message of Christ Jesus finding she had the experience and understanding to travel better its inner pathway of transformation and illumination.      At the age of 50,  Jo moved to Wales where she was for nearly twenty years,  running a meditation, healing and retreat centre offering teaching and practice in both universal Sufism and mystical Christianity, both paths emphasising love, reconciliation and the opening and development of the heart. During this time, she had the privilege of guiding the healing work of the (Sufi) Inayatiyya in the UK for ten years.        In 2016, she felt guided to initiate a School of Christian Mysticism with Tim, initially with Viv Little, now with Malcolm Peet. She hopes the school will be one way, to make more easily available the powerful and beautiful inner path of Christianity.​      In 2022 she moved down to Devon to help support her mother. She continues leading meditation, working as a spiritual guide, guiding individual and group retreat, often, as a storyteller, making use of metaphor and story in her work. She is a Play Therapist by profession. 

Fr Tim Ardouin

     Tim ​is a Church in Wales priest, currently serving in the Ministry Area of Gower, with pastoral oversight for the six churches and the communities in North Gower.  He is married to Emilia and is a father of three girls and two boys.     Tim spent his teenage years through thirties traveling, playing music and teaching. Some of these were years of hard travel, hitch hiking, busking and sleeping rough but the rawness of all this taught Tim a deep appreciation of the beauty and power of the natural and of the innate generosity and empathy of human beings wherever he went. It was a time of opening for him and he was acutely aware of the presence of the Divine in him and in his surroundings. Christ was for him a constant companion. It was during that time that Tim felt a calling to serve God.     Tim leads  retreats and teaches people to pray within themselves, and this contemplative way of being informs the way he does ministry. He is Bishop's Officer for the Diocese of Swansea and Brecon for Interfaith Dialogue.

Dr Malcolm Peet

     Malcolm is a retired consultant psychiatrist. Formerly a Professor of Psychiatry, Head of the Sheffield University Department of Psychiatry, and Medical Director of Rotherham and  NHS  Trust. He has happily put aside professional and managerial pursuits, in order to focus on the spiritual path towards and beyond death of the ego-self and the physical body.     Malcolm's path of Christian mysticism has been illuminated greatly by active engagement with other faiths, including Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and the tradition of Advaita Vedanta. He facilitates silent prayer at his place of worship in Sheffield, at Whirlow Spirituality Centre, and wanders in the local countryside.     Malcolm has an MA in Western Esotericism and recently completed a Certificate in Christian Spirituality.     He is married, and has three daughters and four grandchildren. 