Christianity Mazagine Interview "Staying Power"

He was well known as a fiery evangelist in the 1970s but then, to the surprise of many, became an Anglican vicar. Now at an age when many retire, he continues to preach, teach and lead. John Buckeridge discovers how Eric Delve is still going strong at 65.

I first heard you, in the late 1970s when you were a firebrand itinerant evangelist with Youth For Christ. Does ‘firebrand’ still characterise you now?

I guess it would in some ways. As an evangelist you’re focused on just one thing, you want to get people to commit themselves to Jesus and that’s it. You can’t bash people with that if you preach to them every week at your own church, although you do need to explore the implications of ‘You’re committed to Jesus’.

Am I still fiery? I certainly hope so. I still believe that God wants to do far, far more than we are allowing him to do. I still believe his biggest problem is the Church. I still believe that one of his desires is to use the Church of England far more than it has allowed him to do. So I’m passionate about those things and I get very steamed up about them.

So you were a fiery evangelist, now you’ re a fiery vicar, at St Luke’s church in Maidstone. Tell us about that journey.

I was on the road as a travelling evangelist for close to 20 years. I felt that all too often Jesus was represented merely as a kind of conductor on the bus to heaven, doling out tickets that other people were paying for. And in fact, of course, he paid for the tickets. Real Christianity isn’t about getting a ticket for heaven. Real Christianity is about a passionate commitment to Jesus that means he comes top of your list and heaven would be the most natural progression when you die because you’ve been living there for decades anyway with him. So that’s the kind of Christianity I want to see happen, I want to see heaven released on earth.

But more and more I was being used by Christians as a kind of ‘Let’s entertain the troops’[figure]; ‘Eric’ll make us laugh’, and, to be honest, I began to get very cynical and very angry. I got to the point where I was just raging, and God kind of asked me whether that was a good state to be in, as he gently does.

One day I was reading the New Testament and I came across Paul casually mentioning that for three years he’d been in Ephesus. And I thought, ‘Wow! The evangelist par excellence has spent three years in one place.’ I had thought to be an evangelist I had to go on this treadmill of going to places.

I began to pray. I thought I was going to get a church in a city centre close to a university, loads of nurses and doctors from medical schools and all that kind of thing.

Actually what God did was to send us to Liverpool, to the inner city. I went to a place called Kirkdale. The Bishop of Liverpool had asked if I would go and look at a parish, so we drove into this little square in the middle of a housing estate and saw this building that had been built as a small supermarket for the local area. It had iron shutters on every door, and we sat there. The cloud cover was like it is sometimes in Liverpool, sort of 20 feet above your head, rain coming in horizontally, McDonald’s wrappers blew across this car park, and I looked at this dump of a building. I said, ‘God, this is a wasteland’. And instantly I felt God say to me, ‘It’s a wasteland where people live, Eric.’ And that was the moment that I thought, ‘Oh blast.’ Actually I said something else but...

This was not where you wanted to be.

No! But I thought, ‘He wants us here.’ I turned to my wife Pat and said, ‘What do you think?’ She turned to my son Andrew and asked him and he said, ‘Well, I don’t like it, but I think it’s where we’re meant to be, Dad.’

So we went to Liverpool and it really saved me because I’d gotten so used to just the thing on the road and had become cynical about preaching. I went there and discovered once again the power of the gospel to change the lives of ordinary people, to transform them, and saw people not only come to faith in Jesus and give their lives to him, but begin to grow. And that was so amazing. The people in that church were brilliant, we loved them and they loved us. Our time there was a real time of healing.

After Liverpool came Maidstone and St Lukes where you’ve been for 12 years. And I gather that a distinctive part of your ministry there is with men.

We’ve got five separate ministries for men. There’s a group called the Journey Men who are a walking group who get together on Saturdays and often have a breakfast before they go. Somebody speaks and then they go off and walk together for the day. Then there’s the Men’s Dining Group which I head up, which meets once a month at a local hotel where we’ve negotiated a really good three-course meal for £15. Then there’s Lionhearts, which is a group that works with small groups in churches. They are associated with Christian Vision for Men, and they are passionate about getting men into what they call ‘Bands of Brothers’ and I think that that’s vital. I think men need each other, they really do. Then there’s The Shed – called that because the man who started it thought that it would be like a garden shed, you know where you go to retreat.

Most men like sheds.

They do, they do. But this is a shed for men who are kind of in their gardening years, of 60 or over. They get together once a month, sit and chat and pray and so on, and encourage one another and there are about 15-20 in that group. Plus we have a men’s breakfast where they have a guest speaker. We are thinking about a sixth group which would be a film club, so men could sit and watch a movie together and then talk about their response to it.

What’s the best thing about being a vicar?

I think the fact that you can have a great deal of fun.

