I didn’t grow up in a Christian house. My parents weren’t believers. I became a Christian when, at 16, I picked up a Bible one day and read it. Whole thing.
And that was it. God stirred my heart, and I knew I wanted to follow his Son, Jesus. I knew God wanted to offer forgiveness to me, and he wanted me to offer it to others. So I went off to school, off to seminary and then into parish work (Anglican Church).
So from the very beginning, I had this great love of the scriptures. It’s how I became a Christian. And I kept reading the book of Acts and looking at the church, then reading the Gospels and looking again at the church, Paul’s epistles and back at the church — and I couldn’t shake that there was something amiss.
The life and mission of the church and the disciples seen in the Bible was almost completely missing in the communities I was a part of. I had some pretty momentous experiences with God over the first 10-15 years of ministry and tinkered around with some different things with mission and discipleship, but it all came to head when I became the lead rector at St. Thomas Sheffield in 1994.
It was a church rich with a tradition of new missional expressions, a pioneering spirit, a church that had started what Eddie Gibbs, at Fuller Seminary, called the first alternative or “post-modern” (not in the theological sense) worship service. It was called The 9:00 Service.
And to be honest, The 9:00 Service was a truly amazing environment.
During the 1980s, it really became quite the magnet for new missional approaches as some of the best leaders in Europe and North America were coming to see what they were doing and how they could learn. Unfortunately, as oftentimes happens with wildly successful churches, the leader turned quite inward and became almost sociopathic, and if that wasn’t enough, deeply immoral. We don’t need to get into all the gory details, but it was ugly.
This congregation, which had by that time planted off of St. Thomas as its own church, was closed by the Church of England because of those reasons.
I was called there as the senior pastor — they call it the “team rector” — in 1994, a year after that congregation had left and a year before it was closed. And because of that, we were caught right in the middle of it. In fact, to this day, it is the largest and longest-running church scandal in British history.
This is what I walked into.
It ran forever and ever and ever.
We were on television every day and on the front page of the newspaper all the time because the only physical building that could be associated with this congregation was our building, even though we were no longer together. We got every ounce of bad press.
