About Ian
I did not come to pastoral ministry through a straightforward path, and I am not sure the straightforward paths produce the most useful ministers. Before I was ever a pastor I was a church member — sitting in a pew, watching what happened to a congregation when teaching drifted, when experience was elevated above Scripture, when a movement swept through and divided people who had been brothers and sisters for years. That experience shaped the way I think about doctrine, about the church, and about what is actually at stake when a minister opens the Bible on a Sunday morning.
I am the minister of Oldfield Free Church, a Baptist congregation in [location], where I have served since [year]. I was ordained through the Baptist Union of Great Britain, and I remain within that family, though not without tensions that I try to address honestly rather than pretend do not exist. I am also associated with the Evangelical Baptist Network, which represents the convictions I hold about biblical marriage, the authority of Scripture, and the evangelical identity that historic Baptist Christianity was built upon.
Theologically, the word I reach for most readily is Biblicist. What I mean by that is simple enough: I want to know what the text actually says before I ask what any theological tradition says about it. I am not a Calvinist, though I take Reformed scholarship seriously. I am not Arminian in the classic sense either. I hold to the unlimited atonement of Christ, to genuine human freedom and responsibility, and to the eternal security of every believer — not because believers are reliable, but because God is. I am dispensational in my understanding of Scripture, pretribulational and premillennial in my eschatology, and complementarian in my ecclesiology. None of these positions are held lightly or inherited uncritically; they are where careful reading of the whole Bible has consistently brought me.
On the Holy Spirit: I believe the gifts remain operative. I have seen enough of genuine spiritual reality — and enough of its counterfeits — to hold both convictions with equal seriousness. I was in a church that was torn apart by what arrived under the banner of the Toronto Blessing in the 1990s, and what I witnessed then did not look like the fruit of the Spirit described in Galatians 5. That experience did not make me a cessationist; it made me a more careful reader of 1 Corinthians 14. The standard for the Spirit’s work is not the intensity of the experience but the clarity of the gospel and the transformation of character over time.
BibleProclaimer.com and the @BibleProclaimer YouTube channel grew out of a conviction that systematic theological education should not be the preserve of seminaries and academics. The people in the pews of ordinary Baptist churches in Britain deserve careful answers to serious questions, and most of them never receive them. The Questions Project — which now runs to several hundred articles covering the full range of Christian doctrine — is my attempt to address that gap, one question at a time. It is written for the lay believer who wants more than a slogan, and for the minister or student who needs a starting point for their own study. It is not the last word on anything. It is an invitation to keep reading.
I use the English Standard Version as my primary translation and work from the NA28 Greek New Testament for detailed study. I hold to the inerrancy and full inspiration of Scripture, to the Protestant canon of sixty-six books, and to the literal-grammatical-historical method of interpretation as the only approach that consistently honours what the text actually is.
[A sentence or two here about your life outside ministry — family, background, how you came to faith — if you are willing to include it. An about page that is entirely professional without any personal window tends to read as guarded.]
If something on this site raises a question, challenges something you thought you believed, or gives you language for something you already knew was true, it has done its work. The goal is not agreement with me. It is growth in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ — which is, as Peter reminds us at the end of his second letter, where every serious engagement with Scripture is ultimately heading.