I arrived in London, with my wife, Sally, at the beginning of August 2014 and  began working at All Souls Langham Place.  This was a completely unexpected development, one of many I was about to discover.

We arrived in London to run the Recovery Course (at that time being run at Holy Trinity Brompton) at the All Souls Clubhouse, and very soon I received a request from a young man to support him, and help
him be accountable, in his struggle with pornography. (As an aside, Free! Recovery grew out of all these early experiences we had, both alongside participants and interacting with the Recovery Course). 

I began weekly meetings with this young man.

I knew of a couple of books to help address and support men with this issue, but the ones I had read, I didn’t really find very helpful.

Then I was introduced to Sexual Sanity for Men, by David White, with Harvest
USA; a ministry specifically to help men and women with sexual sin.

We began working through the book, slower than the author advised, because in the struggle with sexual sin there is always so much to talk about, so much to share, so much to even lament.

A few weeks later, another brother in Christ asked for help, and then another…

Before I knew it, I had a small group meeting every Saturday morning and I was doing 1 to 1 mentoring, sometimes as many as 5 a day.

It just kept growing, some men would leave, and then often return after a while, for various reasons.

My friend Rico would interview me on a Sunday morning during a church service, usually in the greater context of addictions as a whole, not specifically porn, and then at the end of the service, encourage men to come and speak with me. Of course, usually no one did, or they would chat with me about an unrelated subject.

Too hesitant to expose themselves in the church arena. I might get an email or two the following week, or maybe someone would show up at my office, or call, and want to meet for coffee.

This new direction seemed to begin to take on a life of its own, somewhat overwhelming at times. I felt I needed to do some research, and discovered some statistics that completely startled me:

• Pornography is a multibillion dollar per year industry.
• It makes more money than basketball, baseball, and American football combined in a single year! Some researchers revealed that the percentage of Christian men who use porn was as high as 80% in some places!
• Some of the same research said that as many as 50% of pastors had viewed
  pornography in the past 90 days!
• As the prevalence of porn in the culture increased, the divorce rate in
  Christian marriages began to be the same as in secular marriages; somewhere
  around 50%!
• In the spiral of all of this, the identity crisis began, or perhaps just moved
  into an area of questioning biological human sexuality