That’s not the answer I was expecting!

Once you become a vicar, what the Church of England calls an incumbent, once you become that, they can’t get rid of you. So actually you have enormous freedom. Nobody can get rid of you, the bishop can’t, unless you steal loads of money, or run off with several people’s wives! So you can have enormous freedom to have fun in the name of Jesus.
People will say, ‘Oh, you’re one of the happy, clappy mob aren’t you?’ and I just say, ‘Oh yes, yes we are, absolutely, but there are plenty of the other sort around if you want those,’ If you want to go to a non-happy, non-clappy church you’re perfectly at liberty to do so, you know!

What really amazes me is we get people come to us and they moan and say, ‘We don’t like the music, it’s too loud.’ But that’s what we do here, we do loud music! Why did you come if you didn’t want that? It’s like walking into McDonald’s and saying, ‘Why aren’t you serving prime fillet steak?’ And they go, ‘Because we don’t do that,’ and you stand there complaining about it.
And what’s the biggest difference now in terms of being based in one church, in one location with one parish, compared to travelling around the UK?

There are huge responsibilities on a vicar. Any church leader knows this. Being a vicar, being the point man for almost everything, senior pastor, whatever you call it, is a tremendous challenge. It can be the best job in the world and also at times be the worst job in the world.

Do you think people appreciate that there’s a big cost to Christian leadership?

Some do, but there are always those people who are coming from their own place of hurt, of rejection, of maybe an abusive father, not necessarily sexually abusive, but abusive in terms of physical violence, or emotional violence, and everything comes at them through that prism. So the moment you do something that they don’t want you to do, they feel rejection, and they feel it’s coming at them, all that stuff from the past, so they’re not seeing you, they’re seeing the dad or they’re seeing the brother or the husband that beat them up or whatever.

All of that stuff is coming so you pick up, that’s what it means to be a priest to be honest, you stand as a representative, and people take it out on you. But that’s what God lets us do, isn’t it?

It’s how I really began my Christian journey, finding out that God isn’t bothered, particularly, by our rage, our rejection, our hurt. We can take it out on him and he’s just so gracious.

Another aspect of what St Luke’s does is Detling –- an annual summer event – that you and the church give a lot of time and money and resources to. Why do you put so much energy into Detling?

I love big Christian gatherings, I just love them. I came from a little tiny backstreet Brethren chapel and my world was constricted to that, because we only ever met with the Brethren. I’ve had similar conversations with people brought up in Methodism, or Baptists, or Anglicans, you know, never the twain would meet.

We thought the Baptists were probably saved. The Pentecostals were saved but terribly unstable, and God clearly couldn’t trust them, and the Methodists? Well, John Wesley was probably saved, but the rest of them looked as if they believed more in tea than anything else. The Congregationalists we never even considered to be Christians. Roman Catholics, of course, as far as we were concerned, were actually in a tube going down into hell, and Anglicans were grouped in the funnel leading into the tube. One or two Anglicans we thought might be saved. That’s the way we were brought up. Quite ridiculous, but there you go!

So I came from this tiny little backstreet chapel, and in 1954, at the age of 12, I was taken to hear Billy Graham at Harringay. We’d never seen anything like that, ever. Billy focused everybody around the gospel. And that was the incredible power of what he did. It transformed my understanding of the church of God immensely. It gave me a reference point for understanding the descriptions in the book of Revelation of the huge assemblies of the Saints of God. It awakened in me a longing to be part of that heavenly gathering but to create a foretaste of it here on earth.

This had a huge impact on you.

Oh yeah. And Billy, preaching like he meant what he said, and he said what he meant. I sat there looking at all that and I said, ‘God, I would just love to do that.’ And it was like God said to me, ‘That’s because that’s what I want you to do.’

So that’s part of why you’re so passionate about Detling?

Yes, I was invited to speak at New Wine, and thought it was absolutely brilliant. I went to New Wine leaders, and asked, ‘Why can’t we have one in the south-east?’ They told me this was something I had to do.

So in 1997 I went with my then worship director and looked at the Kent County Showground which was just three miles from our church and we said, ‘Right, we’re gonna do it.’ The first year was in 2000, so this year will be our ninth. And it’s been a miracle that it’s kept going to be honest. We’re only 20 minutes from the M25 so some come for the day, while others want to camp and they bring their caravans or their tents.

What I love about it is that it’s a different socio-economic mix from either Spring Harvest or New Wine because it’s quite local, and we reflect the kind of situation that most of Kent is in. I love it because we’re touching the people of the community where I serve. And it’s brilliant. We’re giving them the best. We’ve got RT Kendall coming this year, John Paul Jackson, Jackie Pullinger. It’s gonna be great

© 2009 Eric Delve. All Rights Reserved.

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