My name is David Tatem – I’m a retired minister of the United Reformed Church living in Coton, a village just on the edge of Cambridge in the UK.
I was born in Plymouth in 1952, attended Devonport High School for Boys and then studied Quantity Surveying in Bristol. After working in London I studied for the ministry of the United Reformed Church (URC) at Westminster College, Cambridge; just down the road from where we now live. I was ordained in 1979 and retired in July 2017.
Very little of the work that I have done has been in the conventional setting of being the minister of one congregation. Even where it has technically been that, it has been different, including my first church which burned down. It has included working ecumenically as a chaplain to students and in three other specifically ecumenical settings, lastly as the denomination’s Secretary for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations.
The above provides the technical details but not much of the personal. I am an only child, married to someone from the Netherlands who I married in 1983 after we met in St Albans. We have two children, a son and a daughter. I speak Dutch, after a fashion and often mix it up with German which I also speak but not with French, which I learned at school and can get by with if the other person speaks very slowly and clearly. After the Brexit referendum I needed to take at least some personal action so we spent a couple of years living in the Netherlands in order for me to get Dutch citizenship. The result is that along with the rest of my family, I am now a dual national citizen and once again a citizen of the EU.
We love travel and have a camper van which we will take to interesting places at the slightest opportunity. I am almost totally non-musical except for occasionally playing the bongos. My favourite literature is Science Fiction, not the trashy stuff but the kind of writing that makes you think seriously about the possible directions society may take, for better or for worse, with or without aliens. In retirement I have taken up one of my early hobbies again which is photography. When I started it was all about darkrooms and messy chemicals, now it’s about RAW files and digital post=processing. How times have changed!
There is a lot more that I could write here and I may well update it from time to time as appropriate but most of it may also emerge in the blogs that I will, hopefully, write more regularly than I have done for quite a while. Probably the current thing to say (in 2026) is that I am increasingly concerned about the way in which Christianity has been hijacked by ultra-conservative and fundamentalist groups in various parts of the world and especially in countries where these groups either hold political power or have an undue amount of influence on those who do hold power.
There’s a lot to say and I hope to be able to say it as clearly as I can. The simplest and most important thing I want to say about what is occupying my thoughts at the moment is that at the heart of Christianity lays the command to love. This means being as empathetic, compassionate and therefore as open to change of different kinds in attitude and behaviour as we can be. Ultra-conservative expressions of Christianity deny this and are rooted in the fear of change or of ‘doing the wrong thing’ and in far too many places it is in love with power.
Thinking Aloud 