A pastor who coaches. A coach who still pastors.

I began preaching at nineteen, in a converted back room in Ibadan with plastic chairs and a borrowed amplifier. There were eleven of us. I had no theological training, no budget and a great deal of misplaced certainty — but I had already noticed something that would shape the next two decades of my life.

The people in that room were not short of faith. They were short of structure. They believed God for extraordinary things and then went home to chaotic habits, unexamined resentment and no plan for Tuesday. The sermon lifted them on Sunday and gravity took them back by Wednesday.

The gap nobody was addressing

I moved to London in my late twenties to study theology, and ended up also studying organisational psychology almost by accident — a module I took to fill a timetable gap and never recovered from. It gave me a vocabulary for the thing I had watched for years: that transformation requires both conviction and architecture. Belief without behaviour is sentiment. Behaviour without belief is exhaustion.

I began coaching properly in 2009, initially with pastors who were quietly falling apart behind competent ministries. Word travelled sideways into business. Within three years I was working with founders, surgeons, civil servants and entrepreneurs — people with entirely different vocabularies and identical problems.

What I actually do

Today my work splits three ways: pastoral ministry and preaching; one-to-one peak performance and life coaching; and seminars, keynotes and leadership schools across Africa, Europe and America. I write in between — three books so far, each one an attempt to put down in print what I keep finding in the room.

I am not interested in helping anyone go faster in the wrong direction. I want to know where you are actually going, and whether the person you are becoming can survive arriving there.

I live in London with my wife of twenty-four years. We have three children, one stubborn allotment, and a house that is louder than it looks from the street.