Me and Deb recently gave our testimony at our local church. A few people have messaged saying they wish they could have seen it, so I have tried to capture the essence of it here. At the bottom of this post I have put a link to a video which captures the essence of our journey to Christianity – but before we get there – a few notes on our backstory.

We both became Christians 19 years ago, so neither of us were brought up in the faith. We are both of the generation when state schools were strongly engrained with Christianity. In my own case – my school had a Christian service at the start of every day, where we said the Lords prayer and sang traditional hymns. Also, my Religious Education class was all based on the Bible – mainly the New Testament as I remember. Although my grandmother was a lapsed catholic, my great grandmother was  an obvious believer – and I have early memories of her taking me to some Salvation Army services as a child. She also started to attend a more modern church service on a Sunday evening near Newcastle city centre- with the church sending a bus around many of the local streets to pick up attendees – we lived around 4-5 miles from the centre of Newcastle, so the church was working hard to encourage attendance from the various estates around Newcastle.

When I was around 14, this somehow intrigued me and a friend- so for around a year – we attended this church – taking the weekly bus ride with a group of people who were at least 60 years older than us! When we got to this church for the first time – I remember being amazed to see a lot of young people there – and the worship band featured guitars – this was before I had picked up a guitar. When I think about it – this was one of the seeds that influenced my future life as a musician. More importantly, It was also part of my journey as a Christian – although I did not realize it at the time. In terms of the progress I made during these times – I do remember getting off the church bus one Sunday – I must have gone on my own that night – and I recall saying the words ‘I am a christian’! These seeds however were quickly forgotten – to quote Matthew 13:4 –

“And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them”.

So I was destined to spend the rest of my young adulthood not really thinking about Christianity at all. I went to music college, practiced a lot of guitar and then moved to London – where me and Deb were to eventually meet in 1985. However – I do think that God used these early experiences as part of my journey. 

Deb had a different background to me, although not being brought up a Christian, she came from a strong Methodist tradition, so she regularly went to Sunday School. So when we met in 1985 in London, neither of us were Christians.  We got married in 1988 and moved to Dorset in 1994 with our then one year old daughter Harriet. Due to God’s providence, we ended up moving next door to a church in Three Legged Cross  and started attending the Mother and Toddlers group there. Due to this connection, we started attending this church and became good friends with the paster and wife, who invested a lot of time in us. However, when Deb’s dad died in 1996, we lost any momentum we had gained. We ended up moving to a different part of Dorset and lived the next several years without God in our lives –  eventually moving to Wales in 2003

So onto the video below. Although we did not realize it at the time – our individual backgrounds and our time in the Church at Three Legged Cross did indeed have an impact on our lives—God uses things that we don’t even realize for good. We became Christians in 2006 and in 2009 – that very church in Dorset that we moved next door to asked us to give our testimony as part of their 75th ‘birthday’ celebrations. As we could not attend in person – we recorded our testimony using a trial version of some software I downloaded – so it is poor quality and has a crazy few minutes before the testimony actually starts – you will have to watch it to see. It was not made for public consumption, but we feel it nicely displays our journey up to this point – which was 16 years ago!

Anyway – here is our 2009 testimony of our conversion- three years after being saved. We hope it blesses some of you.