About

I’m Ben.

It seems to me that since time began, God has wonderfully used mankind to further his purposes and grow his kingdom for his glory despite our propensity for letting him down. Abraham tried to pass his wife off as his sister (twice) but became the Grand-daddy of all of God’s people; The great King David slept with a girl he fancied and then had her husband killed; Peter denied he even knew Jesus at the crucifixion and then preached that great sermon at Pentecost and founded the Church. The list goes on.

I too am a fool. I became a Christian when I was only 4 years old. I used to be quite proud of this fact, but I am beginning to realise that God probably got hold of me early not because he was so keen for me to be part of his team, but actually because I am such a slow learner and there was more work to be done on me than most.

For most of my life I have wanted to be a teacher. I went to university knowing that I would go on to a PGCE course afterwards, and I then got a great job teaching Geography and Games in a grammar school in Birmingham. Lots of people tried to get me to think about full-time christian work, but I was quite convinced that teaching was me for life – I have very strong opinions that there is a great need for Christians in the secular workplace, and I was going to stay there.

To cut a long story short I left school-teaching in 2008 to work for CampXL and take up the position of Director of Ministry at Gaines, their countryside retreat centre. Despite me and my big ideas, God moved me and my family to work in full-time ministry and gave us the privilege of training apprentices and talking to young folk about Jesus.

This has forced me to think more about various issues relating to youthwork, theology , worldview, philosophy . . . and blogging has proved to be a useful tool in crystalising some of those thoughts. This is essentially therefore a fairly selfish exercise, but if any of what follows is useful to someone else then that’d be great.