Pastor David & Jennifer Fletcher
Church LeadersDavid & Jennifer
David & Jennifer Fletcher are the Church Leaders of New Life in Christ, Harrogate; working together with Senior Pastors Vernon and Susan Roosevelt and the Leadership team.
David and Jennifer’s background is over fifteen years of pioneering mission in the UK with a specific calling to Yorkshire in the North of England. Jennifer is a missionary with Youth with a Mission (YWAM). She led a team of YWAM missionaries in York and set up and established Street Angels in the same city. David has worked mostly pioneering new expressions of ‘church’ since 2005.
Together they started and developed a ministry to mostly Central & East European homeless & rough-sleeping people in Sheffield, who often suffered from alcoholism and other addictions. During this time of working together, they married one another.
Their passion is for people to discover their identities in Christ and to be released into their God-given callings, purposes and destinies. They love to worship God through passionate praise music and they love to see people restored to ‘fullness of life’ through the love of God in Jesus Christ.
Jennifer
Jennifer grew up in the Harrogate area and joined New Life In Christ after becoming a Christian while backpacking around Australia post-University. Since the early 2000s, she has served with Youth with a Mission (YWAM) in York, running discipleship training schools, leading short term mission trips overseas, and then setting up Street Angels York. She then moved to Sheffield to work with David serving a community of marginalised Eastern Europeans.
Her passion is for Jesus, his love for the nations and for those on the fringes of society.
She loves adventure, hospitality, meeting new people and starting new initiatives. New Life In Christ has always been her church family and home. She is excited to be back in Harrogate leading this international, vibrant and passionate congregation together with her husband David.
David
David is a passionate and committed follower of Jesus. He is by nature a visionary and has a missionary calling to bring the good news of the love of Jesus Christ to people who don’t know Him personally.
David was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, and felt the call to be a missionary at age 10 during the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, which stirred the world and led to the Live Aid events. At that time, David felt a longing to help people who were physically poor, but this later developed to include a heart for those who were materially wealthy, yet troubled in emotions, mind and spirit.
At age 13, he was asked by a teacher during a religious education lesson, if he believed in God. His answer was ‘No’. Travelling home from school, he asked himself “Who is the God I don’t believe in?” He decided that he would find out more about the God he didn’t believe in, so he could know why he didn’t believe in him! This led David to read the New Testament from cover to cover over a number of years. Through reading the stories of Jesus’ life he had many moving encounters with the love of God. Although he didn’t fully understand the implications of his newfound faith.
In the 1990s at University, living a life of partying and excess, he had a profound spiritual crisis and was led by an African student, to give his life, wholeheartedly to Jesus. His life changed dramatically at that point and he has not looked back.
David has followed an unconventional route into church leadership. He has pioneered numerous ‘Fresh Expressions’ of church; set up a social enterprise and worked for over seven years birthing and nurturing a Christian community of people who were formerly homeless and who wrestled with many life-controlling issues. His passion is to see those on the margins of church, and society, for whatever reason, to enter into a full knowledge of their ‘true’ identity in Christ and to understand their vocation and who they are called to become.
David enjoys walking and mountain biking in the countryside; good films with strong character development; listening to contemporary Christian music and reading theology. He is excited to be one of the leaders at New Life in Christ and looks forward to meeting you, as you seek to take your own steps on a journey of discovery, adventure, and homecoming.