To start at the very beginning, I was born in Sunderland Tyne & Wear and was baptised as it infant at the age of one.  From there on we had no contact as a family with the church until, after moving several times, we ended up in a small village near Boston in Lincolnshire.  The village church ran a youth club on a Tuesday evening which all of the children in the village attended. I'll be honest, there was very little else to do!  At one of these sessions the vicar asked if anyone wanted to be confirmed. Six girls volunteered, one of them I had a soft spot for, so I thought I'd go and be confirmed too.  That is not to say I didn't have a faith - I believed in Jesus and I thought everyone did.  I just thought like everyone else you didn't have to be part of a church to be a follower.  I was duly confirmed and after six months of attending services my family moved again.  Then a long break of seven years of no church contact at all.

Driving home on summer evening about 6.30pm I had a “moment” with God.  It's hard to describe this moment other than I was told to come home, but this was not with words, it was just a kind of knowing that it was time.  The problem was I didn't know what it was time for  - I just knew it was time to be with God and to worship and to be in his presence.  So I drove around to the local library and looked up what he had to do to be a Vicar.  Three years at university followed by a four year curacy. Surely I was not called to this - after all I left school with only two GCSEs.  I drove round to the Church of England church and went in.

Entering into this different place I felt upset and confused to what God wanted me to do. I was mulling over hundreds of things in my mind when somebody came up to me and said "Oh you're a little early for this evenings brass rubbing event"  I explained that I wasn't there for the brass rubbing and she said that she would fetch us both a cup of tea. I guess you could see someone who was upset and confused.  She gave me the cup of tea and started just chatting with me.

It was at that moment in which I new for certain what God wanted me to do he wanted me to follow him, to be a Christian and I knew that the people in his church were the people who I wanted to serve.  So he could really say my Christian journey started with a cup of tea.

I started to attend church regularly every day with morning and evening prayer, and three times on Sunday. After a few months I started to meet the curate to discuss my spiritual journey.  She helped me grow in my faith and there I expressed to her that I thought I might be called to ordination.  She said she was surprised that it had taken me that long to express something that she had known since nearly the very beginning of my time at church.  From there I went to the College of the Resurrection, Mirfield as an independent student to study theology and to find out if I was being called to ordination or possibly to the religious life of a monk.  Two weeks before I left to go to college I met Jess and after three months we were engaged so it was pretty clear early on that I was not called to the religious life but called to serve God and his people as a priest.

From Mirfield I spent four years back in industry before going through selection and having been selected for training, I attended Trinity theological College Bristol for my ordination training.  I completed my degree, and here I am now in my curacy, with my wife Jess and daughter Lucy, in the diocese serving God and his people in the way in which he called me some 10 years ago.