Why I Could No Longer Serve My Anglican Parish in the UK

Hew Gregory-Smith was an Anglican vicar and missionary from the United Kingdom. Hew began a long journey of reexamining his beliefs after he encountered challenges to what he believed and taught. Eventually, this led him to the teachings of the Anabaptists, and he moved his family to Ireland to join a Mennonite church there. In this episode Hew shares his testimony of how he came to Christ, and why he made significant changes to his beliefs about church.

This is the 271st episode of Anabaptist Perspectives, a podcast, blog, and YouTube channel that examines various aspects of conservative Anabaptist life and thought.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
It came to a head in a way. I began to become

(00:02):
braver in my preaching and began to preach
more like an Anabaptist from
the sermon, from the pulpit.
Did that have interesting results?
It had profound results. I was in trouble for
that. From my own congregation, rather
than... I mean, they probably
whispered it to those above me.

(00:30):
Hew, welcome to the podcast. So, you've had an
interesting story that we want to capture
in today's episode. You're originally from the UK
and were part of the Anglican Church,
I believe.
That's right.
And so, let's just start at the beginning and get
your story. Where were you born and
what kind of church
environment did you grow up in?

(00:51):
I was born in Singapore. My father was in the
army and the second from last man to leave
Singapore because it was a colony but had gained
independence and he was helping their
army gain the knowledge they needed to stand on

(01:13):
their own two feet. So, I was there for
the first three years of my life.
Now that's... Okay, so that's an interesting time
in British history, I guess, as that
colony is becoming independent.
It was independent already.
Okay.
It was...
Transitioning, I guess.

Transitioning. And church background (01:28):
he was
inclining and in later life confirmed as an
atheist. His parents would have been reasonably
regular churchgoers in the Church of England.
So that was his background and my mother had a

(01:53):
Catholic education but wasn't from a
Catholic family. So she went to a Catholic
school. So she had a knowledge of Christianity
that kicked in later, bless her, and it helped us
out of a hard situation.
And in her teenage years, she was involved with
the Christian science movement. So, basically,

(02:15):
that was often her default and she was
disillusioned with that. So
religion was not a big part
or Christian faith was not a big part of our
family upbringing. But we had lots of stuff
in our house that was religious. We had plenty of

(02:36):
little temple bits and bobs that we'd picked
up in bazaars and thieves markets and things like
that. So we had Buddhist scrolls on the
walls and Indian images, copper images or bronze
images of Indian holy men on the mantelpiece
and stuff. So we had a lot of Eastern, what I
look now as unhelpful junk. We didn't know

(03:01):
where we were. We were just sucking up the
culture around us and having none ourselves,
really. That was the way it goes.
Was there a lot of... Was
this from your father's travel?
My father's travels, my parents had been married
for some time before I was born. I was the
youngest of five and was 18 years younger than my

(03:24):
brother. So we had a very spaced family
and my father had done a lot of traveling with
the army beforehand. Then life went on
to Germany. We moved to Germany then and then
Nepal. It's probably in Nepal that I
had my first spiritual experience. It was

(03:46):
basically an out-of-body experience that I
first had. I was terrified by the whole
experience. I was only six
at the time or something like
that. I would just head into my parents' bed
after having this dream of just being
able to push myself around my bedroom wall and

(04:06):
float and look down upon my body beneath me.
That was disturbing. When I told my mother this,
she was quite stricken in some ways,
because she had messed around with this as a
teenager. This was back in the... Would've been
back in the 40s, 50s. She had seen it as a very

(04:28):
terrifying part of her own life. She just
realized that it had just transferred down the
generation to me. She said, "Well, look, Hew,
there's something that will work. Let's pray the
Lord's Prayer together." Upon praying the
Lord's Prayer, that ceased in my life, which
showed me something positive about Christianity

(04:52):
that I wouldn't forget.
This is age six, you said.
This is age six. Wow. It's a pretty early...
I had never been baptized. My older siblings had,
but there was no kind of any Christian imprint on
me at all. I was untouched basically at that

(05:12):
point. That was a
positive impact in my existence.
Nepal was a pretty frustrating place to a point
for me. I had difficulties in learning. I suppose
they would put it down as dyslexia. I was pretty

(05:35):
low in the class. I'm often being left behind.
One day, I just banged my head on the floor. "I'm
just with a load of babies. I want to do
something else." My mother said, "Oh, well, I
better send you to boarding school."
At the age of six, I was sent off to boarding
school, traveling with my sisters. They were

(05:56):
living in Nepal, my father and father. My father
reckoned that it was cheaper to send us to
boarding school anyway than to feed us at home
because the army gave such a generous subsidy
on education at boarding schools. Wow. That's
fine. Problem solved. Off to boarding school.

(06:18):
Is this boarding school, it's there in Nepal or
did you enter somewhere else?
No, it was in England. In Devon.
They send you to literally
the other side of the world.
Yeah, on the other side of the world.
For the school term? Then you come back?
They come back during the holidays. Wow. Quite
traumatic at the age of six.
Age six. Yeah, no kidding. That must have been

(06:38):
confusing at that age or maybe disorienting,
is a better word.
It didn't last forever though and the occasion,
was quite sad. My parents divorced in 1979,
and then that was the end of the boarding school
education. The army wasn't there to subsidize it.
It suddenly becomes a very expensive thing. I go

(07:02):
home and go to a village school,
a village government school. I had a big shock
coming because it was a very different world
to my boarding school world. Boarding school,
you've got lots of people like yourself,
soldiers' children's, diplomats' children's, the

(07:22):
odd African chiefs' children,
a huge array of oddballs. You all get on very
well. Then suddenly, you go to a village school
and you're this weird guy that everyone picks on
because you speak differently,
and you've traveled and they
haven't. It was a big struggle.

(07:47):
A certain superstition took part in that. My
family were pretty superstitious, actually.
There is a religion in everyone, and they were.
On one occasion, when we were down in Wales,
I willfully broke a mirror. My sisters came to me
and they said, "Ah, you. That's bad." That was

(08:09):
only 11 at the time or something like that. She
said, "That's seven years bad luck now."
To a degree, they were right because it was a
very dark time in my life and for seven years.
Things began to change when I went to sixth form

(08:30):
college in Torlton, a neighboring town.
There, I met a different girl. She was from a
Christian family and got to know her.
But I have to backtrack a little bit here
because, whilst I was still

(08:51):
at finishing off at school,
my brother and his wife had a first child, and
they wanted to have a Christening ceremony.
We went down to the local vicar and spoke to him
about it. He said, "Well,
the first thing I have to ask you is, have you
been confirmed and have you been baptized?"

(09:14):
My mother and I both had to answer that we both
were not baptized or confirmed.
We were out of the loop, so to speak, in the
Anglican mindset. That had to be done. We were
invited to come along to a confirmation class.
Can you define,
when he's asking you to be confirmed, What does
that mean? Also, for those who aren't familiar

(09:34):
aren't familiar with Anglicanism, What is a vicar? Can you define
that as well? A vicar would be a minister, a
minister who is responsible for preaching
and leading out the service prayers, visiting in
a parish area. Things are changing now because,

(09:54):
to a degree, in certain parts of the Anglican
world anyway, numbers are going down, so parishes
would be getting bigger. Then he would have a
responsibility of a village and its surrounding
countryside until the next village is hit. That's
helpful. Basically, your brother is going to the
local vicar and this is what he's telling them.
My brother wanted us to be godparents.

