What do you do at SIM UK?
The short answer is a bit of everything! I lead our Leadership Team (LT) and, together with them, lead our amazing staff team. I represent SIM UK at events and with other organisations and networks and foster our collaboration with SIM International and SIM offices around the world. I provide spiritual and organisational leadership and ensure the development and implementation of our strategy. I help to keep SIM UK aligned with our vision, mission, and values and most of all, seek to keep us focused on Jesus.
Meeting with our mission workers is very important to me and I love cheering them on and encouraging them. My role also involves connecting with churches and church leaders, as well as speaking at churches or events.
As director, I’m also responsible for ensuring compliance with UK laws and SIM Policy, Principles and Practice, in collaboration with our Board of Trustees.
There’s also a lot of emails and Zoom calls but thankfully, I’m out and about quite a bit too.
What makes you passionate about working for SIM?
Every person’s greatest need is reconciliation with God. There’s nothing more important we can do with our lives than make disciples of Jesus and I love that I get to be part of a passionate and gifted team of people who are playing their part in doing this.
Jesus is worthy to receive the worship of all peoples. We’re drawing more people to know and worship Jesus in communities around the world. What an incredible calling!
Every day, around the world, SIM mission workers are sharing the gospel, providing life-changing medical care, teaching God’s word, discipling new believers, running vocational training programmes, serving exploited women and children at risk, and much more.
Finally, having served as a mission worker in a few different countries, I can relate to those who are serving cross-culturally in some challenging situations. Ensuring we provide good member care, in partnership with sending churches and the SIM teams on the ground, is hugely important to me.
You’ve been serving as SIM UK director with us for just over a year now. How have you seen God working through your job this past year?
I don’t want to underestimate how miraculous it is that SIM came to exist and that we’re sustained as an organisation day by day. It’s all from God. One of SIM’s core values is being dependent on God. It all has to be supernatural, by prayer. It can be tempting to think that we got here, or that we saw certain results because of our experience, skill set, or resources, etc. All of those are from God too!
More personally, I’ve seen that God has used me to bring encouragement to specific people, enabled me to speak into some situations and helped us make progress with our strategy. I’ve been enabled to inspire people to be involved in world mission or serve cross-culturally. One highlight was speaking at a world mission evening at a university CU where the students were hungry for God and really excited about playing their part in his mission.
What are you excited about for the future of SIM UK?
There remain many places in the world where Christ is not known or worshipped. Where people are yet to hear the gospel and yet to have an established church they can be part of. I’m excited about the role we get to play in seeing people reached with the gospel in least-reached places. We want to see an increase in the number of SIM UK workers serving in such places and the UK church informed and engaged with the need and opportunities.
We’re engaging with a lot of people interested in serving with us and have several enquirers and people getting ready to go.
I’m also excited about partnering with more UK churches and about growing our SIM UK community. We’d love to see a network of individuals and groups across the UK passionately engaging UK Christians about world mission and connecting them with SIM UK. Get in touch if you want to be part of an SIM ‘Champion Community’!
We also love supporting, encouraging and resourcing the UK church in local cross-cultural mission.
In what ways do you continue your ministry in life outside of work?
At home, my wife and I seek to keep Christ at the centre, pray, and model trust and dependence on God. We love having guests at our table and staying with us. Having moved house, we’re getting to know our new neighbours who are open to hearing more after a recent ‘God-conversation.’
We’re part of Hope Church in Ipswich, where we serve in a few different teams/ministries. We have been group leaders and speakers in Called to God, a programme to prepare people for cross-cultural mission. Also, people who are exploring cross-cultural mission sometimes reach out and we meet with them.
How can we pray for you?
During the Hebrides revival, Duncan Campbell said the following, which I’ve had over my desk for many years:
“These are days of much activity in the field of church and mission work, but no amount of activity in the King’s service will make up for neglect of the King himself. The devil is not greatly concerned about getting between us and work; his great concern is getting between us and God. Many a Christian worker has buried his spirituality in the grave of his activity.”
- Pray that I keep Christ at the centre of all I do as UK Director and help us to do that as an organisation.
- Pray that I will manage my time and prioritise well when a lot is going on.
- Pray that I will be an encouragement to those I meet with.
- Pray for our witness as a family in our local area.
- Pray for wisdom and insight as I lead.