My first brush with Dr Clifford Hill’s ministry was shortly after I arrived in Sheffield in 1979 to take up a post as senior reporter with the Morning Telegraph. One of my first jobs was to ring around all our many estate agents for an update in our Saturday Property section. I was soon in conversation with one of the city’s leading businessman, David T Ward, and it was immediately obvious that we were both on the same spiritual wavelength, and we have remained friends to this day.
In due course, David invited me to a Christian businessmen’s breakfast at the YMCA and gave me a lift there. On the way he was greatly enthused by Cliff’s new book, Towards the Dawn, which affected me in a similar way (I believe he gave me a copy). Its warnings about the inevitable consequences of sliding down the slippery slope away from our Christian foundations chimed well with my thinking, especially as a journalist who saw political and other events through a biblical lens and was frustrated by the Church’s tendency to separate the sacred from the secular.
It was during the previous four years while working in Fleet Street for the South African Press Association that I was strongly envisioned with the idea of a national newspaper interpreting the news from a biblical perspective, and was much encouraged along these lines through Cliff’s message. I subsequently attended a meeting at which he spoke and soon became aware of, and started to read, the Prophecy Today magazine.
It was much later, in 1999, that I met Nick Thompson, who had worked for national newspapers at senior management level, and discovered that he shared my vision. So we got together and prepared a business plan for a Sunday paper which provoked a quick response from a millionaire Christian businessman, who effectively promised £300,000 (a tithe of the projected cost) if all the parameters worked out. In the event, they didn’t. But it was a great encouragement, nonetheless.
Shortly afterwards, through Nick’s Hebraic roots links with Clifford Denton, a close colleague of Cliff’s for many years, we were invited to share our vision with the PT team at Moggerhanger in Bedfordshire, where we had many meetings over the next few years. We also met with high-fliers in the City of London and in the Houses of Parliament, and a report about our ambitious project even appeared in a Sunday paper, causing much alarm among the senior management of Johnston Press, for whom I worked as Selby Times sports editor. In the end, after undertaking fairly extensive market research, we managed (in late 2001) to produce an impressive dummy copy of Life on Sunday.
In some respects, looking back, we seem to have come very close to launching our product, for which market research suggested we could expect a circulation of around 250,000! Interestingly enough, this was the circulation number of an 18th century newspaper produced by William Wilberforce in his bid to “reform the manners” of the British public, an ethos not dissimilar to our own. And Moggerhanger was the very place where Wilberforce and his Clapham Sect friends had met and prayed for breakthrough in such ventures.
But though the project failed to get off the ground, we channelled the not inconsiderable finances (£64,000) raised by supporters towards a more modest online version of what we had envisioned and called it Lifebite – not unlike PT today in style and content. It ran for two years and four months – until we ran out of money in effect – and I believe it served its purpose in alerting readers to the severity of our problems in the social, political and spiritual spheres, and it proved a useful training ground for what we are now doing with PT.
Within months of its closure in 2010, while holidaying on the Yorkshire coast, God spoke to me very powerfully as I read Isaiah, specifically calling me to be a ‘helper of Israel’, and I have since concentrated my efforts in this cause – helping Gentiles gain a better understanding of God’s purpose for Israel while also reaching out to the Jewish people with the gospel they first brought to us. I have also been a volunteer for the Church’s Ministry among Jewish people (CMJ) since 2013.
So it was that, shortly after the re-launch of PT as an online site in 2015, Cliff invited me onto the Editorial Board and I took up the baton of editor-in-chief in the late summer of 2020. I am hugely indebted to Cliff for his inspiration, encouragement and friendship which has spurred me on to help fulfil a much misunderstood calling valued by all too few of our church leaders – that of skilfully, wisely and concisely interpreting the great issues of the day in the context of what the Bible says.