IT’S hard to know how The Revd David Gifford fits everything in. He commutes to London from Dorchester-on-Thames for his high pressured day job and has just been ordained as a Deacon to serve in Benson.

He visited me one afternoon, on his way home from London and told me about his life, from becoming a Christian at university through to his recent ordination. “My room-mate at university was a Christian. He wasn’t evangelistic but he knew his faith and over the course of a year I started to understand more. Towards the end of my first year I had a dramatic conversion experience.”

David became a Methodist Lay Preacher as well as a geography teacher, before he headed to the South Pacific with the Methodist Missionary Society. “I was based in Tonga and it was an idyllic experience. I would come out of the school compound and about three minutes away there would be palm fronted beaches with waves breaking over the coral reef.”

But this idyllic time was interrupted by tragedy when a hurricane and a small tsunami caused havoc. “Afterwards the Tonga Christians took it in their stride. I thought that I was giving very little but was receiving far, far more from them,” says David.
When he returned to the UK David studied for a degree in management and worked for the Leprosy Mission as director in charge of Communications and Resource Development.

“That was an amazing time. I visited three continents seeing the work of the Mission and gathering stories and information for appeals.” It was on one of those trips that David met his wife, Francine, who was then the matron of a leprosarium in Indonesia. His career saw him travel to Nepal, Singapore, India and Africa and become a consultant for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for the Pacific Islands, using his cultural and geographic knowledge. He went on to become the Director of the European Division of Habitat for Humanity, which has its UK base in Banbury.

He came back to Britain when his father was very ill and because he wanted his son Jonathan to have an English education and worked for a bio science company, before becoming Chief Executive of the Council of Christians and Jews.
“There I was able to bring my wide experience working with a lot of people in the church at various levels cross culturally,” he says. He admits that at the time, he didn’t know a lot about Judaism and a steep learning curve was to follow.
“As a Christian you can’t be anything but enriched by contact with Jewish people. They inform your own faith. They have a wonderful view of life that’s very different from our own.

“They have had to endure terrible persecution principally by Christians and they still go on affirming life,” he says.
When he visited the Door office, David had just returned from Poland, where he had been to Auschwitz and the lesser known Birkenau camp, where Jews, rather than being sent to work, were simply sent to be slaughtered. There he witnessed prayers said in English and translated into Hebrew.
“It caused anxiety for everyone there, Christians and Jews. We walked in silence to the gas chambers. We were all walking along the gravel, in silence. The crunching of the gravel was the sound the Jews would have heard as they walked to their death during the war.

“My role is to create a greater understanding between the two faiths at every level. At a leadership level with our two senior presidents, Archbishop Rowan and the Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, but also at a church and synagogue level, making sure clergy have the time to learn from rabbis and rabbis learn from clergy.” As well as his national role, David is secretary Oxford branch of the CCJ – one of the oldest in the country.

So how did a man with such a busy life end up at theology college studying to become ordained? “I used to do the morning office at my desk. I get to work at 7am, which means leaving Oxford at 5am, but I’m a morning person and I enjoy the hour-and-a-half before people come into the office, I get a lot of work done. One day my desk became an altar and I stood out of myself and saw myself kneeling down. I was interceding, praying that God would reconcile Jews and Christians. It was a very powerful image.”

He says that for 30 years people had been suggesting he get ordained, but he had never thought he should. After that experience he went to see a vocations adviser, and then on to a Bishops Advisory Panel. “I knew it was the right thing to do,” he added.

For more see www.ccj.org.uk
David is now a Deacon in Benson and lives in Dorchester with his wife Francine. He has one son, Jonathan.