One-to-one with Charlie Cleverly

Charlie has been Rector of St Aldates, Oxford, UK since September 2002. Prior to going to Oxford, he was pastor of a French-speaking church in inner-city Paris for ten years. He founded ‘Embrace nos Coeurs’ and ‘Intercession France’, international conferences promoting intercession throughout France. Charlie is the author of The Passion That Shapes Nations and The Discipline of Intimacy. Here he speaks to David Coak of the Oxford Newfrontiers Church.

DC: Charlie, please tell us something about your childhood and how you came to know Christ.

CC: I was brought up in a very liberal household with my parents divorcing when I was fourteen and although I was drawn to spiritual things at school I pretty quickly put them away, especially when I came to study modern languages at Oxford and was trained to disbelieve.

DC: So what changed?

CC: My girlfriend, Anita, with whom I had had a stormy relationship when I was in Oxford, moved to Cambridge, became a Christian and rang me with this news. I really didn’t know any Christians. She persuaded me to buy a Bible and at the age of 24 I read the whole of the New Testament and was drawn to the figure of Christ who I found irresistible.

Anita would send me articles or books, Mere Christianity by CS Lewis, for example. I would then write five-page letters disproving every analogy. But really these were the last kicks of a person drowning in the love of God. One Sunday morning, persuaded by Anita, ‘to try going to church’, I went into St Aldates church in Oxford. I heard someone talk about Christ, the same yesterday, today and for ever, and how he was still calling people, just as then, to follow him. I made a decision to follow him.

DC: And Anita became your wife?

CC: I phoned Anita to tell her I had become a Christian. She found it hard to believe. I did eventually persuade her it was all true and she then agreed to become my wife. My whole life was changed overnight from really anti-Christian, dark and lost. God found me, I can’t ever understand how. I am eternally grateful to Him and to Anita. We married in 1975.

DC: And then children?

CC: We had two children, then a third, our first son, who died in a cot death in 1982. That was a terribly dark period and informed our whole life really because as God comforted us we found it possible to comfort others. As a result, I think we have always felt very close to those who are grieving. Then we had two further children. So we have three daughters and one son all of whom are now married.

DC: When did you decide to go into the Christian ministry?

CC: After becoming a Christian, I started working with a Christian theatre company called Red Rock which later became Riding Lights. I was often called upon to link the sketches together and preach on the streets.

I was deeply impacted by visiting St Michael the Belfry, in York, when David Watson was the pastor, where I fell in love with a demonstration of the Acts 2 church. They were serving the poor and the music sounded as though it came from heaven. They were living in community and they were impacting the city. I thought, ‘This is something worth giving one’s life for, to build this kind of community.’ So it was a combination of being aware of a capacity to preach and a deep love for a vision of the local church. I trained during 1979–1982.

DC: Did that new-found love for the church affect your ministry in Paris?

CC: When I was in Paris I found out more about the church. I think one is always being converted into a new understanding of what local church can be. There it was multi-cultural, all nations, touching poor and rich, infecting community in the centre of a world class city. I had been trained to think that only sociologically homogenous groups could grow. When I moved to Paris in the ‘90s I also learned about passion and heartfelt prayer and intercession.

DC: Why Paris?

CC: I had written a book on church planting in England which came out in 1992, called Church Planting, our Future Hope. We were aware that a

lot of people were planting churches in England, both the new churches and the older denominations. Yet we realised that in France and mainland Europe the situation was very different.

Anita and I had French degrees and could speak French reasonably fluently. We felt that the mission field was more needy over the other side of the Channel. I went to an event with a friend of mine, Lynn Green, in Paris and told the table I was sitting at about our feelings. The person opposite me immediately said, ‘Our pastor has just handed in his notice, why don’t you take his place?’ So that’s how we arrived at Belleville in the heart of inner-city Paris.

CC: I think everybody has to look at the culture around them and adapt their message in some way, like Paul in Athens. Personally my feeling is that it is easier to plant a church in a world class city, because often people have moved there for anonymity. They are in transition so they are open to the message. Certainly we found that in Paris. We just had to raise up a banner saying this is the church that we are longing for, the Acts 2 church, and people flocked, they came.

The necessity is that it is a house of prayer for all nations.

If you enjoy that and celebrate different cultures you are on to something because there is so much disintegration at the moment in society, so much separation, so much betrayal that if you can possibly construct community where people live humbly and consistently with one another, especially inter-cultural, it is a foretaste of heaven. It is a prophetic sign of what we are all destined for, many nations and tongues around the throne of God.

DC: Please tell us a bit about how you and Anita work together.

CC: We both feel, and always have done, called together to work in deed. Anita probably got the call to France more clearly than I did. We were both clearly called to move back to Oxford. A lot of our work is to do with friendship and entertaining and supporting leaders, releasing leaders, which we do together. Anita is also a good preacher and leader of different departments, and she helps me steer the vision for the church. I find she has often got more insight, or definitely a good corrective balance to me!