(10:17):
Well, he needed to be a
godparent. Of course, I was 15 at the time.
We went through this confirmation class and I
came out of it, not as a Christian, but I came
out of it believing in one God. Because, of
course, the upbringing we'd
had, there were gods all over the place,
in our house. Yeah, interesting. There were

(10:43):
works of art, let's put it
that way, but I think it's a
bit more than that because they would have meant
something to somebody else in a different way.
Anyway, as a result, I was going to be confirmed.
Then the vicar remembered,
"But you two haven't yet even been baptized."
Just before we were off to see the bishop to get
confirmed, he said, "Come over here." He baptized

(11:08):
both my mother and
myself. Then we went off to see
the bishop to get confirmed. The bishop then lays
hands upon you, which represents the giving of
the Holy Spirit. You then become a confirmed
Anglican. Usually at the time of 14 or 15 or
12 or 13, that's the time as a young person you
leave the Anglican church. There's a joke about

(11:28):
this in Anglican circles. Very often church buildings have
problems with bats and they're flying around
and dropping droppings on the furniture and what
have you. One vicar's
complaining, "Oh, we've got
a real problem with our bats." The other one says
to him, "Well, there's a way around that, you know."
"Oh really?" "But you've got to be careful. You

(11:50):
can't do things that are to bats because they're
protected." He said, "We don't. We baptize and
confirm them, and then we never see them again."
So that is almost the point of Anglicanism at
that time and it probably
still accounts to very much.
Wow. So it doesn't seem like there was much

(12:13):
expectation of continual
involvement after this point for you.
But having said that, it was an evangelical
Anglican church. So there was a degree of
expectation that we would continue and I did. I
continued to go to church and I would put on a
suit and a tie and go to church. In fact, I went

(12:34):
more regularly than my mother. Something was
drawing me there.
Could you pinpoint it at the time?
I think it was probably, there was a certain
sense of belonging, but what I didn't want to do
was to talk to anyone after the service. So once
the service was over, I shot out of there
straight away before anyone could nab me, because I

(12:55):
felt someone would gonna, "Oh, nice young person,
he's still coming to church. Let's go to speak to
him." And so I would disappear very quickly.
Anyway, back to the girl I met at Sixth Form
college. She was different because the young
bloods went to chat her up because she was
pretty. And I observed

(13:15):
this. Interestingly enough,
they kind of walked off. I thought, "What's this
girl? She's a Christian. She's not going to be
doing the things that we'd like to do with her."
And so, "Well, that's a bit different." And I go
to church. I got to know her, but then pointed

(13:40):
out what my worldview was, and she could very
clearly see. Though I attended church and the
Anglican church, she was a Baptist minister's
daughter. And though I attended, I wasn't a
Christian because I believed that the world
centered around me and others were just cardboard
cutouts that were convenient to help me pass my

(14:00):
time. That was how self-centered and rotten I
was. Anyway, to cut a little story short,
we had a friendship, but she said, "But I'm not
your girlfriend." And we did get pretty friendly.

(14:22):
Anyway, she invited me along to the tail end of a
beach mission service. I have to explain
about beach missions. This is going into the more
of the evangelical circle of nonconformity,
generally, in Britain. And they would, at seaside
resorts, they would have young people

(14:44):
looking after the bored children on the beach
whose parents were just sunbathing and maybe
just letting- the children were a bit unoccupied.
And so this youth group would wear blue shorts
or blue skirts, blue shorts, and yellow or red

(15:05):
t-shirts. So they would be identified as a
team of young people. And they would teach the
young people Bible verses. They would have a shop
where if people had learnt to say so many Bible
verses or achieved certain merits in the games
they did on the beach, they would occupy the
children and they would give a nice place for
they could get out of the sun, sunshade area

(15:28):
where they would meet and
teach them simple songs and
that sort of thing. But then they would invite
the children and the
parents back to a gospel meeting
in a local church that hosted them. And so I was
there at this service where a chap called,
I think his name was Nigel Lee, was preaching and

(15:50):
he gave a very clear gospel message.
And the gist of it to me anyway was that you
can't just walk on the fence.
You have to be for God or against him. He doesn't
take people who run with the hare and hunt with
the hounds. You need to be in his church or out

(16:18):
of it. There is no halfway point.
And I realized that I was attending church, but I
had no knowledge of Christ.
I knew about him, but he certainly wasn't
dwelling in me. And that there was an offer
of salvation if we would come to Christ and

(16:39):
repent from the sins we knew about.
So a gospel call was made and I was invited to go
up if I felt that my life needed to change.
And so that was back in 1988. I think it was on a

(16:59):
Sunday in August of 1988,
I gave my life to Christ.
Initially, there's a lot of work to be done on me
since, a huge amount. But that was a first step
anyway. And I at that point felt the indwelling
of the Holy Spirit. And
though God had to do a lot

(17:21):
more work with me, there was such peace in that
encounter with God. Interesting point though,
you know how self-conscious
you are when you're about 18.
I felt that I was going up with a great company
of others. But when I turned around,
there was nobody else. So God brought me up there

(17:45):
with the thought that there were many behind me
and there wasn't one person. So I'm sure Nigel,
as he preached there, was a bit disappointed that
his eloquent sermon and his forceful preaching
had only produced one person. But thank you,
Nigel, if you're listening out there, thank you.

(18:06):
I'm very grateful for your preaching.
Anyway, about a year before I went up to from
sixth form college, which is up to the age of 18,
19 to university. So I was accepted at university
in Abberistwyth initially to study geology.

(18:30):
But in geology, it was something that I'd started
when I wasn't a Christian and I wanted to do it.
I'm fascinated with it. It helped later on in
life with an interest in creation. But I felt
that the reason I was doing geology was just
about me. And those who are with me

(18:50):
were very much that way focused or on just
themselves. I felt I wanted to do something
better for the world, for God's kingdom, for poor
people. And I thought, well,
what can I do? I need to transfer out of this
geology to do something else. So I actually was

(19:12):
able to switch to doing agriculture with business
studies. And so I spent four years at
university in Abberistwyth. And I'm glad I did,
because I met my wife there who's sitting back
there out of range. And we met at St. Michael's

(19:37):
Church, Abberistwyth. And we had the ministry, the minister
at that time was the Reverend Stuart Bell, a
good, clear preacher of the gospel. And
I grew in my faith there, I have to say. It was
an evangelical,

(19:59):
small-c, charismatic congregation
that was showing some growth. And there was a lot
of outreach to students. So it was very much a
student. It was the hip student church to be in
at Abberistwyth University, very much definitely.
The majority of the students went there. And I
involved myself to a degree with the Christian

(20:21):
Union that was always having spats between
Pentecostals and Calvinists, generally speaking.
There was often flack there, but it was
nonetheless quite formative. Meeting
Jeanette, I met her in the street and it was my
flatmate. I knew Jeanette before I knew her.

(20:48):
And I was looking over his shoulder thinking,
"She's a rather nice girl." But my flatmate did
thought she was too. And he made no attempt to
introduce me. So it was a couple of years
before we met later. And at the time, our now
brother-in-law was the parish worker,

(21:12):
and he wanted to get us together, didn't he? So
he invited himself to tea and I thought, "Oh,
no, the parish worker's coming." And I was living
with a bunch of non-Christians
in an outlying town called Borth on the coast as
well. And suddenly, in come two parish workers actually,

(21:34):
and a girl with them. And it's
the same girl I saw in the street.
Pretty soon, we were seeing more of each other.
And Jeanette will laugh, but I had to talk to
her mother, didn't I? I got to befriend her
mother securely and then
everything fell together.

(21:54):
I was such a nice boy. Anyway, but when we got
together and we were
talking before we got engaged
about the importance of if we were to marry, we
wanted to be serving God in some form or other.
And what denomination were you at this point?

