A very brief history

Ben

Hi, I’m Ben otherwise known as Dad, Benjamin (if I’m in trouble…) or “that man with the bushy beard”!

I had the immense privilege of being born into a (very) large family of believers. I remember growing up hearing the truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ almost daily and attending “chapel” (as it was known back then) every Sunday at what is now Hillfields Church Coventry.

Day by day and week by week I was faithfully taught and fed by my parents (Paul and Ruth), and the pastor of our church – Paul Watts.

It was not until I was ten years old that I first began to realise my own need for personal repentance and faith. I had been furtively reading “God’s Smuggler” by Brother Andrew, by torchlight at night (when I should have been sleeping) when God used the faith and heroic bravery of Brother Andrew to graciously show me my own need to repent of my own sin and to trust wholly in Christ as my only Saviour.

That night, I asked God to forgive my sin, to cleanse me from it by the blood of Jesus Christ and to live in me by His Holy Spirit. I experienced for the first time the joy of my sin forgiven and true peace in my heart. But I didn’t dare share this with anyone.

Only a few days later, God used the preaching of an old visiting Strict Baptist pastor – Mr Hallihan on Acts 8:26-40 – to convict me once again of my sin, my need of repentance (and baptism) and to publicly proclaim my allegiance to Christ. Mr Hallihan’s text was verse 36:

 And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?

It was as though God spoke directly to my heart! What was hindering me from taking my faith public? It was not a lack of knowledge, nor a lack of water, it was not a deficient Saviour, it was only my fear of what others might say. That night in the car on the way home from church I asked my Mum the very question that had convicted me, what’s stopping me from being baptised?

Soon after, meetings with the Elders were arranged and I was baptised a few months later.

Since then the Lord has faithfully lead and guided me through nearly thirty years of life! I have made many mistakes, He has made none. It was during secondary school (high school) that I first felt a call to “The Ministry”, although in my youthful pride and arrogance I believed I could do that ministry on my own terms using my own natural abilities, so after a gap year in Kenya I began under graduate studies at East 15 Acting School in London.

My goal was to graduate and begin life as a successful actor who also happened to be a Christian. It took less than two full terms for the Lord to show me how catastrophically arrogant and foolish that was! I’d had no idea how far a young man who professed faith in Christ could fall… I left East 15 before the end of the second term and returned home with no clear plan of what to do with the rest of my life.

Not many months passed before God graciously intervened once again and, through the outstanding Banner of Truth youth conference 2004, introduced me to the wonderful woman I would marry less than a year later. In March of 2005 Trish and I married, in her beautiful home town of Bradford-on-Avon. We settled in Coventry and by then I had secured my first role in IT.

Years passed, God blessed us with three children, a strengthened relationship and a series of good jobs in IT for me. But still I had no clear route to the ministry and a growing frustration with secular work. In 2014 we were introduced to the teaching and preaching of Matt Marino and Josh Bales who were pastoring a church in a place in the USA neither Trish nor myself had ever really heard of – Boise, Idaho.

Trish’s brother, Ian, had been perusing the excellent resource that is sermonaudio.com looking for lectures on some obscure part of Church history and stumbled upon some lectures by Matt at the Well Church. He was captivated, and began devouring all of the teaching and sermons he could get his hands on. Trish was the first to notice this “mini-reformation” in her brother, and soon discovered the reason. She began to listen, and eventually I was reluctantly persuaded to put aside my prejudice of all things “American” and listen too.

The teaching on Christian Education particularly spoke to us, and soon we had pulled our children out of the State run system and began our homeschooling journey. I say “we”, but as with most things, Trish was doing all the real, hard work.

In early 2016 I was able to visit the Well, with Ian, and it was there that God began to open my eyes to the possibility of serving Him alongside my brothers and sisters in Boise.

Josh and I grew very close over the following years. His patient, loving care for us as a family, even though we were more than 4000 miles away has been a precious gift. I was able to visit a further three times, helping to launch the Boise Reformation Conference in 2017, visiting for the first time with Trish in 2018, and then again in the summer of 2019 on the end of a long work trip to North Bend, OR. and Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Fast forward to today, and in God’s perfect timing, we are rapidly approaching the date by which we hope to be in Boise – March 25, 2022!