Ian Mobsby

Ian Mobsby is a writer, speaker and missioner. He is the Priest in Charge of the Guild Church of St Mary Aldermary in the City of London and missioner to the Moot Community. Mobsby has a background in the Emerging Church and in particular New Monasticism and as an associate missioner of the Fresh expression Initiative, which seeks to renew and revive the churches in the UK regarding contextual mission, engaging worship and being real forms of community.

Mobsby was born in the heady days of the late 1960s, with a rich family inheritance of atheism and socialism on his mother's side and science, the arts and banking on his father's side. At an early age he took to music in a strong way, which became a key motif to his life, particularly with the classical guitar and violin. He also had a deep love of nature and has described in his writing how this opened up the whole experience of spirituality in nature. After recovering from a long period of convalescence following orthopaedic operations requiring him to use a wheelchair, he trained for a BHSc (Hons) in occupational therapy at York St John University which was formally part of the University of Leeds at the time.

It was while studying in York that Mobsby became a committed Christian, largely through an alternative worship project then called Warehouse and now called Visions. He was also influenced by the Nine O'Clock Service in Sheffield. He made the leap from atheism to Christianity largely through the experience of Christian spiritual communities and a strong sense of God's mystical presence in the world. After returning to London for work at the end of his studies, he was one of the founders of a south London alternative worship community which was called the Epicentre Network and then based at St Mark's Battersea Rise. After ten years of innovative and creative approaches to reach the un-and-de-churched, this project ended as a parting of the waves as both the community and the host church were coming from completely different places regarding theology, ecclesiology and attitudes towards the wider church. Throughout the years of the Epicentre Network he was a lay minister giving a day a week of his time voluntarily and working the rest of the time as an occupational therapist. He became the acting head of the Occupational Therapy Service at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in Putney, London. At this time he was encouraged to discern a potential calling to the priesthood of the Church of England. After a lengthy discernment process it was confirmed that the church recognised his calling to pioneering and mission work as a Church of England priest and recommended training.

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