Growing Up & Going Out

Sharon’s Story

My story begins in the 80s when my mum and dad felt called to Toxteth - I think their story spreads over a few years before we actually finally made it in 1989.   I do have a memory of one of the times we visited before we actually moved to Liverpool and according to my parents as we were driving round Toxteth, I compared it to the Blitz because I had been studying that at primary school and there was still at that time quite a lot of burnt out houses and it was really rundown after the riots and neglected for years.  I have this memory of black walls.

It was a big change for me - moving from West London, Middlesex area - me with a southern accent trying to learn scouse so that I wasn’t bullied at school.  A big change moving to Liverpool and moving to secondary school.   

A big change too, because there were no other kids my age at the church. I was 12 and I think Helen Steele and Judith Bass were a few years younger than me in age and then that was it really. We met in the church hall at the side which is the hall that became the Preschool.

I do remember feeling really made welcome and cared for, but I think as teenage girl with not many youth friends around me, I guess I don’t know how much I really connected.   I think I used to help with the younger kids and stuff like that so my journey at the Tab was an interesting one to start with, but I definitely felt part of the family there. As I became more of a teenager, I drifted more and more from God and although I would always have said I believed I was never ready to really live out my faith or live it out how God wanted me to live.  

I do remember when I was an older teenager, there were more students arriving and CareForce workers and other people inputted a bit more into my life.  People like Amy - Amy Bodman now - and a few others were key examples for me of what it really meant to live for God although it actually took me until I’d finished university to actually give my life to God and that actually happened at a Tab mission event.

I had just moved back to Liverpool the day before after living in Sheffield for 4 years - and I had been living with my boyfriend and I’d been thinking so much in the previous months about God. I was just so unhappy and really lacking peace.  

The day I moved back, there’d been a team from the States at the Tab that week doing all sorts of outreach and that evening they had an event in the sports hall down the road (Lifestyles now).   An American pastor was talking about procrastination and putting off what you know to be true.  That word really spoke to me because that is what I’d been doing, I had been procrastinating about really choosing to follow Christ and that day, the 31st of May 1999, I gave my life to Christ.

I spent the next three months before I moved to London just being part of church and I remember having bible studies with Amy and a couple of others who lived in the flat above St Philemon’s and I remember feeling more alive and I felt really loved and care for. I know Kate Morris and Joy were around, and other people too.  The Joyce’s - Joyce Lyle and Joyce Ritchie - took me under their wing and had been praying for me for a while. 

I know Joyce Lyle prayed for me until she moved onto heaven and that Joyce Ritchie still does and that’s just so, so encouraging across the generations, to be supported and encouraged.  People have seen me grow up and go through all the teenage years - like Bill Baker and Alison and Richard Steele.  Then I was living in London and just used to visit sporadically if I was visiting my mum and dad.