With the statistics of church decline grabbing column inches and headlines on a regular basis, Sorted magazine caught up with Alanzo Paul to hear his drug-fuelled story of transformation and new faith.

What was your upbringing like?

I had quite a normal Canadian upbringing with loving and present parents, as well as an extremely athletic sister who lovingly toughened me up with wedgies and banter. We were a really happy family who played board games, built snowmen, went sledging, and did other such activities that one can enjoy when it’s a brisk -40C winter day in Canada. I grew up in a nominally Catholic home and when we did go to church, I didn’t really understand its meaning, significance, or relevance. Nostalgically, I reminisce on how religious holidays such as Christmas, from my perspective, had the primary function and focus of amassing presents. While Easter, for me, equalled delightfully gorging one’s self on copious amounts of chocolate bunnies.

Unbeknown to me at th...

Denzel Washington is a man with a deep sense of mission in life. It extends to his family, his movie career, and most importantly, to his faith in God. The son of a Pentecostal preacher, Washington has long been driven by an abiding belief that we are summoned to bring greater good to the world.

“We all have a spiritual nature and I don’t think we should deny that – we should embrace it,” says Washington. “I am trying to suggest that there is a higher calling to life and you can interpret that any way you want. My belief is that we are all born with a purpose to bring something good to the world and not just think in terms of our narrow self-interest.

“I have faith that we have a greater purpose in life and that is what inspires us to be good men and women and it’s up to us to take responsibility for living up to a higher morality than simply whatever base instincts move us. ”That powerful spiritual message regularly finds expression in the characters the 63-year-old Washington h...

Ed Stafford was bitten by the bug for adventure from an early age as a Cub and then Scout. Four years as an officer in the Devon and Dorset Regiment can only have sharpened his appetite for adventure, and after leaving the army he undertook an incredible two-year expedition to walk the entire length of the Amazon. Aired on television as Walking the Amazon, it was an adventure described by another legendary explorer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, as “truly extraordinary” and has been celebrated with an array of awards and Guinness World Records. He has been commissioned for several shows for Discovery Channel since 2012 and Sorted’s Martin Leggatt caught up with him between filming for his new show First Man Out.

You’re in the Guinness Book of Records for your epic Amazon expedition and received loads of accolades. When you set out, did you think it would be that big a deal to people?

I think I did realise that it would be a big deal to people, because so many people told me, “That’s impos...

In the centre of Kibera slum, Nairobi, Kenya, on what used to be a rubbish dump, stand three schools, a boarding house for teenage girls, a church, a medical clinic, some outhouses for animals and a basic kitchen. There are fewer open sewers and more roads here than anywhere else in Kibera and every day 1,400 children come to learn and be fed.

In January this year a team of six British women left the Midlands to spend a week helping in one of the schools. It’s hard being a child in Kibera slum. Some drop out of school when they are eight to work on the rubbish dump, rummaging through the waste looking for things to sell. There is a high rate of unemployment and alcoholism. Girls are vulnerable to sexual exploitation and trafficking. A 12-year-old girl’s education isn’t as valuable to a Kiberan father as the dowry of cows her marriage might bring. Rachel and Hannah from Hinckley, Leicestershire spent the week with the teenage girls.

“They were aged between 15 and 19 and most hadn’...

Jim Caviezel, who plays the physician and evangelist Luke in Paul, Apostle of Christ is no stranger to taking on challenging biblical acting roles, following his portrayal of Jesus in the 2004 film The Passion of the Christ.

Despite reportedly receiving warnings from Mel Gibson that playing Jesus would hurt his acting career, he took the risk.

During filming he suffered from pneumonia and hypothermia, was struck by lightning, accidentally scourged and had his shoulder dislocated. Years later, he admitted that good roles had been hard to come by since, but stated he had no regrets about taking the role.

Following The Passion of the Christ, Caviezel used some of his fee from the film to pay for three Chinese children with cancer to receive medical treatment. Along with his wife, Kerri Browitt, who he married in 1996, they ended up adopting the three children, saying: “They are people, just like us.”

He also used the platform of such a high-profile role to begin to give m...

From firing blanks to conceiving some new life in your leadership

In 1st June this year, I helped a friendly middle-aged woman understand something she’d never figured out:

“Why am I happy donating to children on Comic Relief,” she asked me, when I mentioned working with charities “but when a well-known children’s charity knocks on my door, with pictures of children, I feel the opposite of generous, and want to slam the door?”

I explained that to be generous, her brain needed some level of emotional connection and the fellow at the door – by intruding on her evening – had burned any possibility of that. I was lying on my back and I had an ulterior motive in explaining this to (we’ll call her Carol). An ageing Polish man sat nearby, fiddling with my intimate regions.

The Diazepam® Dilemma

She was the nurse. He the surgeon. I was the patient and I’d been a naughty boy.

If you’ve had a vasectomy, you’ll know you’re meant to take 10mg of Diazepam (another name for Valium)...