(22:16):
Still Anglican. We were still attending an
Anglican church. And we have at the time,
another brother-in-law, a future
brother-in-law, and Jeanette's sister,
were serving with an organization called Emmanuel
International. And they are an
interdenominational evangelical missionary agency

(22:39):
based in Canada. And we were very impressed with
Wendy and Glenn, my brother and sister-in-law, in
their work amongst the poor people of Malawi.
Jeanette actually went out to visit them. And I,
at an earlier point, had visited my sister

(23:00):
in Malawi. And so we had another thing in common.
And I actually gave you a radio to give to a
forest ranger I'd been for a
walk with. And so that was little things there
to do things, to make connections. And I

(23:21):
actually, at that time, I was
visiting my father in Malaysia.
And I sent Jeanette a postcard or two. And my
writing is absolutely awful. It's really bad.
So when Jeanette saw my writing on this postcard
that I'd sent her, she thought,

(23:41):
"Oh, this guy must have terrible
disabilities or something like that.
He's got such awful writing and punctuation and
spelling and everything."
Anyway, there you go. But she overlooked that.
And coming to the end of 1992,

(24:03):
I proposed to her and she accepted. And then I
had to ask her father. And very fortunately,
he said, "Yes, that's really good news." And we
got married the following year.
Then, following on from this desire to serve God,
we were impressed with

(24:23):
what Wendy and Glenn had to
say about the Emanuel International. But then, I
was also interested in
Tearfund, which is a British
charity that works overseas. But they said,
"Well, for the first year of marriage, we won't
even consider you because you need to have that
year of living together in your local culture and

(24:46):
getting through the teething problems of
marriage." And then we
asked Emanuel International
and went to some interviews there. And we said,
"Do we have to wait here?" And they'd say,
"Normally we would. Normally we would." But on
this occasion, they bent
the rules somewhat for us.
So we went off to training [in] Canada and Jamaica as

(25:10):
missionaries. And the way Emanuel International
worked, or maybe still works, was that you would
do your training first and then be offered to
churches around the world who like the look of you
and thought you'd be able to fit into
the programs they were offering. So it wasn't...

(25:32):
This was a little different than training to be
a minister, say, or something. This is different
than that. This is a missionary worker. This is
mission. Underneath the local church. So we
weren't going off... It happened to be an
Anglican church that we went to and I'll say more
about that. But before
that, I have to say, because it
was during training that we had our first

(25:54):
encounter with Mennonites. Because we come
from an Anglican background, the mission agency
wanted to shake us up a bit. So they like to put
you with a church that you had no experience of.
And so we were put in this local church of
Mennonites in a place called Stoville, which is

(26:17):
east of Toronto, east of Markham in Canada,
in Ontario. And we were with the First Mennonite
church. And I only discovered recently the First
was actually the name of the
denomination of Mennonites in Canada.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
I thought it was the first Mennonite church. And

(26:38):
in the UK, we have cub scouts. And if you're the
first troop of cub scouts to be in a certain
village or a town, you get first. And the other
one would have to put second and a third and
fourth if there were more of them being set up.
So it wasn't that. I discovered that recently.
That was the name of the
denomination of Mennonites.
And they would have not been as conservative as

(27:01):
you are, but they still retained. And I hope they
still do. And God bless you if you're listening
from you dear folks in Stoville,
First Mennonite church. You had a big impact on
our lives. And one of the things we remember
very clearly about that was the hospitality that

(27:22):
we were shown. After the end of the service,
we were always invited to someone's house for a
meal. They took us under their wing.
And I'll have to say a very amusing
cross-cultural
misunderstanding, a couple of them which took
place, which were quite telling at the time.

(27:42):
First of all, it was a simple misunderstanding.
Sunday School, for instance, came about in the
service. And for us, Sunday School was something
that those who are perhaps under 12 or under 13
would go to. But the
adults would be in the service
and the children would be out there somewhere.
But here, adults did Sunday School. So that was

(28:03):
something very new to us. So off we went into our
little groups. And we went down into the basement
to a men's group. And there, one of the fellows
leading it said, "Ah, lovely to see you. I've
brought some cider along to drink during Sunday
School." I thought, "Oh my goodness me. It's only

(28:24):
10 o'clock half past in the morning and we're
drinking alcohol?" What has
this mission agency brought us to? Oh,
that must have been a
shock. So then here we were.
Okay, well, when in Rome, do as Rome does. So we
were like, "All right, it's only apple juice.
It's okay. That's all right." And then that was

(28:46):
one thing. And the other
one was a bit more serious.
This was towards the end of our stay at the
church. But we were asked to do something that
was a cultural practice from our own countries.
And it happened to be the beginning of November.

(29:06):
There's a tradition in Britain called Guy Fawkes
Night. And it reenacts the time in history when
James I was the king and he had started
encouraging the Bible to be more widespread
and for the country to be generally a much more

(29:27):
Protestant nation. And there were subjects of his
who were Catholic who did not like this. And
among them was a man named
Guy Fawkes who plotted with
about 21 others to rent cellars underneath the

(29:47):
houses of Parliament and then pretend it was for
firewood storage, but actually be putting
gunpowder in there. And then on Guy Fawkes Night,
November the 5th, to ignite it and blow the House
of Lords/ Commons to smithereens with the
King. Then there could be an invasion because

(30:10):
everyone would be in disorder because all the
royalty and the nobles would have been wiped out with a
great explosion underneath the Houses of Commons/
Lords. And one of the plotters warned a
Catholic nobleman to, you know,
"You're one of us, don't be there tonight." But he

(30:31):
was a loyal subject to the King, warned the King.
And then the plotters were arrested and for their
treason, horrible things happened to them.
And so on Bonfire Night, an effigy of Guy Fawkes
is made in some places
and a big bonfire is put up

(30:54):
and the effigy is burned. And so we had plenty of
things to burn around the mission buildings in
Stoville. And we thought, well, let's do a
British cultural demonstration to our Canadian
hosts and friends. And so we had the sausage
sizzle and we had a big bonfire constructed.

(31:18):
And the accountant of the mission had this very
involved little daughter and she was really into
it as well. So we got some old clothes and
stuffed them with old wet
leaves that were lying around
because it was autumn or fall. And we made this
effigy of Guy Fawkes with a big floppy hat and

(31:40):
you know, big, big, big, small, moustache and
beard. And we had them all the time on fire. And
we invited the local churches that hosted us
because a lot of us were from Britain as well,
no others. So we all took part in it. And we had
this, you know, sausage sizzle and
big bonfire. And one of the guys from our church,

(32:00):
a young man, was a part-time fireman. And
he was absolutely disgusted and said, "This is
sickening." He was a Mennonite.
"This is sickening. I'm a part-time fireman and I
have seen humans burn in cars, in houses,

(32:21):
when I haven't been able to rescue them. And here
we are burning an image,
an image of a human being
that's made in the image of God." And I never
thought the same about fireworks night or
Guy Fawkes night from there onwards. Something of
his conviction made him brave enough to speak

(32:43):
out and challenge what had just happened. But the
two women spoke out as
well in the church service,
giving thanks for the way the church had helped
them. One of them's husband had broken his leg
badly and couldn't get the harvest in. And
basically the church people who could, pitched

(33:05):
in and brought in the harvest and helped out. And
another one, whose husband
actually tragically died.
The same thing happened. The congregation pitched
in and the harvest was taken in,
the day was saved. An immediate relief was given
to a problem that faced both women.

(33:26):
And to us, from our church backgrounds, that
spoke volumes. For you coming from
Mennonite backgrounds, that's just what you do.
But it wasn't something that happened
from our backgrounds. Yes, if there had been a
bereavement, you would
have had a very compassionate
visit from the vicar. And maybe there would be

(33:48):
some help from a neighbor farmer,
but the church would not have acted as a body to
help do what's done in the general sense of
our experience. That would have been neighbors
who may have been, but it just wouldn't happen
together. Not like a church, an

(34:09):
actual church unified in this way.
Is that just culturally or
traditionally? That's just the way it is?
I think it's something deeper than that. I think
it's something whereby faith and practice go hand
in hand in the Anabaptist setting. And they don't

(34:32):
always do that--not to say they never do that--in
Protestant/Anglican circles, but it's not
so common. It's very rare.
Well, it definitely made an
impression on you. It did.
Powerful. So you continue on from
this point, and you're still Anglican.

(34:53):
I'm still Anglican.
Basically, you've been Anglican this whole point
from when you became a
Christian on. Do you return
to the UK and continue life there then in the
Anglican church? Or what happens?
After that, we had some time building up our
funds. We went back to the UK for a while.

