Husband and wife team Rev Stuart and Mrs Georgie Christine begin their ministry at Brownley Green on January 1st. We are pleased to welcome Stuart and Georgie to our church family and look forward to all the the Lord has prepared for His people as we continue to reach out to the people of Wythenshawe.
Below is a summary of the experience of Stuart and Georgie in Mission work in the Baptist denomination.
Stuart and Georgie were brought up, met and married in Nottingham. Before training for the Baptist ministry at Spurgeon’s College Stuart studied physics at Oxford University and worked in research and development with Courtaulds in Derby, whilst Georgie, who had qualified as a teacher in Worcester, taught as Head of Science at the Moravian secondary school in Ockbrook. In 1977 Stuart and Georgie were appointed for work with BMS World Mission in Brazil and after a year of Portuguese language study they spent 10 years starting new churches and training pastors in the State of Mato Grosso, Central Brazil.
In 1988 Stuart was invited to take the position of Tutor in Greek and New Testament Studies at Spurgeon’s College in London, UK. And so the family returned to the UK.
A year later, as a result of a joint initiative between Spurgeons and the Oasis Trust, Stuart was asked to design and head up a new programme based at the College which focused on training church planters and evangelists. At this time Stuart jointly authored the book- Planting Tomorrow’s Churches Today-Monarch Press.1992 and Georgie qualified with the YMCA as a teacher in Exercise to Music.
After supervising the implementation of a full cycle of the newly established course, Stuart and Georgie received an invitation from the São Paulo, Baptist Theological Seminary to return Brazil and were re-appointed for service with BMS in 1992. It was from that time that the link with Brownley Green Baptist Church was established and throughout their time in Sao Paulo, they have visited when in the UK and received active support from the church.
Once in São Paulo their work quickly developed to include church planting and training of church workers in the favela slums of the city.
As the favela mission grew, Stuart took on the direction of a Brazilian Mission charity, ABIAH, developing it to become a vehicle for offering a variety of programs that combined the evangelistic and social dimensions of the Gospel and were suitable for local churches conducting mission in deprived communities. By developing partnerships with other agencies both in Brazil and beyond, one of ABIAH’s programs started by Georgie, PEPE- the Pre-School Mission Program, has become especially successful with currently over 9000 children a day being helped by the programme in 18 other countries in Latin America and Africa. Georgie was honoured by the Queen in 2006 with the OBE in recognition of her key role in developing this programme. Stuart has written and taught widely on these ministries in both Portuguese and Spanish.
As from 1 November 2003 Stuart took up the post of BMS Regional Team leader for Latin America, with the responsibility of overseeing BMS mission workers then based only in Brazil but with the remit of developing a wider strategy and new contacts with churches across Latin America. In this role Stuart established mission partnerships with national Baptist Conventions and other Evangelical mission agencies in Peru, Ecuador and Paraguay. In August 2009 Stuart and Georgie returned to the UK to live in Wantage and for two further years Stuart continued his role based at the HQ of the BMS in Didcot. During this time Georgie took up work in the Balsam Project, a Christian Charity that works in support of dysfunctional families in Oxfordshire. More recently Georgie has also undertaken the YMCA course in Exercise for Aging which she hopes will be useful in the work of the church in Brownley Green.
Stuart and Georgie Christine have three sons, Bruce, Sam and Ben now all married, and a daughter, Lindy- and two dogs, Maya and Danny. Bruce lives in Handforth, Cheshire, Sam and Lindy in Dubai and Ben in Andover. So far no grandchildren!