Meet our Festival Service speaker
With Godly Leadership as the St Patrick's Day theme, our speaker, His Honour David Turner KC, is well placed to address us with his extensive experience of leadership in the law and the church.
Please join us on Monday 17 March at 11.45 in Down Cathedral for a celebratory service followed by a complimentary “Picnic in the Pews’. Full programme HERE.
Meet our speaker
His Honour David Turner KC is a recently retired Circuit Judge, who sat in Essex and London. Born in Derry/Londonderry and educated at Foyle College, he moved to London to study law at King’s College in 1972 and was President of the Christian Union at King’s.
Professional life
Upon completing his degree, David joined Gray’s Inn, where he was called to the Bar in 1976 and became a Bencher of the Inn in 2015.
For 28 years David practiced from chambers in Gray’s Inn, at a set of which he was ultimately Head. He became a QC in 2000 and was appointed a Circuit and Deputy High Court Judge in 2004. A family law specialist at the Bar, he sat as a judge in criminal, family and Court of Protection work.
Church
David’s family roots were in Presbyterianism, but his adult life has been spent as an Anglican. He has been a member of All Souls’, Langham Place, since 1972, Reader there since 1981, and served as Churchwarden between 1983 and 2006. He has said John Stott was a very significant influence on him. David remains heavily (and largely joyfully!) involved in church life and preaches regularly.
Central church
David has been Chancellor of the Diocese of Chester since 1998 and, from 2002 to 2020 was Deputy Chancellor of the Diocese of London. He served on the Legal Advisory Commission of the Church of England from 2007 to 2010 and, since 2020, has been deputy President of the Clergy Discipline Commission and Deputy President of Disciplinary Tribunals in the Church. David is currently Chair of the Ecclesiastical Judges’ Association. He has served as a Ministry Development Review Consultant in the Diocese of London since 2013 and was on the board of the Langham Partnership (UK and Ireland) for some 40 years.
David married Jean in 1978. They have two sons, a Dungannon daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren aged between 14 and 8.