(35:17):
At the time, we discovered we were going to have
a baby. It was Richard, our first son.
He was born in England, in southwest England. Our
funding did come in. It did mean that we
went to Uganda. In Uganda, we were teaching as

(35:39):
well as being tutor for agriculture,
because we had to grow
our own food at the college.
Anyway, that was a long story. So it was suddenly
we're thrown into missionary life there.
Added to that, in northern Uganda, there was a
war zone. We were generally kept within the

(36:01):
confines of Gulu, but it was a very dark time.
You would often be
hearing gunfire in the distance.
And sometimes the conflict came very close, and
we would have bullets raining down on our roof
sometimes. And sometimes we had, on one occasion,
we had a tank fire outside our house, which

(36:23):
was quite... That's an experience.
That was an experience. It brought a lot of dust
down from the roughness.
Yes, it does. There's a lot of percussive force
behind a weapon like
that. So, wow. Okay, so yeah,
you're definitely getting a variety of experience
here. But it's
interesting. I didn't know Anglicans
were in Uganda, so you were connected with a

(36:45):
church that was already established.
They were already established.
Yeah, they had the first missionaries who'd come
in in 1911 to northern Uganda.
So that's just over 100
years ago. So not that long, man.
And they had tried to bamboozle the Africans with
technology initially by filming them,
doing dancing and throwing spears and what have

(37:07):
you. And that actually backfired badly,
because once they were shown the films of
themselves, they thought their spirits had
been trapped upon the screen. And so they thought
the missionaries were sorcerers and
kept well away from them. So it was actually a
long time that the trust was built up again.

(37:30):
Yeah, that wasn't a good plan. So
how long were you in Uganda, then?
We were there for two years.
Okay, so you went back to...
We went back to the UK and then did our second
year. So we were in Uganda from 1995 to 1997.

(37:51):
So after Uganda, you end up back in the UK and at
some point you become an Anglican vicar
yourself. So now that's a change. So what
happened there? What was the process?
Why did you become a vicar?
Why did I become a vicar?
Yeah.
Well, we had some shining examples of Anglican

(38:12):
ministers in northern Uganda.
They were working for a pittance. Sometimes they
would not be paid. They'd often have to
grow their own food to survive. And they were
godly men and still are as far as I'm aware.
That must have left quite an impression, because

(38:33):
you're describing an environment that
maybe we read about it in books or something, but
those of us living in the West just never
experienced chaos, like what you're describing,
and for someone to live in that environment.
It was the example of the men who
we knew there that made me think,
"Perhaps I should do that when I go back to

(38:56):
England and take up the calling of becoming
a clergyman in the Church of England, which is
what I know of. I know nothing else, really."
Yeah. I'm realizing that's a thread through your
story. The Church of England or the Anglican
Church. Yeah. It's definitely a large impact on
your life and these ministers you knew.

(39:18):
So becoming a vicar, what is that
process like? You go back to school.
You go. First of all, I have to see the Warden of
Ordinance. They are called a prebendary.
I visited a prebendary in the Church of England to
begin with in my diocese.

(39:40):
I told him what I was planning and why I would
like to be ordained and that sort of thing.
I had the experience in Africa. Basically, I
didn't realize there's a bit of a game to test
your calling. He kind of pooh-poohed everything I'd
done. I thought, "Why am I wasting my time?

(40:04):
I should ask the Church in Wales." This is
another Anglican sister
church to the Church of England.
Okay. I didn't know that.
So I said, "You're just wasting my time. Why
should I be trying to
prove to you that I want to...
when you're mocking me?" So I just left off and
then he's running after me and saying,

(40:24):
"No, come back. Come back." I said, "No. I'm
going to go to the Church of Wales now.
I'm not going to bother with this anymore." So I
didn't realize that it was a "test your
vocation to make you grovel." Now, my
brother-in-law who was

(40:45):
already ordained as a deacon
in the Anglican Church told me,
"That's what they do." So he said,
"Next time you go in for an
interview, don't be so quick to walk out."
So you stuck with it though.
So then I went to visit the similar setup because

(41:07):
I'd been going to college in Abberistwyth,
and going to attending an Anglican Church there.
I needed then to work through the
Diocese of St. David's, which was in West Wales.
And so I visited the Warden of Ordnance there,
and I met the bishop who questioned me. And I

(41:34):
went to a panel aboard and
I remember my own doubts being honest with him. I
said, "Well, I am dyslexic. I'm not really
great with those things." And there was some
retired major or something on the board. He said,
"Don't worry about that. You've
got a degree. You'll be fine."

(41:56):
So that was a part of the story. So then you're
then sent to Theological College where your
calling is tested still for three years if you're
under the age of 30. And I was under the age of
30. So I had to do a degree
again. So I went to the...
So you got another degree?
I got another degree in practical theology.

(42:20):
That'd be a four-year degree?
It was a three-year degree. It was basically in
an Anglican college being released into the
university to do the theological side. And some
of it would be in-house
training, and then going out
to preach in different parishes. You'd have an
experience of a wide range of churches in the

(42:41):
Anglican setup. And that was in the city of
Cardiff. So that's where I was based.
And so for three years I was there and it was
a... In the Anglican church, you've got
four groups within it that bicker and fight
amongst each other often enough.
You have the Anglo-Catholics
who are very like Roman Catholics.

(43:04):
They would perhaps have images and statues in
their churches. They would swing incense.
Some Roman Catholics would say, "That was like we
used to be before Vatican II."
Wow.
So quite medieval in their way of doing things.
But amongst them I've met men of great faith.

(43:25):
So I don't want to poohoo them too much. Some of
them are just in it for the theatricals,
which is very sad. So you have that group. Then
you have the liberals, as you do usually in any
denomination. They're often actually aiming to
change culture, the culture that's around them,
as much as they want to change those who are

(43:45):
being ministered to by them.
And you have them in the
Mennonites as well in their setup.
Yes. Then you have the Charismatics. Do I say more?
Okay. I've just never thought of Anglican
Charismatic combination. I don't know why.
I guess that makes sense now as you say it, but

(44:07):
whoa. Okay. That's interesting.
And then you have the evangelicals. Within the
evangelicals and the Charismatics, there's often
hybrids between the two. And likewise, between
the Charismatics and the Anglo-Catholics,
there's hybrids between them too. And maybe the
Charismatics and the Liberal system hybrids,
but generally the evangelicals and theologically

(44:28):
the evangelicals and the Anglo-Catholics will
probably have more in common than the
Charismatics and the
Liberals. So it's a bit of a muddle.
It's a bit of a muddle, but you're born into
that. And our church was
conservative Anglo-Catholic
and the Catholic changing to Liberal Catholic.

(44:50):
Oh, so you're in interesting transition.
I was from an evangelical background and
observing all this going on in the college,
the bickering and the fighting and the meanness
that was going on between the ordinands and the
ordinands and the staff. And it was pretty ugly
stuff, but part of spiritual formation, I'm told.

(45:13):
Wow. Yeah, because that's interesting to me
because what you're describing,
so many different churches denominations go
through that process where you have this old,
traditional old conservatives way of doing it,
and then it's changing and being updated or going
more liberal in certain ways. That causes all
kinds of, yeah, like you said, bickering.

(45:33):
Yeah, it certainly does. It's quite emotional,
emotionally charged atmosphere.
So once you complete your three years there and
you say you were preaching some in different
parishes, things like that, so you're getting
some experience, at that point then, are you now
officially a vicar or do
you have to go through more?
It doesn't happen so simply.
There's some more hoops to get through.

