Courtney in London
About
the
vision
​​Welcome to my place of honesty. As a creative Christian in full-time ministry in London, there's a lot about my life that doesn't fit into a box. Sometimes it seems like I'm too Christian for non-Christians and too "secular" for Christians, or at the very least the concept of urban missions is usually hard to wrap your mind around if you've only experienced a "classic" sense of missions. But despite the awkwardness, I actually kind of love living in this in-between, and dare I say believe it's where we all should live. I think that God's plans and dreams for us (as in you and me and also like, humaity) are bigger and way more crative and innovative than we're probably used to. So this is why I've resurrected this site; it's a place where we can live in the tension of being human together and colour outside the lines a bit.
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It's also a place where I can write again. I found my old blog recently and was reminded that I actually used to write because I loved it. As I get older and things increasingly become "work" without even noticing, I feel a new resolve to start writing again just because I want to. And who knows, maybe this will encourage you to start doing the thing in your life that feels forgotten.
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So thanks for joining me, and I hope that you find this to be a place where you can be honest, too.
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xx Courtney
the
backstory
Ever since childhood, I knew I wasn't created for a "normal" life. I mean, whatever "normal" is anyway. But the the point is I've always known that the standard 9-5, living down the street from my parents just wasn't in the cards for me. If you asked me when I was 13, I would've told you that I was going to be some CEO of a fashion company living it up in NYC or Paris. It's funny how we can be so close, yet so, so far...
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When I was 17, I had an experience with God that marked my life so strongly that I believe it changed the direction of my life. From then on, I was obsessed with getting to know Him more. A few years passed and as I learned more about who God is, I was also discovering more of who He created me to be. And let's just say, there were some things I believed about myself that weren't right at all.
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One of those things involved my identity as the "fashion girl" - that's what I was known as, how I labelled myself and what was in control of the future I had projected for myself. So when God revealed that actually, no, that was not who I was but merely one aspect of myself, you can imagine that it sent me into a crisis of sorts. Long story short, I no longer knew who I was nor what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and a friend of a friend suggested I do a creative Discipleship Training School. Arts and missions? Sounded like just what I needed! So in the autumn of 2014 I moved to Germany for a six month, creative writing-focused missions school with an outreach to Nepal and India.
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I returned home with a deeper relationship with Jesus but a lot of things to work through (but that's a story for another time). Fast forward a few months, and I felt God release me back into creative missions. Beacsue I had no idea what else to do, I did a quik Google search about creative missions and found myself in London for a three month creative writing and missions internship.
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And over eight years (!!) later, I'm still here with no plans of going elsewhere! These years have been both the most challenging and most rewarding of my life, and I'm now in full-time missions with Hope and Anchor Community Church and One UK. Although things are different from when I arrived in 2016, our mission to reach the spheres of urban life remains. I am rooted in a place where I can grow and thrive, and each day I'm amazed to see how God uses all of my skills and passions that He has placed inside me for something way bigger than me - His Kingdom. When I think back to that young girl that wanted nothing more that to live an extraordinary life doing what she loved, I know that if she saw me today she would be amazed at how God's plans are greater than anything that she could ever imagine. I'm not going to lie, life is far from easy and the cost of living all-in for Jesus is, well, everything, but is always worth it because I know I'm exactly where He has called me to be. ​