CCK Life blog

Simon Virgo is presently on the leadership team at New Life Church (formerly known as Biggin Hill Christian Fellowship), Biggin Hill, Kent. He is married to Caroline. They are soon to move to Kingston where Simon will lead King’s Church there. Simon was born and brought up in Brighton and studied Intellectual History at Sussex University. He supports Liverpool Football Club. Yohaan Philip, chief editor of the ccklife blog, had the joy of hearing from Simon the amazing story of God’s hand on his life and writes:

Simon’s a dear friend, one of my closest. His father, Terry, introduced us way back in January 08 whilst I was still in India. We exchanged a few emails and in September 09 when I moved to Brighton, I finally had the privilege of finally meeting this mighty man of God. Simon has been one of the most inspiring figures in my life ever since. One of the most prominent features of this humble young man is his passion for God and commitment to prayer. There is never a time when he’s not up for praying – be it in the middle of a cold winter night (when he has dragged me out of bed!) or a hot summer afternoon (as we’ve sat by the sea!). In spite of this, Simon doesn’t come across as “super spiritual” with his head in the clouds! His cheeky sense of humor always has me in splits! This interview has really blessed me and I pray it has a similar effect on you as you read it. To Christ Eternal be all glory for His gracious, saving work.

YP: Simon Virgo – one of the founding members of Church of Christ the King! Always good talking to you my friend! Tell us a bit about yourself.

SV: Yes, I was there when the church was started, all of 3 years I think. I now herd goats as a pass time. At the moment I also work at the church in Biggin Hill, Kent. I am married to Caroline and we have no children yet. But, we do have a pet badger and a very small monkey.

I warned you about his cheeky sense of humour! On to more serious stuff now..

YP: You do have quite a remarkable story about your relationship with Jesus. Tell me a bit more about your story:

SV: I grew up in a Christian family with my mum and dad very involved here. I was very happy and there were no particular problems in that. I was happy in church, happy in a good school – everything was fine. I appreciated that my parents lived out their faith with real integrity. From a young age, I experienced listening to the preaching of the gospel and was captivated by it. I remember as a 9 year old listening to my dad preach through the book of Romans and being very captivated by the gospel and by preaching under the power of the Holy Spirit. I felt God call me to leadership when I was 9 at Downs ‘88 when Ray Lowe preached four messages on four different world changers across history.

When I was 14, we moved to America for two years, and that was when everything really changed for me. I didn’t really want to go and rebelled at that stage. I turned my back on God and became really bitter and angry. We came back from America when I was 16 and I pursued that rebellion for a few years. I had radically changed and even my non Christian friends noticed how bitter I had become. I started getting into soft drugs and drinking a lot. I was very anti God, very anti Church, very anti any form of authority really. I was bitter towards my parents and my family. I kept getting into more drugs – worse and worse drugs. By the end of 1998 I was taking LSD and ecstasy regularly. I was beginning to experiment with other drugs. I was smoking dope all the time. I was running from God and getting swallowed up in a drug induced lifestyle. I’d read a lot of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and felt everything in the world was pretty bankrupt. I was in a relationship that ended in heart break. It seemed that after five years of running away from God, life was beginning to disintegrate. I felt I had no hope. For two years I was severely depressed. Life was really going down the toilet.

And then my mum felt God saying to her, “spend a week praying and fasting, seeking Me for Simon”. My dad had gone to America, but she felt she was not to go and instead to stay back and really fight for her son. So she did that and it was during that week that everything really changed. I went from the beginning of the week having no interest in God, running away from Him as fast as I could to being completely transformed. On the Thursday night, I was in a night club and I felt God saying to me, “you could be happy and know peace if you stopped running away from me.” That night I opened up a bible and suddenly all the arguments about what truth could and couldn’t be died down. All the different voices that I’d listened to and read and thought about suddenly had to be quiet as if the teacher had walked into the class. I read what Jesus said in the gospels and I suddenly knew that this was it. This was the truth. By the end of the night, I knelt down and submitted my life to God. The following day at work I had an incredible encounter with God’s love as I sang a song that ends with “you delight in me”. All my emptiness was filled in that moment and I knew that God was claiming my life back for Himself. I took a long time to get out of the lifestyle I was in. It was messy and prolonged. I went through some terrible seasons and it was by no means easy. But, God was faithful throughout the whole thing. That was the beginning of 1999, so it’s been 10 years now. I’ve been through some tough times and had to make some tough decisions, but God has been faithful.

YP: I remember your mum saying that she almost fell off the chair when you said “Whatever you’re doing, I think you’re winning” during that week she prayed and fasted for you. She had tears in her eyes as she narrated the story. The memory was still so vivid to her. I love it when God demonstrates how real He is.

