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I’m the most privileged guy in the world
A mistake responding to a cryptic job ad eventually led Andrew McKerrow to become New Zealand’s first horse racing chaplain.
When I was 15, I saw a job ad in the paper. It said: ‘Are you short? Do you weigh under 48kg? Do you like the outdoors? I thought ‘Yeah!’ My parents had told me that I couldn’t leave school without a job, so I answered the ad not realising I’d signed myself up to become a jockey.
As it turns out, I have one arm shorter than the other, I’m allergic to horse food and I’m slightly scared of horses. Needless to say, I never made it as a jockey or even to a race day, but I’d pigeon-holed myself and had no other options. I spent three years around the stables.
During these years, I wasn’t a Christian and I had addictions to gambling, alcohol and drugs. I stopped working in stables at about 18 years old, but I still had friends there and was using my cartooning skills for trackside TV. What struck me after I became a Christian was that when I was in racing I never met a Christian within those circles.
When I was 20, I encountered God most unexpectedly—on the toilet floor of a pub.
From there, my life began to change radically. I got help for my gambling addiction, but I thought, ‘There must be something bigger that I’ve been set free to do.’ I turned up to a Christian friend’s house and said, ‘Would you take me to church? I know I have met God, but I don’t know how to walk with him.’ She was coming to Belfast Salvation Army.
Not long after becoming a Christian, I met my wife Kim, and after some time, we trained to be Salvation Army officers and served for about eight years in Foxton and Whanganui. Even as an officer, I naturally gravitated to the racing fraternity and found opportunities to reach out to people at the race tracks. When our officership ended four years ago, it didn’t sit well in my heart that there wasn’t any formal chaplaincy body or deliberate outreach to that massive industry.
Recently, after a lot of talks with the industry, I have started officially as New Zealand’s first racetrack chaplain. Whenever there’s a race meeting at Riccarton, I hang out at the course and the stables for a couple of hours. It’s about connecting with people, and race days are a good place to do that.
Another big part of race track chaplaincy is involvement with the apprentice jockey school—this gives me opportunities to do lots of listening and eventually speak into their lives as they navigate a future in the racing industry. The racing body itself has been good to me. They’ve opened their arms to what we’d like to do, and for this I’m grateful.
What we’d like to do is get a really robust, effective model of race track chaplaincy in place that shows the way to establish chaplaincy services at other race tracks around the country. There are also some other Christians in racing starting to pop up, so I’d like to get a proper group set up for Christians in racing.
There are not words to say how excited I am about this new venture. I was on the track the other day thinking, ‘I’m the most privileged guy in the world to be able to do this
by Andrew McKerrow (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 11 July 2015, pp9.
You can read 'War Cry' at your nearest Salvation Army church or centre, or subscribe through Salvationist Resources.