(45:54):
You are then assigned to a placement, a
teaching, a parish where you are ordained deacon.
And so as a deacon, you can preach and you help
with communion, but you cannot administer
communion to the congregation. You have to wait a

(46:16):
year and then after a year you're priested,
and then you can give communion.
You said "priested." I'm not
familiar with that term. What is that?
That would mean that you undergo a ceremony and you
become, and you're given a charge
by the bishop and hands are laid upon you

(46:38):
and you make a vow of obedience
to the 39 articles of the Anglican faith.
You then are allowed to conduct a communion service
after being a year of a deacon and observing it

(47:00):
happen, but hands off you're not able to do it
yet. Now you continue being a curate in your
position, so you've now been ordained,
you can take communion, you can go to old
people's homes and give people communion,
you can visit the sick and give them communion.
You have the power. Some would say "you're a magic

(47:22):
man now." No, I'm being a bit facetious, but
you're suddenly empowered.
Yeah, interesting. Now would you be called a
priest at this time? Is
that the wrong terminology?
No, it's the right idea to use that, but
generally if you're from an
Anglican evangelical background,

(47:43):
you generally prefer to use the term minister. A
priest often is, and you
might be called reverend,
whereas if you're from the Anglo-Catholic
tradition in the Anglican
Church, you like to be known as
father. So you could have chosen a number of
different title options here. If I wanted to,
I could have been a reverend father. Which one

(48:03):
did you choose? I was reverend.
Okay, so this is a process, but this is really
interesting because I'm not familiar with this.
Of course, being an American, not much
interaction with Church of England. So you
go through this process and you're now a priest
or a reverend or a father

(48:23):
or a vicar or whichever term
I guess we want to pull in here. So what's that
like now? That becomes your life.
Well then you're suddenly there and I was, I have
to say I was probably rather naive.
I realized I was now managing decline. Oh, that's
gotta feel not fun at all.

(48:43):
And it wasn't great, but I was doing my best to
preach the gospel in that situation.
And the inertia was tremendous. And I began to
rattle cages by speaking of the need to be born
again in my sermons and sometimes in the

(49:06):
parish magazine. That was something that ignited
an interest because someone who read an article
I'd written in the parish magazine was a Baptist
minister from a nearby town and he'd somehow read
what I'd said and he understood the reaction that

(49:27):
I'd got, which was pretty
bad. I think my training
vicar was a bit irritated with that. There was
someone lodging with the hairdresser up the road
in the terraced houses we lived in, in Pembroke
in South Wales by the name of Brendan. Brendan,

(49:47):
if you're out there, God bless you. I have to say
you used a sledgehammer to crack a nut,
but you got your point across. And your point
was, Brendan, that as a born again man,
I was in the wrong place. Some would argue
against that. Someone
would say you were in the right

(50:07):
place, you, because you're in it to win it. That
was what my evangelical
Anglican brethren would say,
"Hew your in the church to win it."
They wouldn't be saying the same thing now with what's happened
to the church. But anyway, this man Brendan

(50:30):
basically metaphorically took me by the scruff
of the neck and he told me in no uncertain terms
that I was absolutely wasting my time
administering in a church that was simply a

(50:51):
daughter of the whore of
Babylon. That was his reaction.
Now that's Plymouth Brethren speak. But he had a
reason for that because he had actually become
a Christian from a Catholic background and he was
originally Irish, interesting enough, and his

(51:14):
mother had been so annoyed by him becoming a
Christian that she had ordered his brothers to
beat him black and blue and there was no love
lost. So he was a man who
was wounded and bleeding, I believe,
from that traumatic experience of him becoming
born again and being rejected by his family.

(51:39):
So the Plymouth Brethren was all to him. But in
the conversation he had,
he mentioned the suffering of the Anabaptists in
Europe under the Catholic Church.
Well now that's
interesting. Why did he bring that up?
Because if that was his background and the
background of his upbringing had been Catholic

(52:03):
and he had suffered and come out of Catholic and
going into the Plymouth Brethren.
I understand now. Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. So he
could empathize with
suffering for what it had been,
the cost of his faith moving out of that. But
with the mention of Anabaptists in Europe,
a light bulb came on in my mind and I began to

(52:27):
remember our time in
Canada, which was about eight
or nine years before. I thought they were
Mennonites. They're
Anabaptists. That got me thinking,
do they exist in England? Do they exist in Wales?
Are they around? Are Anabaptists there?
The early days of the internet, type it in
Anabaptists and what pops up, there's the

(52:50):
Anabaptist network in London, Wood Green
Mennonite Church and the Bruderhof pop up.
I didn't have a number for the Bruderhof, so I
contacted the Wood Green Mennonites and
said, "Could I have a number for the Bruderhof
because you might have as your both Anabaptists?"

(53:12):
They somewhat reluctantly passed it on. Anyways,
they did. Thank you. And so
in the great scheme of things, but I have to say
at the time, the neighboring Baptist minister
had given me this book to read. And I don't know
if you've come across this one. I've heard of it,

(53:34):
but I'm not... How do you pronounce their name?
The Broadbent. The Pilgrim
Church by E.H. Broadbent.
This would have been produced by the... But I
think the man was Plymouth Brethren. He's passed
away now. But in the 1930s and 20s, he did a lot

(53:58):
of traveling throughout Europe and Asia,
making contact with surviving churches from
historical links and in the States as well,
Mennonites and Amish. So he spoke about the
continuation of the Pilgrim Church from the

(54:19):
Acts of the Apostles through history. So that
book opened my eyes to the existence of a
non-sacramental form of Christianity that existed
from the time of the Apostles.
And that was a really encouraging read. And to

(54:42):
anyone who's on a journey like me,
do read it. That was very helpful. That led me to
a point where I actually, for the first time,
resigned from the Anglican Church. I was probably

(55:05):
a little bit early in doing that.
But you had been a vicar
for how long before you did?
I had been a curate and that was someone who was
a priest in training, put it that way,
doing practical work. So I was resigning. But
that led me to a point
of, "Okay, so I've resigned.

(55:27):
Where do I go now?" "Yeah, where did you go?"
"Where do I go now?" We'd already visited the
Bruderhof. And my dear wife had made it very
plain to me that our family would have suffered
greatly if we'd gone to the Bruderhof because
community is valued at a higher standing
than family. So our family would be restructured

(55:50):
in a way that would have been too painful for us.
But what we did do at that point was to decide
that we would home-educate because we realized
that there was a change in the culture of...
because as we were
getting more spiritually aware,
I suppose, we were realizing that there was a

(56:12):
change in the culture of Wales,
that it was drifting away from its Christian
foundations and becoming
steadily more pagan and secularized. And this was
coming through to us in the state school
that our children were going to. My ---- view

(56:34):
somewhat naively was that I thought that
education should lift children above the level
that their parents achieved.
And that's something I hope that our school is
doing here in Dunwall East,
lifting children above to where their parents

(56:58):
have achieved to go beyond,
in a positive way, to the point which their
parents have. Anyway, I could see that in some
ways the schools were failing. How in their own
views, they were probably doing just fine,
managing difficult situations and compromising

(57:21):
where they had to and that sort of thing.
But it led me to be in a position where I was
still the curate, but taking devotions in these
schools and my children had been taken out of
them. So we were
home-educating and the Bruderhof had
helped us see that there was another way of doing

(57:42):
things. So that was
great. And there was an option
to home-educate thanks to the work of Winston
Churchill, who when he was a student, he had a
horrible time in the boarding school he was sent
to. And he would have
much rather had a home tutor
in his home and he didn't like school. And he

(58:08):
made a provision in the Education Act of 1945
that there would be an education at school or
otherwise. So within law...
That's on British law right now.
Yeah, in British law now. So there's a freedom to
home-educate in Britain.
I did not know that about Winston Churchill, but

(58:29):
that doesn't actually entirely surprise me,
now that I think about it.
He was quite insightful. And he said of
education, "The sad thing
is about education in Britain
is its main design is just to create workers for
our factories and soldiers for our empire."

(58:49):
Ow.
That's brutal.
That is brutal. I mean, that's what... And we
thought, "Well, education
should be more than that."
So that's an interesting piece of the story
because it feels like oftentimes home schooling
or home education or whatever is usually part of
the story for people that are going down paths

(59:11):
similar to what you've went down. And that's, I
think, an important piece because of how valuable
or important I should say education can be, what
an influence that can be on children.
At this point, you've resigned from
your position in the Anglican Church.
You're doing some exploring, I guess, testing
options. You're going down the path of home

(59:33):
education. Where do you choose to go from there
as far as church goes? This must have
been a pretty lonely time.
Well, having resigned, I was given a month to
think about it. And on the last day of the month,
I went to my bishop and said, "I think I made a
mistake. I can't see where I'm going to go."

