Posted: 30th January 2019
With the retirement of Alan McCormick as CEO of Mission Direct in March, Wil Horwood will be joining us in February to begin the official handover.
Wil is coming to Mission Direct after serving as chief executive of Hope Worldwide UK for the last 11 years. Hope Worldwide UK is part of the global Hope Worldwide network that operates in almost 70 countries. For the last seven years, he has had the additional role of vice chair of Hope Worldwide’s Global Coordinating Council where he has been part of spearheading the network’s restructuring and governance. He is looking forward to his new role at Mission Direct because of the opportunity to engage more closely with the charity’s beneficiaries, where he hopes to build on the excellent work of the Mission Direct team and retiring chief executive, Alan McCormick.
Wil grew up with an English Catholic father and a German Lutheran mother. He observed the cost of religious divisions within his wider family and experienced regular racial intolerance and bullying as a child. While a student he became complacent about his relationship with God until a series of prompts from Him helped Wil to renew his faith, finally giving his life to Jesus a day before his 21st birthday in 1992.
Since then Wil has thrown himself into mission and church planting; and has served as a lay leader for several churches. He studied missional leadership at postgraduate level with ForMission and the University of Wales which helped him to realise his calling to work in Christian mission driven organisations where he could combine his experiences of church leadership and organisational management.
His formative and continuing experiences of division within the wider Christian family motivate Wil to seek to bring Christians together in service, and his experiences of racial abuse help him identify with people who are marginalised. He has observed how insulated Christians in the UK can be from real world issues. For him, Mission Direct represents the best of multi-denominational Christian service that helps the Christians taking part as much as the beneficiaries that they are serving.
Join us in praying for Wil and his family during this transition.
