en Reviews Editor John Woods speaks to John Stevens about his time thus far serving with the FIEC.
en: You have been serving as National Director of the Fellowship of Evangelical Churches (FIEC) for 15 years. What was you first experience of the FIEC?
JS: I became a Christian through the witness of friends in my final year as a student at Cambridge. I went to an Anglican church at that point, but had friends who went to FIEC churches. I very nearly became an Anglican vicar, but having been selected for training I realised that I was not an Anglican. That was bound up with baptism, ecclesiology, and the desire to be involved in a church that was not compromised and mixed. At first, I attended an independent Baptist church, but ended up in Birmingham where I was involved in planting a church which become a part of FIEC. We found them helpful and supportive as we planted a church. In the 11 years of being the pastor of City Church Birmingham we had the support of other FIEC pastors in the area. Gradually I became more involved through attending their Easter conference and becoming part of the FIEC training team that was thinking about raising up a new generation of gospel workers.
en: What did you do before becoming Director?
JS: I have always been involved in wider gospel unity projects. When I was a student, I was involved in UCCF and with emerging Gospel Partnerships. My professional career had been in law. I had always wanted to be a barrister but had an “accidental” career teaching law in university, where I specialised in Trust law and Charity law. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this was useful for me at FIEC in helping churches with issues of church governance, structure and constitutions. I was also deputy head of the Law Faculty at the University of Birmingham, and that was a preparation for leading an eldership and ultimately a staff team at FIEC. This background in law also turned out to be of tremendous significance when the Covid crisis hit. We needed to interpret government legislation and statutes, and the skills learned in my legal career were put to good use.
en: When you started 15 years ago did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to accomplish? What were your priorities at the start?
JS: It was an immense privilege to be asked to do this job. FIEC was founded in 1922, and I think that the fundamentals of FIEC have always been right. It has sought to encourage and support local church ministry. Churches unite around core gospel truths, but are not controlled by a central denomination.
Those leaders who preceded me, to whom I owe a tremendous amount (Richard Underwood as General Secretary and Andy Paterson as former President), had the vision to see that FIEC needed to change. FIEC was seen as a group that was predominately conservative in culture, and served relatively small churches, whilst the energy in evangelicalism was in groups like Evangelical Anglicans or New Frontiers. FIEC was under-resourced with a great need to recapture its original vision.
The governance of FIEC was streamlined and there was a high level of delegation to a larger staff team to serve and support the churches. I didn’t go in with a grand plan, but was entrusted with the task of leading a group of churches that had been together for many decades but needed a fresh vitality, particularly to engage a younger generation of pastors and leaders. One of the missing dimensions was churches in city centres reaching students and young professionals. I felt it was a long-term task to bring about the cultural change that was needed to challenge the perceptions of FIEC as a backward-looking movement, not insular but one that was genuinely aiming to grow the gospel in the nation.
en: I have heard you speak about E.J. Poole-Connor, the founder of the FIEC. What aspects of his life and leadership have helped you approach your role?
JS: I didn’t know much, but part of my preparation for my role was learning more about him. As a result of his work for a mission organisation, he had visited many independent churches and mission halls and came to the realisation that they could be isolated. He wrote a book about Evangelical Unity, which outlined how the church could work together. What struck me was how contemporary and relevant his writings were.
I helped the FIEC staff realise that we were not doing anything new, but were coming back to our original vision. FIEC has not changed. We have not changed doctrinally, or in what we see as our purpose. What has changed is our resources. FIEC began with 18 churches; when I became National Director, it had about 500 churches. We are now about 675. The scale of the FIEC has changed, but the fundamental vision is the same.
en: How do you balance the words “fellowship” and “independent” in your title?
JS: Sometimes people have misunderstood what independence means. In the past it has tended to mean a sense of isolation. In part this is because in the 1960s several churches came out of the main denominations. A generation of leaders who had left the denominations became very suspicious of any kind of organisation. We wanted to restore the idea that fellowship was about working together in a common purpose. FIEC is a voluntary organisation; churches choose to join and can leave at any time. The FIEC staff have no control over the local churches but are here to serve them. Our strapline is: “Independent churches working together to reach Britain for Christ.”
We have worked hard to develop relationships between churches and leaders. This is partly through our Leader’s Conference which has become the main gathering for our churches. We now have over 1,100 leaders gathering each November. Over the years this builds up a sense of connection nationally. One of the things that has galvanised us is the missional need of the nation. If we are to make any progress in reaching the nation, then churches must work together and pool resources.
en: What does the annual FIEC Leaders’ Conference say about how you see the value of good leadership in the church?
JS: We are committed to the local churches, but the health of local churches often depends on the health of local leaders. Therefore, investing in leaders, supporting leaders and encouraging leaders is absolutely key. The Leader’s Conference is not a gathering where we tell leaders what to do; it is much more a conference that brings leaders together to be encouraged and to share together. We have become aware in the last 15 years how the pressures on leaders have increased.
en: I have heard you speak about the importance of preaching. Is there a danger of seeing it as carrying all the freight of ministry to the neglect of other areas of ministry?
