Mike Cain
Mike writes of himself, "The alarming thing about being brought up in a place as fantastically dull as Guildford is that the older you get the more you find yourself reflecting on what a pleasant place to live it must be. As with so many other well-drilled Guildfordians, I looked good from a distance, but the aftermath of my parents' divorce increasingly took the edge off my appetite for doing anything. What kept me going was a discovery I made through my best friend at school.
"His family were Christians, and they showed me the sort of love and kindness that made me want to find out more about this Jesus they followed. It was his love in coming after us, in entering our world and dying our death, and his promise never to let his people go that captured my heart.
"However, it wasn't until the end of my time as an undergraduate reading English at Durham, that my head was fully captured. What haunted me was the possibility that Jesus was just an existential answer that happened to suit me. It took some quite painful wrestling before I came to the clear conviction that He was indeed the one who made sense of the whole universe.
"After an MA in theatre in London, it became clear that the one appetite that had now replaced all others was to tell other people about this Jesus. This meant studying theology in Cambridge (my favourite memories of those three years being Wednesday afternoons staggering around a hockey pitch for Selwyn) and then on to a first job as a Church of England minister in Wimbledon. At the moment I am on a steep learning curve working in Leipzig, a city in the former East Germany."