Charmaine Yip meets with Phil Moore, author of the much acclaimed Straight to the Heart series of Bible commentaries, as well as many other books and most recently, The Forgotten Manifesto of Jesus: How revival in Iran is spreading across the world (IVP, 2024).
You’ve been a church leader, but you’ve also had some very formational experiences of mission in overseas countries?
I was saved in the context of mission. I don’t know if this has happened to many people, but I went on Operation Mobilisation (OM) to Europe in the 1990s and it was a mission trip to go and share the gospel with people behind the Iron Curtain (as it used to be known). I went to go and share the gospel with people who’d not heard it, only to discover that this included me!
I attended a four-day preparation conference for going to the mission field. Although I’d been brought up in a church context, I spoke the language of church. I was really there for the holiday.
To be honest I was there because I wanted to see behind the Iron Curtain I’d grown up with, the former communist world being the ‘no entry’ part of Europe. But wisely, the leaders of OM ran these four days of preparation. And on one of them, they invited a speaker to come and preach the gospel.
He preached on Samson about the guy that knew how to talk about God. He’d been chosen by God, but basically, he was messing around, was living for himself. The preacher basically preached a message of judgement: the consequences of living your life for yourself rather than for God. And I believed it! I was born again that night. Something happened in my heart, despite having been in the church context, having heard the gospel maybe over a thousand times. There was something about hearing the gospel that night that just convinced me that I am Samson. I’m living life for myself. I’m talking a good game, but really the way I’m living is displeasing God and I’m in trouble unless I surrender. And that was what I did that night.
After you’d had those experiences abroad you returned to the UK and you became a church leader?
Yes, that’s right, almost 20 years in church leadership in various contexts.
Was it during those years in the church leadership that you wrote the Straight to the Heart series?
Yes. I’d been living in Europe and reading the Bible in a foreign language. I’d recognised that sometimes when I was reading the Bible in a European language, it didn’t always say exactly the same thing as it did in English. I became motivated in my very early days as a church leader to learn Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic so I could read the original scriptures (I probably had too much time on my hands to be honest!).
