Dr. Daniel Newman
Currently 24 years of age, I recently graduated from the Univerisity of Oxford, where I read medicine at Brasenose College. Having recently married Brooke, I am spending a year in her home town of Moscow, Idaho where I will be studying at Greyfriars’ Hall and working as an evangelist-at-large for Community Christian Ministries. I originally hail from Poole in Dorset, which the Borough Council tells me is “a beautiful place”.
My testimony in many ways follows the pattern of the parable of the lost sheep Jesus told in Matthew 18. Having been “received into the congregation of Christ’s flock” (cf. “The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants” in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer) when I was baptised on the third of November, 1985 at the age of eight months, I then went astray through not being raised as Christian. Nevertheless, it isn’t the Father’s will that one of these little ones, such as I was, should perish, and as I look back over the story of my childhood, I can see how he therefore went in search of me and found me. I was favoured in attending a local primary school in which the religious education was explicitly Christian and we sang Christians songs in assembly and hymn practice. Through a friend at school at around the age of eight, I went to children’s activities at my parish church in Merley for several years, and then, when we moved, my best friend at school invited me along to the church of which he and his family were a part. The message of the Bible was taught and I heard the good news of the Lord Jesus Christ, his life, his teaching, his death on the cross for sins and his resurrection from the dead. I don’t recall ever resisting this knowledge, but as I look back over my childhood and adolescence, I can see how I grew in my trust in him as my saviour, and increasingly lived under his good rule as my king. Along the way, I was greatly helped to grow in maturity through a young persons’ home group run by my friend’s father, being encouraged in prayer and Bible study. When I went up to university, a time when one is faced with new temptations away from the faith and pressures to conform to the world, God granted me to be rooted from the outset in a loving, faithful church and gave me a solid group of Christian friends. Through the expository preaching under which I sat in the church, and through the friendships I formed, I have been sharpened in my understanding of Scripture and of Christian doctrine, challenged to read more broadly and deeply, and equipped and stirred up greater zeal for evangelism. I also value my involvement with my college chapel, where I grew to see, value, and benefit from the richness of the liturgical heritage of the Church of England. I look back with warm memories and am thankful to God for the growth he wrought in me during my time at Oxford. Labels are often unhelpful because they often conjure up stereotypes with misleading baggage, but for what it’s worth, I am a classical reformed catholic evangelical Anglican Christian.
Over the past six years, I have had the privilege of being given the opportunity to lead my college Christian Union in witnessing for Christ, lead Bible studies for other Christian students at church, preach in my college chapel, St. James’s, Poole (the church I now attend when I am at home in Poole), and in a number of other places. This ministry seems to have been appreciated and to have borne fruit and as a result of this, as well as a personal sense of fulfilment and joy when I am engaged in such ministry, and the advice of other Christians, ordained and not ordained, I began to wonder whether the risen and ascended Christ in his grace had given me gifts that might best be used to serve him and his church as a pastor-teacher, rather than as a doctor. I have been exploring ordination in the Church of England and was recently recommended for training. Lord willing, I will read theology and train for the ordained ministry at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, from the autumn of 2010.
I am interested in theology, particularly historical theology of the Reformation and Puritan era: I think we contemporary evangelicals as perhaps their natural heirs have much to learn from their doctrine of the church, the sacraments, worship and the objectivity of God’s covenant. My favourite book of the Bible is the Old Testament. I enjoy drinking Earl Grey tea (if it’s good enough for the Queen, it’s good enough for me), fencing, listening to “R. and B.” music (Renaissance and Baroque, that is), reading fiction (including P. G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Sayers, and John Buchan, an alumnus of Brasenose College) both silently and aloud, the poetry of George Herbert, and wearing blue shirts.
