My parents were missionaries for 20 years in Brazil before I was born.
Two of my older siblings were born there. I arrived after they returned to Belfast shortly after the Second World War. So I grew up in a home where Christian faith was inseparable from mission commitment and global interest (aided by a stamp-collecting hobby). I remember asking Jesus to come into my heart as a young child of five or six, when my brother Paul asked me if my name was in the Lamb’s Book of Life; and when I asked how I could be sure (probably not quite understanding which book he had in mind), he told me to do just that.
So I count it an enormous privilege and blessing that my ‘Christian life’ has simply been the rest of my life, since then.
Berry Street Presbyterian
I also grew up in Berry Street Presbyterian church where, in my youth, the Bible was systematically preached every Sunday by a succession of godly Welsh ministers – Ivor Lewis, Glyn Owen and Eiffion Evans. Thus my passion for the Bible, for bringing it to life and helping others understand it, stems from that weekly soaking in a quality of preaching that fed the mind and inspired the heart. My Belfast childhood eventually flowed into the era of ‘The Troubles’ from 1968 onwards, and I developed a greater critical awareness of the fragmentary and one-sided nature of my Protestant upbringing and the syncretistic political symbiosis that lurked within it. Yet I have never lost my gratitude for that solid Ulster evangelical culture in which the Bible was valued, memorised and prized (literally, with Sunday School awards, quizzes and competitions, Crusader classes, etc). It’s why I still love going ‘home’ to Northern Ireland for family and ministry reasons.
It was at Berry Street that I fell in love (by singing in the church choir and sitting opposite her every Sunday) with Elizabeth (now universally called Liz) Brown, married her there in 1970, and have shared a life of ministry together for nearly half a century, ministry that includes God’s wonderful gift of a family of four children, and a posse of grandchildren that now matches that Christian bookseller – ‘10 of those’.
Study, Stott and ordination
After a few years as schoolteachers in Belfast, we moved to Cambridge, where I studied for a PhD in Old Testament economic ethics, and then for ordination training in the Church of England (though I did not, in the move from Presbyterian to Anglican, ‘change my religion’, as a stern Belfast aunt alleged). And then to Tonbridge, Kent, for almost five years in parish ministry, during which I got to know John Stott, which opened doors on the wider world, especially in the days after the first Lausanne Congress of 1974.
India
In 1983 as a family of six we headed for India, responding to an invitation to teach the Old Testament at the Union Biblical Seminary, Pune, as mission partners with the BCMS, now Crosslinks. That was, I suppose, our ‘missionary period’ (of five years), in the sense that it was serving overseas in a cross-cultural setting, and we were certainly ‘sent’ by some very generously supportive churches in England and Belfast. But I refused then and now to believe that mission is only for ‘missionaries’ in that sense – vitally important though such cross-cultural mission is. As I told churches: ‘Liz and I are going where we believe God wants us to go, to do what we believe God wants us to do. Isn’t that what God expects from every disciple of Jesus Christ?’ God’s whole mission is for God’s whole church, for every church member, and for the whole of life. I believe that is the teaching of the whole Bible (and have written a few books saying so).
All Nations College
So our ‘life in mission’ continued when we returned to the UK in 1988, and for the next 13 years we were on the staff at All Nations Christian College, teaching the Bible and tutoring generations of young men and women committed to a whole range of missional professions and commitments, with Liz additionally serving in and then managing the college bookshop. They were great years, which expanded our network of enduring friendships all over the world.
And so finally to our present calling and ‘sending.’ In 2001 John Stott invited me to take on the leadership of several ministries he had founded around 1970, seeking to equip and resource the church in the majority world (outside the West). So I became International Ministries Director for Langham Partnership (www.langham.org)*. Its three programmes and many ministry partners around the world provide training in biblical preaching, multiply the creation of evangelical literature in many languages, and enhance the level and quality of theological education and leadership in the global church.
It’s been quite a journey in mission! And it isn’t finished.
