S02:E01
This week’s service was a Communion Sunday in the “This is Us” series, and instead of a sermon it was an interview: Nick sat down with Wendy Painter, who recently joined the senior leadership team, so the church could get to know her.
Wendy describes herself as a one-to-one person rather than a group person: married to Colin for 37 years, with two married daughters and a new grandson. She was born in Coventry, the youngest of seven, and — as she tells it — the first baby born in the lift of the new hospital, because the staff did not believe her mother was already in labour. Her childhood was happy but quiet: love was not spoken out loud, and with seven children it was mostly “get on with it”. She disliked school and rules, and her rebellion was a quiet one — she simply did not turn up for her French exam. Nurse training at King’s College London was the escape she loved.
Her family was not Christian. Faith arrived through a colleague called Jackie, who took her to St Mark’s at the Oval. Wendy remembers the enormous wooden doors and told Jackie she would not go in if they were shut, because she did not want to be boxed in — they stayed open, and after several weeks she gave her life to Christ. Jesus has been the constant ever since: life has its ups and downs, but he does not move.
She is honest that faith has not meant an easy life. When Colin’s work moved the family back to the Midlands she resented leaving a place she loved near the sea; soon afterwards her mother contracted meningitis and was given hours to live. Wendy stood by the bed and shouted at God — “this isn’t on” — and her mother recovered, and never smoked again after forty a day. A couple of years later a stroke took her. Her father’s Alzheimer’s brought the opposite prayer, that God would take him, and she describes God answering that he knew the day he brought him into the world and the day he would take him home; he died the next day.
What she has learned is God’s faithfulness across a whole life — from lost keys and parking spaces to the death of parents — and that he is worth trusting more as she gets older, even when she still doubts. The second lesson came through years with Christians Against Poverty: do not judge people, see them through Jesus’ eyes.
The last part is about MCF. The family moved to Sheffield five years ago, ten days before their first grandson was born, and went to St Thomas Philadelphia until the drive — 28 sets of traffic lights — became impossible. Wendy admits they looked at the MCF website and said “no, we’re not going there”; then they walked in and felt at home. What struck her was the leadership’s humility and the plainness of communion. She is excited and scared about joining the team, used to the structure of her Baptist background, and aware that God keeps asking her to stay open and keep learning: there is no retiring from his kingdom.
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Watch the video: https://youtu.be/xj_R7d0w6BM
