Hi! I’m Hope
I am married to my partner in marriage, business, parenting, church work, and life, Richard, who has put up with a LOT over the last 23 years. Our kids Isaac, Keirsten and Aaron have filled my life with joy, purpose and many, many opportunities to learn and grow. The four of them are my absolute favourite people on the planet to hang out with.
I’ve been in some form of youth work since I was 19, so I really love teens and young adults.
Theologically, I was blessed to be raised by amazing, godly missionary parents who let me make my faith my own. I have gone to church in pretty much every denomination you can think of so I have learned that wonderful, Jesus-loving people can have very different perspectives on many important, but not essential, things.
Our family currently attends an AGC church that we helped plant. I truly believe that as a church, as THE church, we have a lot to learn from one another and as long as we keep going back to scripture to make sure we aren’t neglecting truth, we need to focus less on the dogmas of our denominations and more on the amazing family that God has given us in his church. There are A LOT of issues that I see many sides of and I’m just not willing to die on many theological hills. The Apostle’s Creed nails the essentials, the hills I will die on if necessary. Pretty much anything else I am still open to learning about.
Philosophically, I am hard core evidentialist. Presuppositionalism makes no sense to me at all. Again, there are a few presuppositionalists I really appreciate and respect, so I am not saying they are wrong, I’m saying it doesn’t make sense to me. For me, it is foolish to believe in something without having good reasons for believing it. Incidentally, I am confident I have REALLY good reasons for my faith. If you want to hear more about that, click on my Why I Believe page and then grab a coffee because it’s a looong one.