John has been a keen Christian since his conversion in 1993. Alongside working and raising a young family he has been involved at different times in helping with prison ministry, youth work, and a variety of both informal and church based ministry. Convicted NOT to go to Bible College in 2004, John remains convinced that the power of true Christianity lies in the body of Christ all working together, rather than in a professional “ministering class”.
From 2003 John started keeping a journal of his thoughts about aspects of the Christian life. A selection of these became the “Thoughts from John’s journal” section of christianity.org.nz. Later he started writing longer articles and after being given the domain name christianity.org.nz, utilized this to both publish his own thoughts online and offer opportunity for other biblical believers to do likewise.
While John broadly categorizes himself as an “evangelical” he is always keen to interact with and learn from other groups of believers. His blog Evangelicals and Plain Folk came out of one of these rich cross denominational fellowship experiences.
From about 1995 John started studying prophecy in his spare time, initially just to understand for himself the teachings of the church he was attending (which taught a classic evangelical, pre-millennial & pre-tribulation rapture based view of prophecy). While most of this really did make good sense, parts of it never quite added up. Thus the process of trying to dig out the truth from scripture became a 13 year quest for truth, and one that ultimately ended up including the examination of many different denominational perspectives on the topic. Eventually emerging from this with a fairly clear perspective on what constituted the clearest, least overworked, most directly word-based view, he also wrote the eBook entitled Prophecy and End Times. Released in September 2009 it aims firstly to introduce the core elements of end times prophecy in the simplest way possible, and secondarily to open up some fresh thinking on certain aspects of the evangelical prophetic perspective.
John can be contacted at the email address in the contact section of christianity.org.nz