Leaving Egypt Podcast

Join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack: leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com
In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Ian Williamson. Ian is a man of great courage whose life was transformed after being dominated by heavy drinking, cocaine addiction, gambling debts, and self-destruction. When he encountered Christ, he chose not to leave but to stay on the council estate where he grew up - and recognised that discipleship there required a distinctively relational approach. He now mentors fellow working class pastors, encouraging them to let their lives speak and to dwell among neighbours as fellow travellers. Ian speaks frankly about the deep alienation between many working class communities and mainstream churches. He names the collapse of moral leadership and the failure of many middle-class leaders to connect with the concerns of poor areas. He also describes the catastrophic damage done to family life and how globalisation has eroded community-centred ways of living. He sees an urgent need for spiritual rebuilding, one relationship at a time. Ian is “the genuine article” — an ordinary man living an extraordinary vocation, through whom the love of Jesus shines.
Ian Williamson is a working-class pastor and church planter from Middlesbrough. Raised in a single-parent home, his early life was dominated by violence and addiction and shaped by work as a nightclub bouncer. After meeting Jesus, Ian’s life was transformed. He was led to plant and pastor New Life Church, and with his wife Rachel, to co-found SixtyEightFive, a ministry supporting men and families affected by fatherlessness. Now, as Executive Director of Medhurst Ministries, he equips pastors for contextual mission, evangelism and relational discipleship, planting and supporting churches in the UK’s most deprived places, especially council estates.

For Ian Williamson
www.medhurstministries.org
In Context Podcast:

For Alan J Roxburgh:
http://alanroxburgh.com/about
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork
Books:
Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)
Joining God in the Great Unravelling
Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions
Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:
Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair
Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/


Get full access to Leaving Egypt at leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack: leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com
In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair speak with Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani. As a bishop in the Church of England, she knows its challenges, both internal and external. She is sensitive not only to its wrestling with decline, but also with the need to reorient itself in a time when both society and the churches confront crisis on multiple levels. Her life has prepared her well for this moment. Experiences of disruption as a refugee have given her a deep confidence that God is both present and actively working, even as familiar structures undergo change, even as communities fragment. With realism and quiet courage, she embodies the struggle of a faithful pilgrim finding ways to “leave Egypt” within the confines of institutional life. Resisting the rush toward strategies and programmatic fixes, she prefers prayerful listening rather than seeking safety in control. In the midst of uncertainty she delights in grassroots relationships, encouraging others to discern the movement of the Spirit and to discover what kind of church God is forming in this time of crisis.
Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani is the Bishop of Chelmsford in the southeast of England, UK. She is the lead Bishop for Housing for the Church of England, a member of the Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords, and is currently Chair of the Board of the Church Army. Born in Iran, daughter of Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, the Anglican Bishop in Iran, and Margaret, daughter of William Thompson, Guli and her family left the country in the wake of the Iranian Revolution in 1980 when she was 13 years old, and to date she has been unable to return.

LINKS

For Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani
https://www.chelmsford.anglican.org/about-us/the-bishop-of-chelmsford/
Bishop Guli’s address at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, 16th Sept 2024
Books
· Listening to the Music of the Soul, 18 September 2025
· Stations of the Resurrection, Encounters with the Risen Christ, written with Malcolm Guite
· Cries for a Lost Homeland: Reflections on Jesus’ sayings from the cross
· Reflections for Lent 2021: 17 February - 3 April 2021

For Alan J Roxburgh:
http://alanroxburgh.com/about
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork
Books:
Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)
Joining God in the Great Unravelling
Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions
Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:
Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair
Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/


Get full access to Leaving Egypt at leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Al and Jenny meet Justin Gill. Justin became a follower of Jesus as a young man in his native Pakistan from where he immigrated to the UK. Immersed in post-industrial English communities for twenty years, he became well acquainted with the complex realities of race, poverty, religion, and questions of belonging. This conversation explores the turbulent relationship between Christianity, Islam and secularisation in a time of cultural and political instability. Justin senses that God has brought him, as a Christian, into Muslim contexts, and to be among the indigenous English working class. His love for peoples and place is evident in his deep understanding of these different communities’ reactions to deindustrialisation, and how their responses to current tensions express their distinct histories and worldviews. Tying all this together is his deep conviction of Christ as Redeemer and His presence in hard, conflicted places.
Justin Gill works with the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC), advising on cross-cultural mission in a network that links more than 50,000 Christians across the UK. Justin speaks here in a personal capacity. Born and raised in North Pakistan, he was an advisor on minority affairs to a political party and led relief operations following the 2005 earthquake. Moving to the UK in 2006, he gained an MSc in Development and Project Planning at Bradford University and lived in North Yorkshire. He continues to support evangelical church networks in Pakistan. He now lives in Leicestershire and attends Knighton Free Church.