SV: It was an encounter with God which totally changed my life.

YP: For a lot of us who have grown up in Church and known the joy of salvation from an early age, we have sometimes struggled and walked away. What advice would you give your son to help him find his own personal relationship with God and not end up making some of the mistakes that you made in your teenage years?

SV: Firstly, I would need to demonstrate an example in front of him of one who is evidently satisfied in God. I think he would need to know that I am following God not out of some obligation, but because I am finding my satisfaction in Him. He shouldn’t feel the need to turn away from God to find satisfaction. It’s much like how in Jeremiah 2:13, God talks about the two sins that His people, the Israelites, have committed – they’ve turned away from Him and turned to broken cisterns.

When young guys tell me that they wish they had a crazy testimony like me, I tend to tell them that you don’t need to taste dog excrement to realize that it’s not going to be pleasant experience. Sometimes people feel the need to go out there and experiment. I would say that the pleasures of the world are very shallow. There is pleasure though. If you sleep around, you will enjoy some pleasure. If you take drugs, there will be some pleasure. You wouldn’t do them otherwise. But it’s ultimately such a shallow pleasure – it’s really the bait on the end of the hook that drags you into bondage and guilt and regrets. It’s like the neon lights of Vegas which look very inviting, but when you go deeper you find it’s full of corruption and foulness. So I would say to people that you don’t need to go out and taste the excrement. Wise children don’t eat dog crap. They don’t even feel the need to taste it to conclude that it’s not nice.

YP:  (laughs) Love that analogy! Some of the best times I’ve shared with you have been those epic hour long prayer times we’ve had on the Brighton sea front in the middle of the night. You inspire prayer in me. What’s been helpful in shaping your desire to pray with such fervour and conviction?

SV: The biggest influence that has shaped my desire to pray has undoubtedly been the example of my dad – hearing and learning from my dad pray every morning as I grew older. You could set your clock to it! Every morning he would be up and praying for a good hour or so. That just put a dent in my mind and in my life. You just see that to do church leadership, you pray. Sometimes I’ve been really frustrated when I’ve gathered others to pray and they seem so reluctant, and then I’m reminded that while I’ve had this incredible example, not everyone else has. So, that has been a big privilege to have lived so close to a man who is such a man of prayer. My parents were both people of prayer.

One of the things that has really motivated me to pray is that simply, prayer works! I’ve seen awesome things happen when I’ve cried out to God. I’ve seen dramatic results in situations where I’ve seen God intervene in a way that can only have been Him. There’s nothing more encouraging than seeing God work.

I think it’s Tozer who says, “we can have as much of God as we want.” The door is open and we can boldly approach God. We can know God. And it’s up to us how much determination we can bring to that task of cultivating a relationship with God – we can know God! An awareness that we are invited into actually knowing God rather than being Christians is awesome. And I want to know God, to encounter Him. I think Christianity is a bit boring unless you encounter God.

YP: Thanks Si! It’s been great chatting with you. This is really going to help bless a lot of us young guys and encourage many parents! Bless you my friend.

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Andrew Wilson is an Elder at King’s Church, Eastbourne, husband to Rachel, father to Ezekiel and author of Deluded by Dawkins and Incomparable. Andrew holds degrees in Theology from Cambridge and London and is not someone you’d want to engage in debate with if you’ve only read the introduction and conclusion to The Origin of Species! Yohaan Philip recently had the privilege of interviewing him and writes:

It’s quite interesting that the setting for this interview is not a massive room, with walls filled to the ceiling with a wide assortment of books and a plush brown leather chair behind a stately oak table as would befit a man of the intellectual calibre that I am about to interview. We are seated in the children’s playroom in the Clarendon Centre, surrounded by dolls houses, plastic balls and a Hot Wheels garage set. It leads me to my first question.

YP: Congratulations Andrew (call him Andy and you incur his wrath!)You’ve recently become a dad for the first time! How does that feel?
AW: It’s absolutely amazing! Ezekiel ‘Zeke’ Jack James Wilson is his name. He’s reading all the right books. He sleeps well and he’s just beautiful. It’s life changing. It has also been a spiritual thing – it has shown me more about God. You get home at the end of the day and wow there’s this other person. Your family has doubled, it’s just extraordinary! The passion you feel for this person and how you want the absolute best for him – it’s fantastic!

My mind drifts to Andrew’s book, Incomparable. Andrew does well to make lofty truths on God an easy read without losing a sense of awe of the God he writes about. How does he do it?!

