As noted in my bio (see ‘About Us’), I was born a ‘preacher’s kid’, brought up in the womb of a loving Christian family and church. I later went on to spend four years in theological training and then twelve years as a minister in New Zealand Baptist churches.

Looking back, I have always been prepared to stick my chin out and to question and re-examine the status quo and Christian traditions of my upbringing. This led me in the early 1970s to be one of the first to embrace the burgeoning charismatic movement, which at the time was regarded with much hostility by the vast majority of non-pentecostal evangelicals, Baptists included.

In 1972, when I entered the NZ Baptist Theological College, I was the only student who was a ‘charismatic’, but over the next two years a significant charismatic revival swept through the student body, much to the consternation of the College Board, principal and staff. In the ensuing years the ministers who came out of Baptist College from this and later intakes were particularly influential in transforming virtually the entire Baptist denomination and making it perhaps the strongest and most stable evangelical/charismatic denomination in New Zealand.

It was in the years after I left pastoral ministry that, through what I am convinced was the amazing guidance of God, I began to find the courage and, hopefully, honesty to begin asking ‘hard questions’ about some of the ‘assumed orthodoxies’ taken so much for granted among evangelical churches.