(59:56):
And he said, "Well, we'll see if we can find a
square peg for you to go into rather than a round
hole." But at the moment, you need to spend some
time out. So I spent four months outside of the
Anglican Church. And I worked for a government

(01:00:19):
agency finding people jobs on the telephone,
which was an insight into how some people live,
which is a telephone operator. And
it was an interesting time to be out of the
church. So I came back in
and I was then sent for further

(01:00:42):
parish training, I suppose, as a curate in an
evangelical parish in a town called Aberaeron
on the coast of Wales, further north than
Pembroke. And there, I
found a different situation
but one that was somewhat... at face value, it

(01:01:05):
was a great relief. But I still had that feeling
that there was something better. And inside, I
was an Anabaptist still, though I had come back
into the Anglican Church. And I remember someone
saying to me, "Oh, it's good. It's really good

(01:01:26):
to come back to Mother Church." So I would have
gone somewhere else had
there been somewhere else.
So that's, I think, an important piece there,
right? Because there was this,
"You don't know where else to go." That had to
not have felt good. Did that feel, I mean,

(01:01:48):
almost like you're trapped. We don't know where
to go. Not trapped, but
we don't know where to go.
Or stuck. Having said that, there was Wood Green
Mennonite Church in London.
Are they still... But they're not there anymore.
No. But they did exist. So I kind of...
They sent some of the mailings to me and I saw

(01:02:12):
the books that they were encouraging.
I thought, "Wow, they're more liberal than many
of the liberals in the
Anglican Church that I know."
Oh, no. And I thought, "I can't go there." And
the Bruderhof, "I can't work with the Bruderhof.
What am I going to do? Where am I going to go?"
So I was in an evangelical parish in

(01:02:32):
Aberaeron and I moved there in about November. It
was during my second son's birthday and we moved
in November 1994. I knew eventually at some point
I would no longer be a curate and I would
become a rector/ vicar of a parish and no

(01:02:54):
longer be number two, but number one
and where the decisions were made. So I knew this
time was coming and I was wondering,
"What do I do in a decline?" I feel the church is
declining. I know that there's movements on the

(01:03:16):
way. They're going to make it a very difficult
place to work. It began with the blessing of
same-sex marriages and I knew it would go
further. What year did that happen?
It actually happened after I left. Okay. But you
saw that that was coming.

(01:03:36):
I saw it was happening and someone close to me,
who I was very disappointed in,
actually took part in the ceremony doing that
with the knowledge of his bishop,
but it was just done for a pastoral reason. I
think of the same-sex relationship.
It really saddened me and in a way propelled me

(01:04:06):
to seek for something else. I thought,
"This is going in a bad way. I can see the
writing on the wall. If
these things are happening and
they're being tolerated, then sooner or later
they're going to be the norm."
And Jeanette will remember, I was on my knees by the
bed for many, many, many nights just wrestling

(01:04:30):
with the Lord, wondering what to do. You see, as
an Anglican vicar at the time,
I would be required to remarry divorcees, to
baptize infants who had no clue about what they
were entering and whether they would ever enter

(01:04:51):
it anyway. Many times a baptism service or a
"Christening," as it's called, would be no more
than an excuse to get drunk by the families
participating and have some photographs taken
with the baby in the Christening garb that had
been passed down the generations. There was a lot

(01:05:12):
of feeling of deep pain and concern.
Through the homeschooling
channels that we had came a leaflet about
an Anabaptist conference that was going to be held in

(01:05:32):
Oxford by the Nationwide Mennonite Church.
Now, they didn't have a presence in the UK, but
they were seeing what the interests would be.
And so I thought, "Well, let's go and find out."
I phoned first of all and said,
"What do you believe in? What are your standing?
What do you stand for the Bible? What do you

(01:05:54):
stand for?" As he spoke, I thought, "Well, I
could have truck with these people. I could
find out more about them because at least it
sounds more like the Anabaptists that I've read
of in history than the guys I'd heard of in
London." So we went along to the conference.
And at the conference, we encountered a lot of

(01:06:20):
other homeschooling families who were having
similar ideas. And there were even some people
from Ireland there. Now, Jeanette met Barbara
and Dan Yoder who are based here. And in my
speaking, I never actually spoke to them,
but they had a church up and running. And as I

(01:06:45):
went through life in the parish,
being the number one from where the buck stops,
so to speak, I was now in charge of the parish.
And I had my struggles. I wanted to see what was
happening in the churches
before I got inducted to
become the rector of the three churches they had

(01:07:09):
given me in that group of parishes. And so I just
went along in ordinary clothes to sit in the
congregation to see what was going on the week
before I was due to be inducted. And at one of
the churches, I was approached by two men

(01:07:29):
at the end of the service and they said, "We hope
you don't mind. We're in a partnership."
And I thought, "Oh, oh." And I was thinking about
what sort of partnership is that.
So I went and had a visit with them before my

(01:07:57):
induction and said, "You spoke of being
in a partnership. What sort of partnership are
you in? And is it a business partnership or
something else?" And they said, "Oh, it's
actually a civil
partnership." Oh, I said, "That's a
difficult one. There's a difficult one for me. I
will have a problem with that. Let me explain.

(01:08:20):
I'll be as clear as I can. I'm not going to drive
you away. I'd love it if you continued to come to
the church, but what I can't do is to give you
communion because in your
current state, that would
be causing you harm." And to begin with, they

(01:08:40):
said, "Well, where do you get that from?" And I
flicked into the Bible and showed them the
passages that were relevant to that topic.
And so I thought, "Oh, they understand. They've
taken it well." But then there was a letter
to the bishop and letters going back and
forth. And then the harvest service happened
where they were going to be playing. One was

(01:09:01):
playing the organ and the
other one was going to be
doing a reading. And one of them played the organ
very badly and the other one refused to do the
reading and walked out of the church. And that
was the last that we saw
of them. But it wasn't the
last of the letters going back and forth. It

(01:09:21):
wasn't the main church, but the church,
it was the second biggest church in the group.
And the parishioners wanted me to explain what
had gone on, why I'd taken the stand I had taken.
So there I was in my black cassock with a table
in the church and the church group assembled

(01:09:43):
around me, having taken advice from a senior
evangelical clergyman to explain to them the
history around the church's view on same-sex
relationships and the biblical view, the
traditional view, the line that was taken

(01:10:06):
historically hadn't just changed. And their view
was you must change with the times and
it'll be okay. So the couple actually went to a
neighboring church down the road where they made
a home for themselves. Sadly, one of them passed
away and the rumor went round that I had refused

(01:10:27):
to bury them. So there are lies and there are sad
things that go on. But throughout this
difficult time, brothers and
sisters from the Mennonite church, from
the Nationwide Mennonite church visited and encouraged me
in this time. So I have a lot of respect for the

(01:10:50):
nationwide Mennonite church in their outreach and
we make it a practice to visit their conference
annually in the UK each year to support them in
their work in the UK. At this time, as well,
was a shift in my thinking as regarding the age

(01:11:16):
of the earth and what the
Bible says and the order
of creation and the trustworthy of the scriptures
from the very beginning. I should have mentioned
this earlier because that would have... we've shot forward
a bit. But it became more

(01:11:37):
and more clear to me that
if I could trust through organizations like
Answers in Genesis and the Creation Ministries
International and their view and their scientific
proof and evidence that the world is much younger

(01:11:58):
and the Bible story fits much more easily in that
young earth situation. If I'm to trust that,
and I did, then the words of Jesus in the New
Testament, which back up the creation model,
need to have special attention to them. So I was

(01:12:20):
now looking at the New Testament through the eyes
of someone who'd been convinced of the validity
of the old with a completely new set of eyes.
I was looking at the commands of Jesus, the Son
of God, in a way that I'd
never really looked at it
before. I'd looked at it as a sort of… I'd

