LEADERSHIP
MEET THE PASTOR
This is the page where I get the opportunity to tell you a little about myself, so here goes.
I am a preacher, poet and failed pugilist, singer, dancer, actor and male model, who enjoys abseiling, turkish delight, hang-gliding, origami, skiing, orienteering (especially wearing a 50lb backpack), long walks by the sea, pussycats, Pekinese dogs and popcorn. When I’m not preaching, I am praising or maybe fasting and praying, whilst enjoying soaking in God, soaking in the bath, or just plain enjoying soccer. (And if you believe that, then you'll believe anything!)
The reality "of course" is that I have lost most of my own teeth, get up a couple of times during the night to pee, struggle out of bed in the morning, never find enough hours in the day, and being a true Celt, seem to alternate between suicide and homicide several times during my self generated tension filled days! Even so God loves me and I increasingly believe and embrace that statement. I love Him, very much indeed.
I was born at a very early age to Scottish Roman Catholic parents, brought up as a latch-key kid, sent to Roman Catholic schools where I was beaten by Jesuits (which, quite frankly, I thoroughly deserved at the time) lost my mum to lung cancer when I was just 17, left the church being disgusted by God and intent on the fulfilment of an utterly hedonistic lifestyle in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. To fulfil that ambition, I joined the submarine service, where to my shock surprise I started to bump into God again.
I was convicted, converted, born-again and baptised as a young sailor, aged just 19 years of age. A few years later I was called into the Ministry. Though having also spent many years as an Information Technology consultant, I reckon I have served in just about every position within the local church, and external to the local church, have served elsewhere in the Kingdom on various boards and even a Deanery Synod, so help me God!
I came into full-time ministry in 1997, and over the course of these subsequent years have spent not a few in further theological training. Now, you have to be insane to get involved in church planting, so I respectfully maintain that God tricked me into pursuing both this course of study and action. But for some six years, I studied Western church practice and models of church planting. It was of course, during that time and because of church planting, that the writing ministry of WhisperingWord successfully progressed.
Feel free to check out some of my other writings here:
It was in the back during a church planting ministry that I start to write daily devotionals materials and while the reasons they were originally written and
emailed to a growing database (we have sent well over one million emails out throughout the world) was to maintain some constant contact with those people we had been sharing the Lord Jesus Christ and the Bible with, this daily devotional email has since turned into two book sets of morning and evening devotions called 'Wake Up!' and 'Night Whispers', and from them and from my preaching ministry, a number of other books have come to be in print and have been found to be very useful by others in spreading the Word. In all these things I am supported by my wife of 30 years and have somehow still found the time to have two grown up children, (they were not grown up when we had them of course) of whom we are both very proud indeed.
Anyway, back to my favourite of churches, The Spring.
I was called to The Spring on 1st July 2008 and in God’s will, intend to spend the rest of my life here, labouring with others to become a church that plants churches, that plants churches, that plants churches. It’s a big job, but we have a big God. Truly we can say, our God is great! I do hope you can come and visit us at The Spring, and if you have the iron, to maybe even come and join us in this great work! It would be our delight to journey further with you. May I leave with a quote from one of my favourite preachers: “If there was ever an hour in which the church needed courageous men of prophetic vision, it is now. Preachers and pastors? They can be turned out in our schools like automobiles off the assembly line. But prophets? Where are they? The simple and humble men who are willing to serve and wait on God in the long silences, who wait to hear what God says before they go and tell the world - these do not come along too often. When they do, they seek only to glorify God and His Christ” A.W. Tozer .
