Peter Owen-Jones

Peter Owen-Jones (born 1957) is an English Anglican priest, author and television presenter.

Owen-Jones dropped out of public school at the age of 16 and went to Australia to make his fortune. Back in Britain, he began his working life as a farm labourer in southeast England and then ran a mobile disco before moving to London where he started in advertising as a messenger boy and worked his way up to creative director.

In his late 20s and with a wife and two children, he gave up his commercial life to follow a calling to the Anglican ordained ministry by enrolling at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. In early 1996 he gained notoriety when he conducted a service for the Newbury bypass protestors.

In 1998, he was responsible for three parishes in Cambridgeshire as the rector of Haslingfield (Harlton, Great Eversden and Little Eversden), before resigning from this position in 2005 to relocate to the benefice of Glynde, West Firle and Beddingham. He was recruited by the BBC to front a series of religious television programmes looking at different aspects of Christianity and other faiths.

He is married to Jac and as of May 2010 has four children.

In his BBC documentary How to Live a Simple Life (2009), Owen-Jones tried to live a life without money in the footsteps of Saint Francis of Assisi. His 2010 documentary, The Lost Gospels, discussed the Apocryphal Gospels which were omitted from the canon of the New Testament. He considered how their contents might have altered Christian theology if they had not been suppressed.