(01:12:41):
looked at scripture in a
flat way. It was all sort of one
and you kind of blended the commandments together
and what Jesus said was sometimes trumped by the
commandments and the law. But then when I seen
how the Old Testament could be trusted,

(01:13:06):
I thought, "Well, now let's look at the New with
fresh eyes." So in a way, my contact with
would probably generally be more mainstream
Protestant in their line with creationist views,
open my eyes to Anabaptism in a very fresh way.
So the teaching on the two kingdoms

(01:13:31):
became more of the bedrock of my faith now. And I
could see that the mingling of the church,
the Anglican church with the
world was something that was toxic.
When you… It sounds like you were right in the
mix of all of that. You know that

(01:13:53):
managing decline is something you said and then
these other changes and
shifts that were happening
and how the church was approaching things, "Oh,
we need to change with the
times," things like that.
And you're right in the middle of that. And you
mentioned two kingdoms, which is a foundational
piece for the Anabaptist worldview. How did you
hear about that for the first time? Was it like
you read the Sermon on the Mount and you're

(01:14:14):
looking at it with different eyes now and saying,
"Oh, wait a minute," or do you read a book about
it? How did you encounter that teaching?
It would have been a very helpful book that was
passed on to me by a Nationwide brother,
now brothers, but they did say at the front that
they didn't believe everything that David Bercot

(01:14:37):
spoke of in the book. They weren't completely on
board with him, but there's an overall framework
of what this book spoke of, The Kingdom that
Turned the World Upside Down.
And the way Christ's
teachings do that to a human life and even to a
society, if the society allows that, are immense.

(01:14:59):
And the idea of the two kingdoms became very
apparent in the reading of this book and opened
my eyes up and made Scripture much more clearer
and plainer in my understanding of it. So yeah,
that was another influential book in my walk.

(01:15:20):
Another book and film that I would recommend.
Our church doesn't encourage film watching, but I
wasn't in it at the time.
It's like a documentary, but there's a book as
well that goes with it. And it's by a man I have met,

(01:15:40):
actually, a Myron S. Augsburger, and the book is
about the life of Michael Sattler,
called Pilgrim of Flame. And that's a very good
read. Michael Sattler's life was an inspiration
to me in the way he lived and died. And in the

(01:16:02):
capacity of someone who was ordained within a
Reformation church, I empathize so much with this
man. I wasn't suffering the way he was,
but spiritually I was. It came to a head in a
way. I began to become braver in my preaching.

(01:16:25):
And began to preach more like an Anabaptist from
the sermon or from the pulpit.
Did that have interesting results?
It had profound results. I was in trouble for
that. From my own congregation,
rather than... I mean, they probably whispered it

(01:16:46):
to those above me. And
the Anglican Church is very
hierarchical. You have to remember that. It's not
a local body of believers, such as the one
that I'm part of here in Ireland. It is quite
hierarchical. So what's said is monitored.
There's a series of sermons that I preached on

(01:17:07):
the Beatitudes called God's Manifesto. I seem
to remember that. So I preached through the
Beatitudes. And I'm very sad to say, but I did
make enemies of my congregation. Not all of them,
quite a few of them who were influential.

(01:17:28):
And one day after speaking out at a larger church
gathering called the synod,
because we were then told at the particular Synod
about what we could and couldn't discuss
anymore in regards women in ministry. We were

(01:17:52):
told it was no longer a negotiable or something
for discussion. It was to be taken as norm now.
And anyone discussing
that would not be considered
to become an ordinand in the up and coming years
to come. So I just felt that was incredibly
draconian. Even if I hadn't at the time had any

(01:18:15):
strong views on it, for that to be said
was pretty draconian. So as a result of my
speaking out against that in the Synod,
one of the influential people in the church was

(01:18:37):
doing the congregational prayers. And I was,
again, in the front of the church. And I found
that I was being prayed
against by my congregation.
Okay, so that was probably

(01:18:57):
a disconcerting experience.
Yeah, it was disconcerting. And then at that
point, I realized this was the end of it,
but it was a curious sensation. I was kneeling at
the prayer desk in the front of the church,
as the prayers were being said. And as I was

(01:19:19):
praying, I felt that I was being lashed on the
back as each prayer was prayed, that I was being
beaten. But the wonderful thing about it was that
I felt a peace that Christ was with me in that
time. And I suppose at

(01:19:40):
the time, I had been reading
this book as well. And this book caused action.
It's called the Anabaptist Vision. And it was
written many, many years ago, in a very short
period of time, it was written overnight by a
man called Harold S. Bender, because he had to

(01:20:01):
explain the Anabaptist position to the President
of America and various military officials as
regards the stance of non-resistant Christians,
of the plain variety, the Anabaptist variety. And
this book encouraged me to act upon my

(01:20:22):
convictions. And I phoned up my bishop and handed
in my resignation. Normally, you have to wait
three months before you can leave. He allowed me
to go in two. We then
came to Ireland. The thought
was that after six months, there would be a
church in England to move to,

(01:20:43):
and that our time in Ireland
would be six months of living in an Anabaptist
community and preparing ourselves for a life in
the UK, in an Anabaptist community, church. But
as it was, the Nationwide
Mennonites took 18 months
to come. And after 18 months had been and gone,

(01:21:05):
our savings was spent. The children had settled,
and I had five children at the time. They had
settled in the community here as much as they
could. And we'd run out of money, and I was
working. I formed a little
business. We were baking and
gardening, and life in Ireland was for us. So six

(01:21:30):
months turned into you live here now.
We live here now. Yeah, six months came and went.
A year came and went.
Eighteen months came and went.
And when we were asked to come over, I had to
say, "No, I'm afraid.
We've made our home in Ireland
now, and we have been blessed. We've been living
here for nearly 15 years now." I have to say that

(01:21:55):
life in an Anabaptist church is not a bed of
roses. There are times when you'll be frustrated
and you'll be annoyed with your brothers and
sisters. But you know deep down that you will
never find the perfect church in this world. But

(01:22:17):
I would say that in the scheme of things,
I'm not condemning other Christians in the church
denominations they find themselves in.
But I find as a Christian, it's more easy to live
within the structure of scripture

(01:22:40):
in an Anabaptist church than I would in a
Protestant or a Catholic or Orthodox church.
That would be in my readings and studies. But
within those denominations and movements,
there are Christians who I respect highly. So

(01:23:05):
it's a strange position to be in,
but there I am. And the other thing is that I
wanted salvation for my children.
And that's something both of us have wanted, both
Jeanette and myself. That if we have to sacrifice
something, some comfort, some privilege, some

(01:23:29):
entitlement for the sake of our children's faith,
we will do it. Even if it means leaving the
safety net of a golden cage.
And that brings us to today essentially. Yeah.
Wow. Yeah, what a journey. Like

(01:23:51):
one of the things that stands out to me in this
is how it wasn't just a
straight linear path. It's
like you're here, we need to be here, take the
steps, arrive, here we go. It seems there was
a lot more to it than that where you're
exploring, you're learning.
Could be here a week. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think it's easy to want to try to

(01:24:12):
rush things sometimes. We hear from a lot of
listeners and it's like, "Okay, great. I'm going
to go join a Mennonite church and we're just going
to do this right now." You're getting to a point
and I'm looking towards my wife now.
And I don't know. And part of me is like, "Okay,
that's great. They're looking for a church to
join wonderful, but these things do take time." And

(01:24:33):
your journey, Emily, was years.
I would say that it took me seven years to leave
the Anglican Church and five years before we
joined this one. So we took a process. It's a
process. And I would recommend anyone going

(01:24:58):
on a pathway like we have gone on to take your
time. Take your time, but
don't take too much time.
I think there was a point in our life. We
realized the age of our children was rising
and it's not easy to do something as we have done
if your children are in their teenage years.

