21 years of XLP

The phone rang back in 1996. My vicar called to tell me that there had been a stabbing in the playground at a local school, and that he had told them that I’d go in and see what I could do. I’d been in London a relatively short period of time having grown up in Chelmsford in Essex. I’d visited London as a school kid, and couldn’t get the tragedy of poverty and exclusion out of my head as the class caught sight of cardboard city – people living in boxes under Waterloo Bridge – some barely out of their teens, while others wore the scars of long-term homelessness. I fairly much decided then and there, I needed to do something.

I came back a few years later as a gap-year student with Oasis, and after getting married to Diane, we moved into a small flat on an estate in Lambeth and I took up the post of youth worker in a local church. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, my heart was beginning to change and my life would never be the same. I was learning that God loves them all – eve...