Who are you and what do you do?

 

My name is Ian and I own a Christian bookshop and I volunteer with HOPE UK. BUT when I was at Virgin Atlantic I sort of had this thought... I wonder if there are any other Christians around. I knew one other Christian guy who was a cargo director. We didn’t want to use a room in the building without being honest about what we were doing and so we wrote to Richard Branson’s office and said we want to use a room for Christian Union is that alright. And he said, “…absolutely, you can do what you like,” – sort of thing – “but it might mean there’s a Muslim society”, and we said that’s fine we just want to have a Christian meeting. In the first meeting there were about 20 of us but I think it’s grown to about 50 plus now. So it’s a big thing down in Crawley. It was really encouraging and all sorts of people came out the woodwork who are Christians within the organisation.

 

What did you do, what were your main activities?

 

Prayer, bible study and encouraging each other. We had speakers in from time to time to talk about different things. We had a time of explaining what we did within the organisation and just sort of networked really and had a bit of lunch.

 

Why was it important for you to set up this Christian Union group?

 

I just wasn’t very good at being... with some people I was alright at being an overt Christian if you like… but I… I had to be more of a sort of effective witness within the company and I felt that would be easier to do if there were a few of us supporting each other. So it was after church when someone at church said come on, be a bit more of a Christian when you’re at work on a Tuesday morning in your job. I felt I couldn’t do this on my own - so suddenly when there were 25/30 of us it was a bit easier.

 

How many years ago was this?

 

About 6/7 years ago now.

  

 

(This info was spoken into a dictaphone and kept word for word where possible)