Under Restoration - Barry Woodward Interview

Can you tell me a little about your background?

Well I was brought up in a good home, in a place called Salford in Greater Manchester. I came from a normal working class family. My parents worked quite hard. I went to school, didn't like it, didn't even try at all at school, and I left school with no qualifications.

Soon after leaving school I got involved with a group of guys who were taking recreational drugs and I started to hang around with them. I started to take the same drugs as they were taking, but then eventually we started using harder drugs.

I ended up moving away from where I was living with my parents to an area called Moss Side which is central Manchester. While I was living there I started to deal drugs and that's how I used to earn a living.

Were there any consequences, were you ever caught?

Yeah I got away with it for a while, but then you always do, but then your luck runs out and you end up getting arrested, arrested again, and arrested again. Eventually I got refused bail and then I got remanded in custody. As a young person I remember going into Strangeways for the very first time on the Young Person's Wing.

That didn't deter me from taking drugs, all I wanted to do was get out and start taking drugs again, and I did. That became a cycle. The more drugs that I took, the deeper I got into the lifestyle of the underworld of drug addicted crime, different kinds of crime. I would do anything to make money, obviously I needed to make a living, I needed to make money to keep my addiction going.

When you get older and you're out of it and you look back in retrospect you can see some of your errors. When you're in it you can't see it, hindsight is a wonderful thing!

Obviously something has happened because I can't see the church inviting a drug addict to speak if you were still in that lifestyle...So what changed your life?

Well I had a 'religious experience' in a church about 14 years ago, some people would call it an epiphany, but for me it was an encounter with God. Chapter 13 of my book "Once An Addict" is called God Encounter and in there I describe something that happened at an independent church. I got invited to this church and I ended up attending. There's a sequence of events that got me into the church, but I ended up going into this church.

The guy who was speaking said "If you've got any issues..." and when he said that I thought Does he want someone with issues? I'll give him issues! He said "our God is able to help you with your problems, we can pray with you..." So I went to the front and this guy came and stood with me and prayed with me and it was like a switch was flicked and I started to see the light, the reality of God became so evident in my life and I just wanted to change the way that I had been living.

I remember walking back to my flat and I suffered from an illness called amphetamine psychosis, up until that day I used to hear voices. On that day all the voices that I used to hear just vanished. I walked into my flat hearing no voices, and I went into the bedroom, took my jacket off and I looked up to the sky and I shouted to God and said "God, what have I been doing with my life for the last 14 years?" I did swear, I'm going to be honest, I've stopped swearing and I've not sworn much since, but I did swear at that time. I don't think God's worried about that because He heard my heart's cry. "All I want to do is get this (blankety- blank) out of my system! All I want to do is to start to live my life for you! I just want to get clean!" I really meant it as I said it.

Within four weeks of me yelling those words out to God I was off the drugs, off the Heroin. I had no desire to even want touch them, I didn't even want to smoke, not even a cigarette. It was a God encounter and that was the big turning point in my life.

What have you been doing since then?

I'm a full time travelling speaker, I travel up and down the country. I used to travel around the world but 5 years ago I really felt challenged by God to major on the UK. Sometimes for an evangelist it can be an easy option to go to Africa and get crowds of 1000 or 2000 and get great responses, I want to make a difference in the United Kingdom because the UK needs God too. It's working alongside the local church.

I went to a college called Cliff College which is a Methodist college, and while I was in my last year I set up a charity that was going to act as an administration base for the work that God had called me to do which was that of an evangelist. On the day of my graduation I became the director-evangelist of Proclaim Trust. We had £10 in the bank, we had no offices, 1 chair, 1desk and some shelves that weren't straight, that was the start of Proclaim Trust. Over the years obviously that's changed, we've built it up and we've got staff now, and our own office suite.

I speak in a maximum of 25 prisons a year. I don't do any more than that because I believe in prison ministry, certainly for me, but I don't want it all to be about prisons. I'm doing lots and lots of different events up and down the country working with different denominations, including the Restored Tour with Shell Perris.

I think working with different denominations is important, even though I belong to a denomination, I'm recognised as a minister. I work right across the board with all the different denominations, not looking at what we can disagree on, but keeping the main thing, what we do agree on which is Christ and having a relationship with God.

With your background do you find that you end up dealing with a lot of people with drug addiction?

It's general adult ministry and young people as well because my books have gone mad. We sent 27,000 copies of my book out to prisons in the last 2 years and some of them went to Young Offenders institutes and we get lots of letters. They say that they can actually see themselves in my story. They are in the same cycle, early stages of it, the beginning of the crime and the drugs. Drugs are so massive now, they were big in my day, but they're even bigger now. So even though I am older, my story can relate a lot to a younger generation.

So I would say young people, young adults, older people, I do tend to draw quite a lot of rehabs to my meetings, people who have got problems with drugs, but I also draw the Professors and the Doctors. In fact a solicitor became a Christian a few months ago in a meeting I was doing in Halifax. I always try and present my story in a way so that everybody can get something from it.

Do you ever get anybody who comes to try and disprove that this has happened to you?

I do lots of interviews with the BBC, with Sky and lots of Newspaper stuff, it's a powerful story and people have read my book. Sceptics of the Christian faith have interviewed me. The thing is this, people can argue with your theology, but they can't argue with something that has happened to you as powerful as it has happened to me. We're all different and God works in us all in different ways, your experience will be different from my experience.

We're all on a journey, for me I think I needed a big shebang because I was into big experiences and God met me where I was at. God woke me up to His existence. No-one can take that away from me, I might not understand everything about how God works, I might not have all the answers about suffering and why God doesn't always heal etc. At the end of the day something happened to me fourteen years ago is a fact and no-one can argue with that.

One thing that does help my story is that my former psychiatrist had a part to play in me becoming a Christian. He's a very good friend of mine now and he supports our ministry, Dr Samuel Yangye, he didn't know that I was going to become a Christian. So in my new DVD that we've just brought out we actually interview my psychiatrist and he gives his professional opinion on the state that I was in and he also validates my 'Religious Experience'.

Having been in the situation how would you help a friend who had an addiction?

If someone has a friend who is addicted, or they know somebody who is taking drugs, I would say be supportive, be there for them but don't be their doormat. Drug addicts and users will take you for granted, even now I can think of a couple of people who I know, they've seen that I've changed and they know that I am a Christian and they try and take advantage of that. I won't be anybody's doormat, but I will support and I will get alongside them.

My Dad for example when he found out I was on drugs he couldn't bear it, he disowned me. I think because he came from that generation that was his way of dealing with it. My son's a drug addict, I don't want to know him. I don't blame him for doing that, I think what he did was right for him and it might have been right for me, because it meant that I could get on with my selfish lifestyle. But if I had a child who was on drugs I wouldn't do that, I would support them, but I wouldn't be their doormat.