God in the life of Martin Cavender

THE SPRINGBOARD for Martin's coming to faith was the realisation, in the middle of a supper party, that he had to make his mind up about Christianity. This was the beginning of a new life in which the solicitor and Diocesan Registrar became director of the Archbishops' evangelism project. Now based in Abingdon, he sees evangelism not so much as taking God into the world as helping people to discover God, already there. He is married to Cesca and they have a daughter and two sons.

My father was General Manager of the Bristol Co-operative society and we lived over the co-op in a village near Bristol. My parents scrimped and saved to educate their five sons of whom they were very proud. We were a loving family but going to church was very low on the agenda.

After school I went straight into a legal practice in Bath. For some years I was very unhappy about not having gone to university, but now see that the jigsaw fits only when I look back. At 23 I got married and then joined a firm of solicitors in Wells for six months as a locum. I stayed with that firm for 21 years. It contained a specialism in Ecclesiastical Law, which after three years of partnership, I reluctantly took up.

'I came to Christ through the Church structures'

In a way I came to Christ through the Church structures, because when I accepted the post of Diocesan Registrar in Bath and Wells Diocese, I knew that I wasn't a committed Christian. In fact I wouldn't have understood that phrase. I confessed to the Bishop that I attended church only three times a year, but I suspect he knew I would get infected!

Sure enough after nine years of being Diocesan Registrar, I decided I had to make my mind up about Christianity. My big brother had committed suicide and I had seen my children born; but most important of all was the fact that I was surrounded by people who shone - young and old, men and women, clergy and laity, people who had something that I wanted, real peace and gentleness, a sense of wholeness, of Shalom. Nobody asked 'Are you saved?' but years later I discovered that many people had been praying for me.

That evening my life came to a fresh beginning

God finally brought me to a moment one evening in December 1984, when a clergyman and his wife came to supper. We were talking about something quite different during the meal when I had a vision of a prison cell in which I was sitting. I thought I was going mad, and said, 'something's happening to me will you please help me'. Then this lovely elderly priest just took a prayer book out of his pocket and began praying from it. I don't know what he prayed. I just know that in his prayers I stood up and walked out of the prison door.

Cardinal Newman, said 'Fear not that your life will come to an end, fear rather that it will never come to a beginning.' That evening my life came to a fresh beginning, which I know will be worked out for the rest of my life.

There is a question which goes 'Do you know what makes God smile?' to which the answer is 'telling him your future plans'! At the time I was busy telling him about how much I loved being a lawyer and a Registrar and serving my fourth Bishop, Jim Thompson. It was as if God said 'Yes I know you do, but now come and do this'. So in April 1992 at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury (who had been my third Bishop). I left the law, and went to work with Springboard.

Perhaps unwisely I had mentioned my coming to faith to the Diocesan Missioner and I found myself catapulted, as someone in the establishment in a pin-striped suit, with Cesca into parish and deanery missions. Then when George Carey became Diocesan Bishop, he developed a series of teaching missions, and we became part of the team. His invitation to join Springboard was exactly what God had prepared us for and was calling us to do.

Springboard was set up in 1992 by the two Archbishops to encourage, renew and mobilise the Church for evangelism. In its initial stage it was to bring back from North America the two Michaels - Bishop Michael Marshall from the Catholic tradition, and Canon Michael Green from the Evangelical - and uniquely in Church history put the two together on the road. It was intended to last four years and I was to go back into the law in August 1996. But the Archbishops decided that the work needed to be renewed. We are now working through to a budget date of March 2003 and then seeing what happens.

Our job in evangelism is not to 'take Christ to the world' because He's already there. It is to help the world discover Him. The main thrusts to our work include local missions - deanery, parish and city wide - because we don't believe we can talk about it if we're not doing it. We are increasingly involved in mission work over weekends, with 60 to 70 parishes in a Diocese simultaneously doing an evangelism weekend, at the invitation of the Bishop. We will train people, help with the weekend, and then come back to do a reflection and debriefing. It can change the environment in a Diocese towards mission. But most of my work is with what we call our Diocesan Travelling School. We do three or four a year and work intensively over a fortnight in a diocese with all the clergy, all the PCC members, local ministry teams, bishops, archdeacons and others to encourage and refresh them and bring challenge and vision to their ministry and mission. We also, amongst other things, do leadership training. We take 25 people away for ten days on the road, teach them for four days in the class room and then take them onto the street for four days on a prepared mission process. People say this has transformed their ministry.

I came to Christ out of plenty. I didn't need to come to faith, and I can't say much about, 'this is what went wrong, so I turned to God'. But I can speak about Cesca's conversion and about the moment when my son Sam was diagnosed as having meningitis, and the way in which God turned up and was involved in that whole process. And I can speak about sitting with people and watching reconciliation in their lives in ways which can only be described as God given. And I can testify to travelling in Rwanda just after the genocide and listening to stories of the faithfulness of God in the midst of all that suffering. And so much more, on and on.

The lawyer in me wants to understand the logic of it. I have got enough evidence to satisfy myself that God exists. But I have this extraordinary sense that He doesn't call me to understand Him. He calls me to know Him.

I am coming to see that He does truly love me. He created the Universe, yet he is fascinated by the tiniest aspect of my life and has also given me free will to make a pig's ear of it. Now a God like that who, as the Bible clearly tells me, is more than anything concerned with having a relationship with me, is the God I want to walk with.

I am more excited about God now than I was 16 years ago. I am coming to understand the height and breadth and depth and totality of the love of God. Somewhere deep inside me I know what it means when it says in John's Gospel in chapter 17 verse 3: 'This is eternal life - to know God and his Son Jesus Christ'.