DC: You have written other books, one about prayer, and then recently about martyrs. Why these topics?

CC: When we were in France we met a friend called John Melindi from Africa and we caught his spirit of prayer, becoming convinced that the destiny of nations is not in the hands of multi-nationals or governments, but in the hands of the people of God who pray. So I wanted to write a kind of manual to call a generation into prayer because I believe that Europe is a continent that has forgotten how to pray and needs the spirit of prayer talked about in Zechariah 12:10, ‘I will pour out a sprit of grace and supplication.’ That book was called The Discipline of Intimacy and it was all about the Biblical models of prayer.

When we got to Oxford we were aware of what had happened there 500 years ago with the martyrdoms of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley on

Broad Street

. Having in front of me every Sunday hundreds of students who may be called, I think, to the gift of courageous suffering for their faith, spurred me to research and write a book about people who had been prepared to sacrifice even their lives for the sake of the gospel. So The Passion that Shapes Nations came about.

DC: You mention Oxford’s history and heritage. Do you find that has benefit or disadvantage, or both? How do these affect the proclamation of the gospel?

CC: The great advantage of Oxford is that it is a multi-cultural city, also with probably 60,000 students in it. People are coming in who are in transition and therefore open to changing their minds, many of them international students. In the last year we had a Japanese PhD student who came to Christ and who has gone back to serve Christ in Japan. That happens a lot.

In Paris we had a young Togalese, a sound engineer student, who came to salvation amazingly and now has planted a church in Darpong, the crossroads of Benin, Niger, Togo, and Burkina Faso; a Muslim crossroads. So there are students who are changing their ideas, and if the church can be ready to befriend them and speak to them, many will change their thinking. That is a great advantage.

The disadvantage of Oxford is that it can be intellectually proud and anti-Christ, so Oxford had beheaded or burnt to death believers in the past, has shut the door on the Methodist revival and banned it from its university, and now is the seat of the new atheism under Richard Dawkins and co.

DC: How do you think the church can best serve and involve students who have a rather transitory lifestyle?

CC: I believe the church needs to emerge from the wilderness, a bit like John the Baptist emerged: whole and holy. If the church can be an Acts 2 church with an appropriate cultural expression, that is one very good way of serving students. The other way is to be filled with compassion and boldness so that students who come to Christ are motivated to reach other students. To do that one needs to unleash the power of the Holy Spirit upon them.

It’s a combination of raising a banner and equipping people I think. We can also serve students by uniting the churches so they are not competing but completing and complementing each other’s work so the church is not a stench in people’s noses, but that fragrance of heaven.

DC: Clearly you have a passion for unity. What do you anticipate or expect will be the outcome of increasing unity?

CC: The Bible says two things: by the love we have for one another everyone will know we are His disciples, so there will be a visibility. Then Psalm 133 talks about God commanding

a blessing on the place where there is unity. So in Oxford,

as you know, David, we are tirelessly working to be together as church leaders.

We construct different events, particularly an event called Love Oxford which is very simple and highly recommended.

The idea is to get as many churches as you can to move their morning service on one Sunday of the year to a large public arena, in our case Broad Street where the martyrs lost their lives for Christ, to do three things: worship God, pray for the peace of the city where God has placed us, and hear public preaching. That has had a great beneficial effect, and in the background there is a lot of time spent and friendships formed between pastors.

DC: Where would you see the place of the established church?

CC: The church can be revolutionary or the church can be transforming. I think the established church on a good day is going towards a transformation of society as it has the privilege of being asked to pray in parliament or in chapels and all sorts of similar environments. Historically, God has opened doors into all kinds of professions in our land. Provided the church can keep the fire of the gospel in those environments, being part of the established church can be a help.

DC: Do you have links with other national church leaders?

CC: I help on the leadership of central and south west New Wine Conference which, along with the other weeks of New Wine, draws 12,000 people, an event that gathers Anglican, Baptist, Vineyard and various others, and is quite fruitful. Then personally I have friendships with people in different denominations and streams. Particularly I meet up with Terry Virgo and others once a year. That has always been a very stimulating time to hear news of what different streams are doing.

DC: What do you think Newfrontiers can contribute to building the church and establishing the kingdom?

CC: I think Newfrontiers has a fantastic DNA of strongly evangelical, Biblical, reformed thinking as well as the anointing and fullness of the Holy Spirit – so Word and Spirit. A strong doctrine of church is very powerful. I think that Newfrontiers is one of various ‘tribes’ in England that needto love each other, learn from one another and together

lead one another into the re-evangelisation of Britain and a reawakening of the land which is in such darkness. I think we are at the edge of either disaster or our dream.

DC: Which way do you think it will go?

CC: I have been quite hopeful recently. We are hopeful in Oxford at the moment and there are certain signs of growing awareness of the value of marriage, and different comments which are coming from political voices are not discouraging, but it is a fight.

DC: Thank you, Charlie.