York Community Church

And it always comes back to the point where God says you cannot serve me and money.

Jim comes from coastal Fife. In his time, it was still a place of coal-mines, fishing fleets, manufacturing plants, old and new council estates, coal-dusted beaches and farms with fields of wheat as well as green pastures. People lived in communities where a child could roam outdoors but the moment he was wanted by his parents, they only had to release their where-is-Jimmy question into the neighbourhood and the question would be swiftly passed around until the child was found and safely brought home. Jimmy indeed was something of a free-range child, a house key round his neck testifying to the fact that both his parents were in full-time work. He loved the outdoors. He liked playing out with friends, but if the weather was too bad and none of them would come out, he would play in the gales, puddles or snow on his own, until hypothermic pain finally drove him home. Family legends tell of a house-entry routine where clothes came off to form a muddy pile while their owner was scrubbed in one sink and rinsed in the next before he could proceed into the carpeted interior. They also tell of escapades. In one of many, cows were liberated from their field to be chased up and down the high street.

School was where one had to go until age 15. It was about a day-by-day search for opportunities to spike the indoor drudgery with some fun. Jim was no stranger to the headmaster's punitive strap, usually for talking to friends when he was supposed to listen to the teacher. He passed his 11+ exam, but chose to go to the secondary school where his friends were going which, needless to say, was not the school where children who had academic ambitions went. In secondary school Jim often slept, because he did a 6.30am paper round every day and, as the years went by, his evenings were getting busy with going out to pubs and with girls. Otherwise he spent time playing sport, which was enjoyable because it was outdoors and he liked winning. His progress towards O-levels, however, almost came to a premature end when a random experiment of his in the chemistry lab ended in an explosion that filled the whole school with ammonia smell. But he was not expelled. He sat his O-levels and passed two of them, which poverty of result was a disappointment to him although it should not have been, given the almost total absence of any preparation. He left school at the age of 15, for an apprenticeship in the engineering factory where his dad worked.

The apprenticeship with its day release and night classes proved a lot more productive of qualifications than the school had been. He got two more O-levels within a year and, his natural brain ability being obvious to his teachers, he transferred to a further five-year specialist course in fabrication engineering. Although he did not exactly turn a new leaf as far as doing any home study was concerned, he now at least paid attention to what his teachers tried to teach in the classroom. He also earned a lot more money than before, which meant that the taste for partying he had acquired while still in school continued to be indulged. He partied hard at weekends, but he never missed work.

Jim's first contact with Christians occurred during the summer after the first apprenticeship year. A group of people approached him on the promenade where he lived and he started running away from them, assuming that they were a visiting gang wanting to honour the custom of beating someone up to start a feud. However, when they called out to him to stop, he did. They were from the Summer Mission. Jim accepted their invitation to visit the Coffee Club for young people they had just set up. He had been banned from all pubs in Leven, after an incident where he had hurt his head on a pub fire escape while drunk and the police had brought him into hospital for treatment. His usual haunts were now barred to him and he was glad to try what the mission club had to offer. He enjoyed the hot drinks and biscuits that were on offer there, the company of young people, their liveliness and lack of any embarrassment about what they were saying, singing and doing to praise Jesus. He also enjoyed mocking their beliefs mercilessly. It made an impression on him, however, that they did not pretend to have answers to all his questions, and that they were simply asking him to consider that he had nothing to lose from giving Jesus a chance. At home he asked his mother if there was a bible in the house and she duly found one, but it would be some time yet before he got truly engaged by what he read in it. Nevertheless, two weeks later he let himself be invited by another Summer Mission on the first day of his holiday in Nairn. He befriended the people in the mission club and enjoyed his conversations, with one girl in particular. One morning he woke up in his holiday caravan and felt a definite change in himself. He went back to the mission club just to be a part of what was going on there; not to pick arguments, because he realised now that belief in Jesus was not only theirs, but his, too.

This new belief of his, however, proved to be a long way yet from taking a practical root in his life. On returning home from the holiday, Jim and a few of the other new believers approached the local church with the idea of setting up something similar to the Summer Mission Coffee Club, but the church gave them only a perfunctory support and the venture soon fizzled out. Jim got back into his old ways, although he had to travel further afield to pubs and clubs, to beat the ban on him in Leven. Quiet nights at home became a distressing option to him as his parents' marriage was breaking up. However, the Christian young people of his town did not forget him and he accepted some of their invitations, such as to Friday night evenings at the home of a retired Baptist minister. When he was 18, he also accepted an invitation to a Christian youth event in Edinburgh, a performance of the musical, Come Together. He enjoyed its vibrancy and responded positively also to the evangelist who spoke afterwards. When the speaker said "there are some of you here tonight who just need to give your life to Jesus", Jim knew what he meant and joined him in saying a prayer. Then a girl of his acquaintance invited him to her church and he indeed became its member, although it was in the church youth group rather than the main Sunday morning congregation where he immediately felt himself to be at home.

