From Albania to Bedfordshire

Two of us grew up in Southend, got married, and trained for ordinary jobs. Annie became a physiotherapist. Dan became a social worker. Nothing about that suggested where we’d end up.

Then Leicester, church leadership, and four children. Then, in 2005, a church family who thought we were worth sending — and Tunisia, where being a Christian was against the law. We learned things there we couldn’t have learned anywhere else. Some of it was hard: opposition, being watched, being cursed at. Some of it was extraordinary. Annie trained Tunisian physiotherapists. Together we walked with adults with learning disabilities out of institutions and into actual jobs.

We came home in 2011. Dan trained at Spurgeon’s. We spent three years in a pioneering Baptist church, learning what it takes to start something where nothing is.

And then in 2014, Albania — with a fifteen-year vision and no real idea how it would work.

The first year we did almost nothing

That sounds like false modesty. It isn’t. Our first year in Albania was spent praying, listening, learning the language, and letting the Albanian Baptist Union teach us. We didn’t start a project. We walked around and paid attention.

What we saw stayed with us. Children picking over the municipal dump for anything worth money. Families living on the riverbank. A society with deep, hard lines running through it — who belongs, who doesn’t, who gets help and who is invisible.

In 2016, Tek Ura was commissioned. The name means at the bridge. That is the whole idea: build bridges between people who have been kept apart, and be a community where God is at the centre of it.

Ten years on there are two community centres, in Tirana and in Durrës. Fourteen Albanian staff — several of whom started out as our translators and are now leading the work. Five programmes running side by side: Church, Rehab, Skills, Recovery and Connect. It is Albanian-led, and that was always the point.

So what are we doing in Marston Moretaine?

In July 2024 we moved to a hybrid role: living here, still leading there, mentoring online and going back regularly. And we became pioneer ministers at Vale Community Church.

On paper Vale should not have taken us on. The church had been without a minister for years. There was no manse. There was half a stipend. There was no building — there still isn’t. Our Regional Minister, Lisa Kerry, has been honest that she doubted any church would accept a hybrid appointment of two ministers who would also be running a charity in another country.

Vale said yes anyway. They changed their constitution to make it work. They prayer-walked the new estate. A year in, we’d seen two baptisms, and a group of UK church leaders had been out to Albania and come back different.

What holds it together is a three-way partnership: Tek Ura in Albania, Vale here, and the Central Baptist Association alongside both. A sister charity, At the Bridge, now sits on the UK side.

Four things we keep coming back to

Mission is simple, and it is difficult. Those are not contradictions. The idea is usually obvious. Staying with it is the hard part.

Vision comes before the money. Every time. If you wait until the finances are clear, you will wait forever and call it wisdom.

Mission goes both ways. Albania is not a place we take things to. Some of the best thinking in this partnership comes from Tirana and Durrës to Bedfordshire, not the other way round.

Keep going. When God calls you to something, the call doesn’t expire because it’s taking longer than you hoped.

The same mission, wherever we are

The Essex riviera, the Sahara, the noise and colour of Albania, and a village in Bedfordshire. Four places that could not be less alike. The mission that has us is the same in all of them: break down barriers, build people up, bring people together.

That’s what we’re trying to do here — around a table at The Table on a Tuesday, in the school hall on a Sunday morning, on the estate, and in the ordinary conversations in between.

Dan and Annie wrote a fuller version of this story for The Baptist Times in September 2025, alongside a reflection from Lisa Kerry of the Central Baptist Association on how the partnership came about. You can read it here: https://www.baptisttimes.co.uk/Articles/718706/From_Albania_to.aspx