YP: You are quite the intellect across the Newfrontiers family of churches. Everybody raves about Incomparable. What has helped shaped your thoughts?
AW: I was blessed early on. Academically sound thinkers who had a God saturated view of the world came across my path. Though some of them disagreed with each other, they all began with a very Theo-centric (God-centric) view of reality. John Piper’s been more influential to me more than anyone else. I read books by Judson Cornwall and Tom Wright at a formative stage of my thinking, where I just suddenly realised that if there’s a place of studying hard and working hard it has got to come from a God-saturated view of the world.

I remember listening to an eight message series Judson Cornwall preached on Psalm 8:1 “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.” He preached on the names of God. This really fired me up. I began to think that this guy is making the character of God something very important that I needed to know, not by him saying you need to know God, but by him telling me who God was. Then I began to notice this trend reappearing in other key writers and thinkers (like Piper) that I interacted with, and I thought “there’s something about knowing who God is that has dramatic application in and of itself.” It’s almost like I can preach on God and not give an application, and it does the work for me. You preach on holiness and people will feel convicted of sin. You preach on love and people will feel overwhelmed with the compassion of God. You preach grace and people will be able to stop sinning. These doctrines of who God is, in them have true power. I think probably some people may occasionally think, “if I don’t apply this all the time instantly, then maybe it’s of no use to anyone” and I’m not sure that’s true. I think there is sometimes power in just saying ‘behold your God’ and that became a specialization for me. I felt God saying that I should preach on nothing else but the character of God, which I did for about 2 years. This God-lead initiative for me to just preach on Him has been foundational for me.

Andrew is almost jumping out of his seat, alive with passion. It’s contagious!

Andrew also oversees Phase 1 of the Future Leadership training programme run by Newfrontiers in Brighton and it has been here that I have grown to respect and adore this spirit-filled young man who engages with God with his heart and mind. I’ve had the privilege of worshipping God along with Andrew during training, and his heartfelt prayers are filled with such a depth of an understanding of who God is that you are immediately drawn into intimate worship.

YP: As someone who loves to study about God, how do you personally ensure that you aren’t relating to God on a purely cerebral level rather than living being filled with the Spirit  – we can know lots of things but the Holy Spirit is the one who underlines reality.
AW: I’m not sure if I do all the time, if I’m honest. I think sometimes I am aware that my devotional times with God have such a strong emphasis on the Word that often I feel like times of praying and enjoying God can suffer. I find my way of approaching that over the last year or so is to realise that I need longer chunks of time and to spend a day or a morning just spending time with God. I told my wife last night that I prefer ‘hanging out with the Trinity” and she laughed at that! Sometimes I don’t even take my Bible with me but just talk to God because my bias is to read and study and find revelation and excitement. It could stay at just a cerebral level if I didn’t spend those times worshiping God. At the same time I’ve come to a place of not being ashamed that the main way I connect with God is through my mind, and that’s ok so long as it’s being expressed in praise and joy and love. The risk I would have is if I was just studying for debates. The crucial thing is spending your time studying on God, the gospel, the great truths. If I spend my time mugging up on eschatology, as important as it is, or Calvinism or Arminianism or whatever debates are on the table, I would have lost that.
Also, being in a charismatic church helps and being surrounded by people and the pressure of “pray for me for healing.” I can’t do that just from having read the Word. I’ve got to be devotionally in step with the Spirit, otherwise I’m going to flunk this. I’m not going to be able to show you any power of healing. I’ve got to be in line with God otherwise this wont work.

I throw a cheeky question in..

YP: What are you doing in Eastbourne?! I heard you moved from London to Eastbourne. I hear from a reliable source that the average age group at Eastbourne  is 45 – 60 years. You make an impact with young people so why Eastbourne?
AW: It’s amazing to me that Steve Boon is now a reliable source! (laughs)
YP: (laughs) But he is a very reliable source!

AW: I moved to Eastbourne to marry Rachel, but I stayed there because I felt God lead me to staying there and being part of the work there (Kings Church, Eastbourne), and particularly about Eldership – which I came into about 5 months ago. A friend of mine said that when you become an elder somewhere you basically raise the bar for God to speak to you to move you along. It’s no longer ok to just say “I feel like doing something else now.” I believe in the sovereignty of God speaking, and having a high view of God being able to prophetically speak to me personally has in fact increased my likelihood to stay where I am. So without being super-spiritual I’d have to say this is what God’s got for me now. But if you ask my wife or me, I don’t think we’d anticipate being in Eastbourne our entire lives or ministries, but for the moment we’re there until God moves and we’re thrilled about that.

And just in case anyone in Brighton thinks “full of old people”, we’ve got 700 plus people on a Sunday and a lot of them are young who need discipling and teaching. But having said that I love coming to Brighton and sitting in Borders and drinking coffee and reading in Starbucks. I love the city.

On that positive note, I bid him adieu and leave feeling quite enriched.

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