What makes up your family?
I am married to Linda and we have two sons, Alex (3rd Year uni) and William (Year 11), plus our dog, ‘Putney’.
What do you do for relaxation and in your spare time?
I enjoy travel, the cinema and eating out and I am a consumer of espionage/adventure novels. We keep our home as welcoming and open as possible and Linda has this amazing ability to make meals stretch for unscheduled visitors.
I also find working with my hands really relaxing and usually have a few projects running at home.
When did you become a Christian and how did that come about?
I come from a family that’s nominally Christian. I was sent to Sunday School as a kid, but my parents were not active churchgoers, I couldn’t say they had a living faith. It was the ‘right thing to do’ being nominally Anglican to go and get confirmed, so I went along and did that and that sort of grew into going to fellowship off and on in my early teens. But I only really came to faith and made a commitment when I was 18 years old. It wasn’t a terribly dramatic moment, I remember it very clearly, but everything that I’d heard and been listening to for some time – God had been acting in my heart and it was just that point in time where I recognised, yeah, there was a decision to be made – that being a Christian was not just being morally good, having a good conscience, being kind to your neighbour, it was actually engaging with God and surrendering your life to the Lordship of God. I recognised that and made a commitment.
Which people have influenced you along the way directly or indirectly?
When I started to go to university, it was about the time that Francis Schaeffer came out with a film series and a book called ‘How Should We Then Live?’. I remember inviting a few friends from uni along, non-Christian friends who I’d met, to see that. I guess that question about ‘how should we then live?’ was something that really stuck with me, challenged me about ‘is my faith real?’, ‘is it making a difference in the way that I engage with the world?’, or ‘is it just an intellectual exercise?’. That issue made me think a lot more and more deeply about philosophy, about reading some good authors. So I read, at an early Christian age, J. C. Ryle’s ‘Holiness’ – this was a very impactful book on me – also ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. They were the first two books I read as a young Christian, jumping in at the deep end I suppose!
Also, being mentored by some guys from Moore College at the time, getting me to think seriously about my faith and what decision I was going to make about that career wise and how I was going to spend the rest of my life, that was helpful. And they were really prayerful, they invested time in me. That was a good model, great, encouraging.
What are some things you have been challenged on with regards to social justice? Did you have any issues with trying to reconcile and understand the relationship of the roles of the gospel and evangelism and where social justice fits in to that?
I guess this is an issue I’ve been thinking of definitely in the role of ANGLICARE, about why as Christians do we engage in social justice issues. What is at the heart of what we do? And what is the distinctiveness that ANGLICARE and Christian aid organisations have or what they should be seen to be doing. What really struck me when looking at the core values – the ANGLICARE vision, Mission statement and the Strategic Plan – was that the gospel of Jesus Christ and bringing Christ to the poor, the disadvantaged, and the socially excluded was at the very core and the heart of what the organisation is about and wants to be about. I’m completely aligned with that, that ANGLICARE ought to be seen as distinctly gospel-centred – that is not to say that we would be any way exclusive about who we would deal with, or serve the needs of or be compassionate to. We make no distinction about who we would render services to. But, why we do it is just so important – that we rely on God, that we recognise in obedience that we depend on God in what we do and we seek to honour Him and to witness to the love of Jesus to people that we deal with.