JS: We believe that God speaks, that the Bible is His word and that the gospel is a verbal message that needs to be communicated. Therefore, preaching is at the heart of Christian ministry. I came from a generation where expository preaching was being recovered but there was a danger of ignoring a more holistic approach to ministry. Leadership, pastoral care and love for people are equally vital aspects of ministry. In the last 15 years when churches have gone wrong, it is seldom the case that the preaching was the cause. The challenge is that dealing with real people within the life of the church requires skills that are more than the ability to deliver a monologue that is Biblically faithful. The qualifications for leaders of churches in the New Testament require more than the ability to preach, they involve character, gifting, the ability to manage and organise, and the skill to deal with people.
en: You have a significant online presence; in what ways has it served to enhance your ministry and in what ways has it been a distraction?
JS: I didn’t set out to have an online presence. It is one of the ways to engage with all our churches and share my thinking more widely. I have always tried not to create an image but to share what I think. Over the years I have seen that the online world has become more difficult and aggressive and that some online exchanges are not helpful. I came off Twitter/X because it was not helpful to me. That short form of immediate engagement can easily escalate. I did not want to be exposed to that, and I did not want to be tempted by it. I could go into lawyer mode and just want to win the argument, but that was not helpful.
I tend to think carefully about what I say and reflect on whether what I am saying is helpful in prompting people to think. Because there is a diversity of views within the FIEC I want to reflect that. I think that it can be useful to champion views which might not be majority views but are legitimate.
en: People have been talking about a “quiet revival” taking place in Britain among young people. Has there been evidence of this in FIEC churches?
JS: The last two years have been the most encouraging in Christian ministry over the past 30 years of my ministry. Church after church is reporting more conversions and increased interest in the gospel, people coming into church off the streets without being invited, and people being converted after engaging with things online.
I suspect that the figures coming out of the Bible Society suggest that more is going on than is being experienced by most churches. For two reasons:
First, they talk about church attendance, but the criterion is attending once a month. This suggests a sporadic attendance by a larger number of people.
Secondly, it also suggests that there has been growth in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Pentecostalism, all of which have grown significantly through immigration. It might be unhelpful to call it a revival, if we mean a large-scale work of God with many people coming to new birth and new life. I doubt we can compare this to the Welsh Revival, the Great Awakening, or even the Billy Graham crusades of the 1950s. This is not to take away from the fact that there is a change in the culture that is reflected in a greater openness to the Christian faith.
en: What would you like to see happen in the FIEC the next 15 years?
JS: We want to see gospel growth. We are a group of 675 churches and 65,000 people. The UK is a population of 69 million people. If you look at conservative evangelicals in the UK, there are probably no more than 200,000 overall, with the total number of all evangelicals being 2-3% of the population or around 2 million.
Our hope would be that the gospel would spread to all sorts of communities in all parts of the UK, reaching all sorts of contexts, social groups, and ethnic groups. We are seeking to appoint a network of regional directors who are located around the country – full-time, part-time, retired ministers who are supporting churches and fostering connection. We are covering a third of the country at present but hope to have full coverage in the next three years. We also want to connect with our members as well as our leaders, so we are starting an Easter event in 2026 in Torquay called Rising Lights, not just for FIEC churches but open to others. It is aimed at local church members, families with kids, students and younger people.
en: Can you tell us a bit about the importance of Christian unity?
JS: In many ways the FIEC is a unity movement; it was meant to bring unity to churches that are independent. There is also a need for a much wider gospel unity than that, and I have been privileged to have to have been involved in a wide variety of unity initiatives: Gospel Partnerships, Affinity and the Evangelical Alliance. I think it is very important for evangelicals to stand together and support one another. What has encouraged me in the last 15 years is a coming together of evangelicals around the gospel core. Having to meet cultural challenges like issues of sexuality, the introduction of same-sex marriage, and seeing churches change their positions on sexuality, has made evangelicals realise how much we have in common with each other, and how small we are. This has led to evangelicals seeing the need to work together at a local and national level.
I have seen relationships between FIEC and Anglican churches, reformed charismatic churches and Evangelical Alliance churches improve as we have fostered this among ourselves. I think this type of unity is vital and precious. All evangelicals believe that what they are doing is Biblical, yet on many matters there is a diversity of views, so we must manage the fact that we read the same Bible, and yet come to quite different conclusions on a whole variety of issues of doctrine and practice. The challenge for evangelicals is whether to put our focus on the core truths that unite us rather than the issues that divide us. It is important to hold together a unity on core truths and a respectful disagreement on other issues.
en: How might the readers of en pray for you?
JS: Faithfulness and constant vision and heart for the work of the gospel. I have been in the role for 15 years, which is a long time, but there is still a lot to do. I want to do that work faithfully and well. It requires a constant awareness of where we are as churches, where we are as an organisation, and where we are culturally. Pray for a constant freshness, and a vibrant personal walk with the Lord. I am convinced that the gospel is what can change our nation; pray that I will not be distracted from that focus.
