ARCHDEACON of Suffolk The Venerable Geoffrey Arrand is retiring after 15 years in the role helping serve the county's 19,000 regular Church of England worshippers.

ARCHDEACON of Suffolk The Venerable Geoffrey Arrand is retiring after 15 years in the role helping serve the county's 19,000 regular Church of England worshippers.

The clergyman, who has held one of the most senior positions in the Church, has announced his retirement 30 years after he took up his first post in the county, and he will leave his job at the end of July.

There will be a farewell service in St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Bury St Edmunds, at 3.30pm on Sunday July 19 and the 64-year-old cleric and his wife Margaret who live at Ashfield-cum-Thorpe near Stowmarket, will retire to Lincolnshire early in August.

He said today: “It has been a great honour to serve the diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich and its parishes for three decades.

“I think after 15 years the time has come to give up being an archdeacon, but I do look forward to serving parishes around Lincoln because I could never imagine not being a priest. Apart from which there is a golf course just three miles down the road where I am determined to improve my golf handicap.”

The archdeacon was ordained a deacon in 1967 in Durham Cathedral and priested the following year. He served as curate in the Washington Group Ministry before moving to a second curacy in the South Ormsby Group in Lincolnshire.

From 1973 to 1979 he was a team vicar in Grimsby and he came to Suffolk in January 1979 to be the first rector of an enlarged Halesworth Team Ministry. In 1984 he became rector of Hadleigh, Layham and Shelley, a position which also carries the title of Dean of Bocking.

The clergyman was invited to become archdeacon of Suffolk in 1994 by the Rt Rev John Dennis, the then bishop of the St Edmundsbury and Ipswich Diocese.