The following is an attempt to respond to the invitation to give some background and context to my writing, mission and ministry in the Anglican Communion.

My faith in Christ came alive in my second semester at Hertford College, Oxford, in January 1974, where I was studying law. In the following few days, I met my future wife and joined a missionary prayer group - quite a week!

That summer, after a student mission in France, I changed to studying theology, since I was reading so much in my spare time. Ali and I were married after my graduation in 1977, and following a gap year as a janitor at All Souls Langham Place, we moved to Cambridge for my ordination training at Ridley Hall, and further New Testament studies at Selwyn College.

After ordination I served as a curate in inner city London for four years in Harlesden, and then, in 1985 as Church Mission Society (CMS) mission partners, we moved, with our two daughters, to St Andrew’ College, Kabare, Kenya in the foothills of Mount Kenya, where I served for seven years as Director of Studies and later Vice-Principal, in the diocese of Mount Kenya East, led by Bishop David Gitari.

During that time I was also on the Liturgical Commission of the Church of the Province of Kenya (now called the Anglican Church of Kenya), which was the background to Offerings from Kenya to Anglicanism (Cambridge: Grove Books, 2002).

We moved back to Cambridge, now with three daughters, and in 1992 I became the first Henry Martyn Lecturer in Mission Studies in the Cambridge Theological Federation and later Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity of the University. In 1995 I founded the Henry Martyn Centre for the study of mission and world Christianity at Westminster College, Cambridge and continued to lecture.

The Centre became the base for the British and Irish Association for Mission Studies and the Currents in World Christianity inter-university project, led by Brian Stanley and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which produced the Eerdmans series Studies in the History of Christian Missions.

While in Cambridge, I also served as an honorary curate at Holy Trinity Church and later at St Andrew’s Chesterton, and studied for a Utrecht University PhD, which led to the publication of Christianity Connected: Hindus, Muslims and the World in the letters of Max Warren and Roger Hooker (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 2002).

I enjoyed two sabbaticals at Yale University and became a contributing editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, based at the Overseas Ministries Study Center, New Haven.

In 2000 I felt called to return to front line mission work again and we moved to the centre of London, and I became vicar of St Mary’s Church, the historic, evangelical church of Islington. Charles Wesley was a curate here in 1739 and both John Welsey and George Whitefield also preached here in that year. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African Anglican bishop went to our parish school in 1826 and trained at the CMS Institute on Upper Street in 1842.

In 2003 Fulcrum was founded here with the aim of renewing the evangelical centre, and I became its theological secretary. I greatly enjoy, and am stimulated by, discussions on the Liturgical Commission and the Mission Theological Advisory Group of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion Network for Inter-Faith Concerns.

So, my writing is influenced by a deep love of the Anglican Communion, its world-wide mission, and the theological riches of its contextual worship.