For Justin Gill
https://fiec.org.uk/people/justin-gill
https://fiec.org.uk/who-we-are/staff
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/justin-gill-fiec
https://x.com/Justin4Gill
https://fiec.org.uk/resources/moving-towards-intercultural-church
https://fiec.org.uk/resources/should-every-church-be-multi-racial

For Alan J Roxburgh:
http://alanroxburgh.com/about
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork
Books:
Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)
Joining God in the Great Unravelling
Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions
Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:
Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair
Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/


Get full access to Leaving Egypt at leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

We hope that you are enjoying Leaving Egypt. We would invite you to join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack by becoming a paid subscriber: https://leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe
In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Tim Soerens. Tim is a wild dreamer - in the very best sense - who describes his development in terms of a “re-enchantment with Christian faith”. Tim is on a rich, imaginative journey fostering ways of being church within creative experiments of local life – through postures, practices and relationships rather than programmes. Dedicated to flourishing neighbourhoods, he has become convinced of the need for stronger local economies, and now, to that end, he convenes collaborations across faith and secular lines. Tim sees the Christian imagination offering many gifts along that road, especially through local-scale partnerships that shift congregations to become relational communities in solidarity with their neighbours.
Tim Soerens is Executive Director and co-founder of the Parish Collective, an ecumenical network that connects and resources Christians to be church within their local neighbourhoods, focusing on presence, place, and community renewal. He is also co-founder of Neighbourhood Economics which convenes faith leaders and entrepreneurs to catalyse ideas for repairing local economies. Tim studied rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned his Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
For Tim Soerens
www.timsoerens.com
https://www.parishcollective.org/team
https://neighborhoodeconomics.org/who-we-are/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoerens
https://x.com/timsoerens
https://www.instagram.com/timsoerens/
https://www.facebook.com/tim.soerens/
Books
Everywhere You Look: Discovering the Church Right Where You Are
The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community (with Paul Sparks)
https://www.ivpress.com/tim-soerens
For Alan J Roxburgh:
http://alanroxburgh.com/about
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork
Books:
Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)
Joining God in the Great Unravelling
Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions
Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time
For Jenny Sinclair:
Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair
Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/


Get full access to Leaving Egypt at leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

We hope that you are enjoying Leaving Egypt. We would invite you to join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack by becoming a paid subscriber: https://leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe
In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair speak with Sophie Taylor about the quiet but growing movement of young adults towards the Catholic Church. Drawn by a hunger for truth and belonging amidst a chaotic culture, many arrive with little formation - some new to faith, others reclaiming what earlier generations let slip. Sophie explores what attracts them: the Church’s sacramental imagination - beauty, liturgy, art, and mystery - and the way parish life can reframe reality and relationship. She also names the challenges of moving from online isolation and post-COVID social anxiety into embodied community, arguing that young adults need more than a friendly welcome: they need intentional formation in relational life. With realism and hope, Sophie describes how deep listening and attentive encounter can renew belonging in the Church and beyond. This is a compelling picture of God’s mission at work - one heart at a time - inviting the whole Church to become a living oasis amid the storms of our age.
Sophie Taylor is the Adult Faith Formation Officer at the Diocese of Leeds, where she supports new Catholics, resources catechists, and organises formation events and days of reflection to help adults across the diocese grow in faith. She also works part-time supporting the pastoral life and community at the parish of St. Joseph Brighouse and St. Patrick’s Elland. After gaining her degree in Theology at Leeds Trinity University, when she also served in the diocesan youth team, she taught RE in the North East of England, where she also served in her local parish.

For Sophie Taylor
https://www.dioceseofleeds.org.uk/education/welcome/meet-the-team/
https://www.dioceseofleeds.org.uk/new-eve-faith-formation-day-celebrating-womens-call-to-holiness/
https://www.dioceseofleeds.org.uk/new-catholics/
https://stjosephschurchbrighouse.co.uk/our-faith/our-news
For Alan J Roxburgh:
http://alanroxburgh.com/about
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork
Books:
Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)
Joining God in the Great Unravelling
Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions
Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time
For Jenny Sinclair:
Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair
Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/


Get full access to Leaving Egypt at leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe