Our Team
TWFTW UK is a charity registered in England and Wales (no. 1098498). It is governed by a board of trustees, all of whom give their time voluntarily to the cause. The trustees have appointed a UK Director. Click here to see a summary of income and expenditure on the Charity Commission website.
Brief biographies of our team are as follows:
Stephen Lancaster (UK Director)
Steve joined the UK office on a full-time basis at the start of October 2021. His role is to represent TWFTW and to promote its work at Christian conferences and churches throughout the UK. He has a passion for preaching God’s Word and, having served in Tanzania using the Swahili language in his ministry, he is very much aware of the importance of people having the Bible in their own language.
In his early years Steve trained in horticulture and arboriculture, and worked for local government in Cumbria for a seven year period, involved in urban tree management. In the year 2000, sensing a call to Africa, he spent eighteen months based in Zambia on a mission’s training programme called African Quest. Then followed a period of study at All Nations Christian College in Hertfordshire (2002-05), before he joined AIM (Africa Inland Mission) here in the UK as a missions mobiliser across the South of England (2006-2013). In 2013 he moved to Tanzania as an AIM missionary to work with the Institute of Bible and Ministry, where he served as a Bible teacher, helping to teach and train Tanzanian pastors. He and his wife Ruth returned to the UK at the end of 2020, and now live in the town of Corsham in Wiltshire. They are members of Corsham Baptist Church.
Steve's interests and hobbies include badminton, skiing, hill walking, birding, snooker and football. He also has a passion for leading and speaking on the occasional Oak Hall trip to Israel.
To contact Stephen click here
Dr Paul Quinlan (Chairman)
Paul joined The World for the World Board in Sept 2015. He has been actively engaged in Christian overseas work for the past 30 years, primarily as a supporter and funder of Africa Inland Mission International and as co-leader of a local group that takes an active interest in the work through prayer, financial support and meeting with mission partners.
Paul has been a member of Grace Community Church for 30 years and is actively involved in a wide range of ministries there.
Professionally, he is a Director of R&D at Unilever, responsible for managing the innovation portfolio in the Foods and Beverages sector. He is heavily involved in strategy development, programme management and delivery, and development of role-specific training programmes for a global team of 700 R&D professionals. All these skills are relevant to his role on the Board.
He has travelled extensively throughout his career which has given him a perspective on working cross-culturally.
Paul obtained his PhD in Biochemistry from The University of Bristol in the UK, and has 30 scientific publications and 20 patents.
Dr Barry Funnell (Trustee and Translation Consultant)
Barry trained as a dentist, but changed his career to Bible Translation in 1991. He has a three year Licentiate in Christian Ministries specialising in Bible Translation at Africa School of Missions in South Africa and obtained a MA in Sociolinguistcs from the University of South Africa (UNISA).
Barry is a Bible translation consultant and has worked with 40 languages in Africa and SE Asia. He is passionate about the Bible and producing quality translations He has been substantially involved in the completion of the Sena Bible (Malawi) which was published in 2006 and started translation projects in 10 Tanzanian languages. The New Testament was published in these 10 languages in 2016.
Barry lives in Bedford, UK and was UK Director from 2009 - 2015. He is married to Julia and has three children; Lisa, Tim and Daniel.
Kenneth Cherry (Trustee)
Ken joined The World for the World Board in 2005, becoming chairman in 2010 and continued until 2016 when he resigned to continue as a trustee.
For the past 20 years he has supported a ministry in Sri Lanka, travelling out there several times to minister to the churches there.
He has been Pastor of Kingdom Harvest, a local Bedford fellowship, for the past 10 years.
Although now retired he worked for Unilever Research and one of its subsidiaries for 23 years, in Process Control of various foods products and latterly in a biomedical company. From there, after taking early retirement he became a self employed R&D Electromechanical engineer continuing in the field of biomedical products.
He is married to Daphne with two grown up adopted boys and a granddaughter.
John Richards (Trustee)
Born and raised in Zimbabwe, I have spent most of my career in the commercial arena of the oil and gas industry with a three-year stint as COO of African Enterprise International. My wife (a fellow Zimbabwean) and I have lived in five countries – South Africa, Australia and the UK – in addition to the land of our birth and France where we currently reside. Our two adult daughters live in London. I have a passion to see God’s word (in print and preached) reach out to all people and to see Christian ministries operate effectively.