He led a double life for a while. Attending the church regularly and getting increasingly involved in its youth activities, but still indulging in boozy times with old friends and in chatting up new girls with but one thing on his mind. Sometimes he turned up in church straight from a pub, not really able to disguise the fact. The people in church never condemned him when that happened, however; they just accepted him as he was and prayed for him. The double life ended on the first evening of Summer Mission in Southport, in which Jim's church youth group was taking part. Some eighty members of the Mission gathered for a prayer. Jim felt increasingly uncomfortable and out of place, a fraud. Then he broke down. Prostate on the floor, he emptied his heart of tears. His church friends rallied round him and he told them the facts of his life which he had been too ashamed to let them know before. He was a new man the next morning, no longer feeling out of place in the Mission, with which he was blessed to see many young people coming to Christ. Thus it took two years from the moment Jim first believed Jesus to the moment he finally made his full commitment to His discipleship.

The church friends who rallied round him that first evening in Southport included Ruth, whom he had started to date some time before. Their relationship blossomed after the Southport experience, as did their joint involvement in a host of church youth activities. In the winter they engaged to be married and became a man and wife almost two years later, as per agreement with her parents, when she reached the age of 19 and he was 21. He had just completed his engineering qualifications, with flying colours.

Their first son was born over a year later and all was going well when their trust in God came under a test. At the age of 23, Jim was suddenly called to have an open-heart surgery to replace a congenitally murmursome aorta valve by a stainless steel one. The call came while he was playing football on Friday evening and it required him to take his bed in the surgery ward on Monday morning. By then, after a weekend of prayer both at home and in church, Jim and Ruth knew the peace of mind that only God can give, when He is unreservedly trusted. The operation was a success despite a painful immediate aftermath, and it brought Jim an additional blessing in doctor's orders to do a lot of walking during his month-long convalescence. Jim loved the outdoors and it was no struggle to acquire a taste for long walks that remains a passion of his today. He on his feet and son Paul in his push-chair covered many miles together during that month.

On his return to work Jim accepted an opportunity to do contract work for BP in Shetland. It meant being away on the island for four weeks at a time, with ten-day breaks at home. The money was good and needed to pay the mortgage, but saying good-bye to Ruth and Paul at the end of each home stay was getting no easier. Jim managed it for a year, then he got himself a senior-engineer position in the head office of his company, in Stockton on Tees. Here Jim and Ruth were blessed with their second son, Daniel, and with belonging to a Baptist church whose minister was of Jim's age and himself new to both his job and the town. Family life and church life blossomed, but work life was now office-bound and full of paper. Jim changed companies after a year, to get back to being a hands-on quality inspection service engineer. The new company did contract work abroad as well as at home and, at age 26, Jim took up a lucrative one-year contract in Italy.

He went there on his own at first, to be joined by the family six weeks later. His new colleagues looked after him well and nothing was lacking in material comforts, but he missed his family. His inability to take part in the Italian conversations of the world outside depressed him. One evening four weeks after his arrival, he sought solace in the bible and as he opened it, a passage (Mt 6:24) caught his eye that told him that he could not serve God and money at the same time. He realized that he had shut his ears to God's calls to service the moment a lucrative career opportunity had come up. Now God was calling him again and there was only one reply. He phoned Ruth to share the news and she surprised him with tears of joy, for that was, she now revealed, what she had prayed for, for seven years. The family joined him in Italy and he saw his contract out. Then they returned to Stockton, where Jim did full-time voluntary church work for a few months, before moving to Berwick on Tweed, where both Jim and Ruth studied at a bible college. Soon after passing his finals (only by the grace of God, he says), he was accepted as a minister by the Baptist Union. Son number three, Sam, was born at this time.

During his studies, Jim acquired work experience in a Methodist church in rural Northumbria, in Summer Missions, and in Westgate Baptist Church in Newcastle. His first "proper job" was as assistant minister in South Parade Baptist Church, Leeds. After three years there, God called him to plant a new church in South Devon, Kingsteignton Community Baptist Church. Again, it was a blessed time in the church ministry and in family life too, with the birth of son number four, Jon. Over three years later, God called Jim and Ruth to another church plant, Morpeth Baptist Church in Northumberland. After four more blessed years, the family moved house again, when Jim took the position of Minister Missioner in Newbury Baptist Church in Berkshire, which was to be focused on outreach. That, however, was not how it turned out, as within a year both the other pastors left and Jim had to take on the overall ministry. After three more years, Jim and Ruth half expected to be called somewhere else but the offers from other churches that came, alluring though they may have been, were not backed by the clear call from God that had prompted the previous moves. Then the unexpected happened. Jim heard that Don Palmer, the full-time worker at York Community Church, was leaving for Canada and rang him up to wish him well. It was too late, however, Don had just left. Somehow, the phone call ended in Jim accepting an invitation to visit YCC. One thing led to another and the family moved to York in August 2001, for Jim to take up the vacancy that Don had left. Here he remains.

On Friday (his free day) late afternoons he can be seen entering his house, boots and gaiters in hand, all covered by layers of mud. He loves a long walk in the open countryside, whatever the weather.

P.S. - update: In obedience to a call from God, Jim and Ruth went to lead Livingston Baptist Church in Scotland. They went up there on 7 September 2008, after a special Commissioning Service that took place in Archbishop Holgate's School.