David Sheppard: Batting for the Poor
ANDREW BRADSTOCK
(SPCK, 368 PP, £19.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.99 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Andrew Bradstock’s Batting for the Poor is a masterful account of the life and ministry of David Sheppard, those he loved and those who influenced him deeply. It is also a salutary reminder of how religious leaders once influenced the life of the nation through the Gospel, rather than behaving like senior executives of a corporation, which seems the norm today.
It is difficult to think of David Sheppard without automatically thinking of his powerful presence in Liverpool and the life of the nation, alongside Derek Worlock, Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool. But Bradstock shows that you cannot understand the David Sheppard of Liverpool unless you understand his comfortable yet thought-provoking upbringing, his life as a first-class cricketer, his ministry in London’s Islington, his leadership of the Mayflower Centre in east London and subsequently his ministry as Bishop of Woolwich, and finally Liverpool.