(01:25:20):
It's not easy. It's not impossible, but it's not
easy because their way of thinking will have been
majorly influenced by the world. Even if it's the
homeschooling group you're part of,
it's something that I certainly felt was
important to mention. Now, I

(01:25:42):
mentioned earlier that I had
come from a military background. Both my father
and my brother were in the British army. When you
come from a background like that, you think
rather like that. That had
been a goal of mine at one
point when I wasn't a Christian to just follow in

(01:26:02):
my brother's and my father's footsteps and
become a soldier. Some of that thinking needed to
be challenged. A book, if you're coming from
a military background, because sometimes the idea
of joining a community like the Anabaptists,
you think, "Well, they're all wearing uniforms.

(01:26:23):
Women are wearing this and men are wearing that."
It's all tickety-boo. Just because you're wearing
those same uniforms, you'll get on all right.
It's not that way. We don't operate like the
military. We are on the
side of the kingdom of God.
Prayer and love are our weapons. A wonderful book

(01:26:46):
to look at is A Change of Allegiance by Dean
Taylor. I've met Dean. We had time together in
Lesbos working with refugees there.
Dean is a former US military soldier who managed

(01:27:08):
to sign out as a conscientious objector,
but he had to go and think deeply. He's now a
bishop in an Anabaptist church in the States.
But in his time in Germany, he was deeply
challenged about what he was doing and whose
kingdom he was in in the military. It's a

(01:27:30):
profound book, and it's helped me on my journey
from the background that I was part of to coming
into the Anabaptist world and what I believe is a
helpful way of living the Christian life. Dean is
quite the man. I had the honor to

(01:27:53):
interview him a few times. Quite the story, and I
think it's stories like that that are very
helpful for others because they can find pieces
like, "Oh, yeah, that's something I'm struggling
with," or, "I'm trying to understand that too."
That's why I'm glad you're willing to share your
story too because I don't know who else is

(01:28:15):
listening. I know we have Anglicans listen to
this podcast for sure. We hear from them, and
they have questions sometimes. "Well, have you
thought about this or what about this?" I think
as well. There are some Anabaptists
who think that grass is greener on the other side
and think perhaps that Anglicanism is for them,

(01:28:40):
and maybe it is for a while. But if you are an
Anabaptist and you're thinking about becoming an
Anglican and you've heard of some good Anglican
Christians, and there are plenty of good Anglican
Christians, and some of their teaching is very
wonderful, but consider

(01:29:02):
this. You may be satisfied,
but what will it do to your children, your wife,
and in the long run your
family? Bear that in mind
if you're considering the leap in another
direction from a former Anglican.

(01:29:22):
So that's something I wanted to ask you. Who
knows the different
journeys everyone is on that's
listening to this. Maybe they're very satisfied
with their church situation. They found a good
community to plug into. But my guess is there's a
lot of people who don't have that.
I can believe that, and they may have had some
very negative experiences from their church.

(01:29:45):
But I would say, don't give up on the Anabaptist
way of living. And in the States,
particularly if you're coming from the States,
you have a lot of options
to move to, whether it's
slightly more progressive or slightly more
conservative or a degree greater in either

(01:30:06):
direction. But bear in mind that there is a
temptation if you go too far in a progressive
direction, then you'll begin to surrender
biblical standards. And that's a dangerous point.
But if you go too far in the other direction, you

(01:30:28):
can end up entangling
yourself with man-made rules.
So yeah, there are some which are helpful, and
there are some which need to be adapted for a
changing circumstance. And so it sounds like what
you're saying, don't be too hasty.
Don't be too hasty. Yeah, it's a serious thing.

(01:30:51):
And you think it through, you know, as I mean,
in your story, you know, it was some time of
really wrestling through this.
Yeah. Yeah. I would like to leave any of you
listeners with these words of Scripture. They
spoke to me very strongly as I wrestled with God
over the decisions I'd make in my life.

(01:31:12):
And this is taken from the Gospel of Luke. And
it's chapter 14 and reading from verse 23
to verse 34. "Now great multitudes went with
Jesus, and he turned and said to them,
'If anyone comes to me and does not hate his

(01:31:35):
father and mother, wife
and children, brothers and
sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be
my disciple. And whoever does not bear his cross
and come after me, he cannot be my disciple. For
which of you, intending to build a tower,
does not sit down first and count the cost,

(01:31:59):
whether he has enough to finish it? Lest,
after he has laid the foundation and is not able
to finish, all who see it
begin to mock him, saying,
"This man began to build and was not able to
finish." Or what king, going
to make war against another
king, does not sit down first and consider
whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him,

(01:32:22):
who comes against him with twenty thousand, or
else, while the other is still a great way off,
he sends a delegation and asks conditions of
peace. So likewise,
whoever of you does not forsake
all that he has, cannot be my disciple. Salt is
good, but if the salt has lost its flavor,

(01:32:44):
how shall it be seasoned? It is neither fit for
the land nor for the dunghill,
but men throw it out.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.'" Those are
verses that help me to rather set my face like

(01:33:06):
flint and make a move. And I would say, my wife
isn't next to me at the moment, but she's
supportively sitting just out of shot from the
camera. It wasn't easy making the move to come
away from the Anglican Church. It was a sweet

(01:33:31):
setup we had. We had a home. It was our home.
We had a beautiful Georgian house that we lived
in. We had a field and we had
sheep on that field and the
children would help me tend their hooves.
We had a life... that was a stressful life, but it

(01:33:58):
was a position in society.
There's a certain pride in it still. You went
through a lot of giving up,
a lot of grieving even of things that you had to
leave behind. It would be easy to package a story
like this where, "Oh, everything's wonderful

(01:34:19):
now. We came through that
and we landed it where we
need to be." That's not the full story. Another
thing is that you may have come from quite
a pronounced or prominent worldly position and
coming into an Anabaptist church. You might think
that you have all the answers and you're the

(01:34:40):
bees' knees. You are the
one who can actually solve
some of their problems. Maybe they should put you
in a position of leadership because you've just
come from a position of leadership, but don't
think that way. You need to humble yourself
and learn from them. Just take

(01:35:02):
time to find your true position and to
not rush into a situation, but to humble yourself
under the brotherhood and not think that you have
all the answers because when you realize there

(01:35:23):
have been a fair number of splits in the
Anabaptist movements and painful things like
that, and whilst that's a
weakness, it's also a strength
because it has allowed a continuation of the
original dream of the Anabaptists

(01:35:44):
from the time of the radical Reformation. You've
given us a lot to think about in this
episode and I think that the piece that sticks
with me is I was born into the Anabaptist
churches and that's what I know. It's easy to
just be okay. That's just kind of what we have.

(01:36:06):
You take it for granted, I suppose. For someone
like yourself who had to go through a much
longer process, a pretty difficult process, you
bring a perspective for people like me
that I think we really need to hear. There is
value here and don't just quickly,
as you were saying earlier, don't just quickly
jump ship and "Ah, we're just kind of done with that."

(01:36:30):
I think that that's a really valuable piece that
we need to keep in mind.
Yeah.
Well, Hew, thank you so much for being willing
to share your story with us today.
Mm-hmm. Thank you for listening. I hope it's a
help to someone out there.
God bless you for listening.
And I just want to say too, we have a lot of
listeners, at least over the years, from the UK.

(01:36:51):
So hopefully if some of those are listening to
this, maybe we'll reach out and we can find some
more people there that have these questions. It
is possible, you've shown that it is,
to walk this path. So yeah,
thank you again for sharing today.
It's been quite
soul-searching, but quite cathartic too.

(01:37:13):
Yeah. Wow. Well, thanks again.
Well, thank you very much
for listening. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this episode with Hew.
If you found this interesting, you should check
out this episode we did with David Bercot, where
he describes how he used to be an Anglican priest
and then explains why he left. And you can find
that linked in the description down below.
We also have a whole separate second YouTube

(01:37:35):
channel and podcast called Developing As A
Servant, which is a class that Frank Reed taught
at SMBI back in 2014. All of that is freely
available as a podcast and on that YouTube
channel, which again, you can find in the
description down below. Thanks again for
listening and we'll catch
you in the next episode.