Society of the Sacred Mission
In 1898 he wrote, "No system can be sound which depends for success upon rare and special gifts, rather than upon the steady use of those more limited and commonplace powers which God ordinarily wills to bestow.
"[4] Kelham Hall had been built between 1859 and 1862 by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the architect of St Pancras Station, with which it shares the same Gothic style.
The Hall was sold to the society of the Sacred Mission in 1903 and housed the Monastic order for the next 70 years...the main accommodation building at the front of the Hall was completed in 1939 to house the Monks and the theological students but its first occupants were a garrison of the ‘Blues’ cavalry and also Texas and Oklahoma oil men who were involved in drilling for oil at the nearby Eakring oilfield.
After the war, the SSM Order returned to the site and, until their organisation was re-structured in 1972, continued to live there adding a certain charm and interest to the village.
The Rev'd John Mullineaux "attended Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn, and Manchester University where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree (Honours English Language & Literature).
Amongst his duties were the regular feeding of the pigs, being in charge of the kitchen garden, stoker of the coke boiler and electrician - learning house re-wiring.
"[9] The Rev'd Eric Mercer was a student at a "Theological College in Nottinghamshire, then the mother house of the Society of the Sacred Mission which for several generations had broken new ground in opening its doors to non-graduates, boys and men from all backgrounds.
The Society may have been highly principled but lacked humanity and the ability to come to terms with the changing needs of its brothers, preferring to bury its head in pseudo intellectualism.
(Alan Edward) Clement Mullenger (1915 - 2008), whose lifelong service was given to the Society at Kelham, Ghana and finally ministering and teaching in Lesotho, describes the Kelham Theological College as "a very rigid and compartmentalised hierarchy...Kelham in its heyday of the late 1930s had certain built-in authoritarian terrors comprising histrionic monologues, directives on notice boards, and a general atmosphere under one roof and round one holy table of a great gulf fixed between them and us...the Society was too concerned with its own satisfactoriness and permanence to think that communication with people not actually enclosed behind its hedges needed much attention.
In the Kelham grounds is a small cemetery where some of the principal brothers (including Canon (Alan Edward) Clement Mullenger) rest in peace.
St Michael's House at Crafers, South Australia was bequeathed to the Anglican Diocese of Adelaide in 1943 by Mrs Audine O'Leary.
[11] The Bishop, Bryan Robin, who had briefly been a member of a religious community, immediately invited SSM to take over the extensive property, and establish both a monastic priory and a theological college, on the same model as Kelham.
The Society arrived in 1947, with Fr Basil Oddie as the first Prior of St Michael's, Warden of the theological college, and superior of the province.
Richard Holloway describes his life as a schoolboy with the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham Hall in his autobiography Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt (2014).
