Our Team

Karen and I come as a pair and I thought that you might like to hear a little bit about our story. We are both what is sometimes referred to as “cradle Methodists,” having attended Church from when we were small babies.

I was born in the village of Calverley in West Yorkshire which sits midway between the cities of Leeds and Bradford. I have one brother who is a year older than me, both my parents were extremely active in the village chapel, so it was inevitable that my brother and I would be absorbed into the “Chapel culture” and attended Sunday school and I became a Church member aged thirteen.

Karen’s paternal family were evacuated from Guernsey during the second world war and settled in Bradford and like me, Karen’s family were involved in the life of one of the other Churches in the same circuit. Karen has two sisters both younger than her and they all attended Church from an early age.

I left school at sixteen, chiefly because my dad was seventy-two that year and after a lifetime of working in the woollen mill as mule spinner, he was retired, and my brother and I had to go out and earn some money. All I wanted to do was to work as sales rep, chiefly so that I would be supplied with a company Ford Cortina, I was very driven, and my dream came true and in my late teens I was travelling the length and breadth of the country.

The only problem with my career choice was that I wasn’t very good at it, and aged twenty-two, I was promoted into a management position and spent the next twenty-five years working in what became known as logistics management, running large distribution centres.

Karen and I met at the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs MAYC London weekend in May 1980, my brother and I sat behind her and her friend on the coach, he married one girl, I married the other. My brother and sister-in-law celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary last year and Karen and I mark our Ruby wedding in September 2025.

We hit a rocky patch in the late eighties when both my parents died, our eldest daughter Laura died when she was just sixteen hours old, and Karen’s father was involved in a fatal traffic collision. But against all this sadness we were blessed with our two girls, Amy and Emma.  I was working hard in my management role and Karen was working as registered childminder, looking after a string of children who became an extension of our family.

After being a local preacher for fifteen years and having felt called to the ministry for many years, I had never followed my call, because with a young family, taking time out to attend theological college didn’t feel viable. Things changed and the Methodist Church opened a pathway for training part time while working full time.

Looking back, I don’t know how I ever managed it, I started my training in 2001 while working full time, spending time on placement in a neighbouring circuit, and being a husband and dad at the same time. Relocating was always a big deal, and we were stationed to Hethersett, Framingham Earl, and Brooke in the Norwich Circuit in September 2005 and I was ordained at the Blackpool conference of 2007.

What is fascinating is that my maternal grandmother grew up in the National Children’s home and for most of my life I knew nothing of her story. I have now discovered through research that her mother lived in the village of Brooke in Norfolk, the very place where my presbyteral ministry began, and my great, great, great, grandfather grew up in the village of Sporle in Norfolk during the early nineteenth century and candidated for the Primitive Methodist Ministry as an eighteen-year-old following a camp meeting in the village and served in and around East Anglia.