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Interview Dean Courtier of Ashingdon Elim Church  (13th December 2010)


Rochford Life: Dean, give us a little background about yourself  
Dean:  I’m married, my wife works for the NHS and we have two children; my daughter is seventeen and my son is fourteen.

RL: Are you full-time with the church or do you have another job?  
Dean: My background is design and marketing and financial services. Up until two years ago I worked in the City for a very large international law firm. As with every other business they suffered because of the economic crisis and ten percent of their full-time staff were let go, and so two years ago I actively became more involved in Ashingdon Elim. I had been preaching there about a year at that time and it just fitted perfectly with everything that was going on. As I said, my background is design and marketing and financial services so I still dabble in website design and marketing for various people but the main focus for me really is serving the Lord through Ashingdon church.

RL: What was your church background, what is your history?
Dean:   I’ve been a Christian since I was seventeen (I will be forty two next year). When I was born I was brought up as a Jew. I lived with my grandmother and grandfather until the age of nine in the East End of London. My mum was always of the opinion that I should always make a choice for myself when I was old enough, what I followed and what I believed. She still thinks I’m going through a phase all these years later, but at the age of seventeen I was invited along to a church by someone I worked with. I went along to the church on a Sunday evening and got really angry with the minister because he seemed to know absolutely everything about me, every question I’d ever asked, every problem I’d ever had, as he was preaching.  I also got incredibly angry with the person who took me along who, after the service said, “Why are you so angry”,  and I said, “Well you’ve told them everything about me,” only to discover that they hadn’t even known that I was going and it was actually God who was speaking to me. A couple of months later, in the June of that year, I gave my life to the Lord and haven’t really looked back since. The church I was converted in was an inner city church in South East London, Grove Chapel, Camberwell. I was there for a few years until we got married, then my wife and I moved to a Baptist Church in New Cross which was sixty or seventy percent West Indian and very different in its style of worship but biblically sound in its preaching.

RL: What got you out of London?
Dean: Well in 1996 I worked for the London Stock Exchange – I did marketing and design work for them. My first daughter was three years old and my son had just been born and we really didn’t want our children to go to school in London. Working at the Stock Exchange they paid for my travel, my season ticket up to a sixty mile radius, so we literally drew a circle on a map and prayed about it and said, “God we’re somewhere in this area. Please show us where you want us to be.”
We prayed that on a Friday night and made a list of the things we were looking for in a property. We wanted something that was close to a local school, shops within walking distance, obviously easy commuting distance. On the Saturday morning we had  a letter through our door from Barratt’s the house builders, who were building in Rochford and they had three and four bedroom properties, so we drove down to Rochford and absolutely fell in love with it.
The property gave us everything that was on the list that we’d made the night before except there was no en suite bathroom, but we thought we could live with that because it had a bathroom and separate toilet. So we put a deposit on the house, drove back home, spoke to our minister in New Cross and said, we believe God is leading us on and can you recommend a church for us to go to?  
So when we first moved down here in 1996 we went to Providence Baptist in Southend and were there for quite a while doing youth work and various different things, and then we really felt the Lord was leading us on and we went to Rochford Congregational Church. There I was involved in setting up what became the Football League of Churches in the area, so we were taking kids out on a Saturday morning and training them in football skills. We took on the kind of kids that no one else would take on, the ones who couldn’t kick a ball straight and who wouldn’t be picked. Also there I became one of the deacons and I did a lot of work in the villages, Canewdon and Pagglesham, where we had two congregational churches, and did quite a lot of preaching there, and door to door visiting.  
Then about three years ago it felt like the Lord was calling us on and we went to Ashingdon Elim, and we really felt like we had come home. Within a couple of months of being there we became members and on the day we joined, Dave Redbond booked me to preach and I haven’t look back since.
In January of 2010 I was appointed a Pastor by the local fellowship and had to go to a national leadership team in June of his year to be given the seal of approval by the ministry selection board and the national leadership team.  So in January 2011 I will celebrate one year of being in the leadership here, and I’m loving it.                           

RL: What actually is your role? What do you do?
Dean:  Primarily preaching. I preach four Sundays out of five, either at Ashingdon or Southend or Rayleigh. I also lead a discussion group on a Tuesday night that we call twenty-twenty which is really about a balanced view of the Bible, and about practical Christianity. Anyone can gather head knowledge about the Bible but it’s actually about how you apply it to your daily life, how you get away from religion into a relationship with the Lord. We deal with really practical things like, what is faith, how to develop positive attitude, how do you look at the positive in every situation? What about in Jeremiah 29 where it says God knows the plans that He has for you?  How do you reconcile living in the world with practical everyday Christianity? We’ve done one evening on angels, demons and Satan and the supernatural realm. We have people who have been Christians for years, and we have people who have virtually no knowledge.
Aside from that I still do marketing for the church. I do all the church advertising, the church literature and I run the websites for each of the local Elim churches, also record our podcasts and upload those to iTunes and various other syndicate sites. Podcasts have been an incredible thing for the church. We’ve been running since May this year and have just over twenty thousand subscribers and around 1.4 million downloads of our sermons. We have subscribers from Russia, from Australia, from the US, from New Zealand, from Bulgaria, from China, from Korea.                 

RL: Earlier you also used the expression, ‘we felt the Lord leading us on’. What does that mean?
Dean: Sometimes God makes it quite clear to us that he wants us to either do something or be somewhere else. It could be by the circumstances we are in, where things happen that are difficult to believe as happening without God being behind them. Using the example in our own lives, about moving to Rochford, when we had such a specific list of what we were looking for, for us to be given everything that we needed suggests that that was the Lord’s will. Similarly for us when we moved from the church in Southend to the Rochford area, we found a burden in our hearts to serve the local community and we wanted to be part of the local community. When I say a burden, it was like an undeniable itch that just had to be scratched that we concluded was God talking to us.
We prayed and said, “Lord where do you want us to be?” and we visited a number of different churches in the area and nowhere that we went to felt like home. There is an undeniable sense or feeling that you get when ‘I’m home’. When we went to Rochford Congregational church, that was how it felt. We went there on a Christmas Eve service and it just felt like home. Again when we moved on to Ashingdon, there was that ‘itch’ to move. In the Bible there are undeniably time when God will speak to people through a variety of ways. I suppose one of the things I keep talking about is a relationship rather than religion and our ethos is really all about having a personal relationship with the Lord. Not just praying in emergencies, it’s about a continuous relationship with a God who loves you. I’ve quoted in it sermons that I’ve preached, that I could stand in a garage for an hour every week but it wouldn’t make me a car, and just going to church doesn’t make me a Christian but it is the commitment to do what God tells me to do, it is the understanding that Jesus Christ is my Saviour. It’s through nothing that I’ve done except accept him. It really is about relationship and not about religion.     

RL: A final closing sentence: “I love doing what I’m doing because...”
Dean: Because God has called me to do it! Can I have more than one line – it’s about the people, it’s about building relationships, it’s about serving the community. I don’t see it as a job; it’s something I love to do which is why I call it a call,

RL: Well, thank you Dean, for sharing so much about your life with us, so thoroughly.