I was born and brought up in the UK. On my first day of medical school at the Royal and Ancient Hospital of St. Bartholomew (Barts), I met my husband, Tony, and it was love at first sight (well, almost)! We married three years later.
We had our first experience of church planting in the medical school, and that church sent us out into what was then a very poor and socially needy area of London where we also practiced medicine where we helped to plant another church. Both these churches were part of what was known as the British House Church Movement.
In 1987, the Lord led us very sovereignly to the States–which was just as well, because it felt as though he dumped us in Texas and took the next plane back to the UK. We struggled at every level for 9 years–God’s training school for us on the backside of the desert, until things began to change for us in 1996.
That year several things happened. We started the business that now supports us (see www.thekarisgroup.com), and we started a church with firstly, our not-yet-believing business acquaintances, and later with friends of our kids, most of whom again, were not yet Christians . When those churches combined, there were around 55 people in our living room and we had to decide what to do. We chose to multiply the small.
In 2000, we helped to start House2House, initially a print magazine and now a website that provides resources for the large house/simple/organic church movement that now exists here in the US.
I’ve written, or co-authored, several book–Simply Church, Getting Started: A Church Planting Manual, The Rabbit and the Elephant (now republished in paperback under the title Small is Big!) and An Army of Ordinary People. I’ve also just produced my first multimedia e-book, A Simple Guide to Hearing God.
Tony and I have also had the privilege of traveling extensively. We speak at conferences all around the world on the subject of how to start simple/organic churches out in the harvest.
The joy of my life is our family of four kids with their wonderful spouses, and our seven, soon to be eight, grandkids.
I enjoy reading, gardening, working out and writing. My passion is the King and His Kingdom.