By Sharon Fischer
Special to ASSIST News Service
COSTA MESA, CA (ANS) -- "Son, I want to warn you about getting involved with the press. They are very wicked people and they drink, smoke and swear as well." These were the very words spoken to Dan Wooding many years ago in Birmingham, England, by his father, a pastor, who was concerned that his son was showing too much interest in becoming a journalist. But despite that, Dan decided that he was still going to move ahead with a career in journalism.
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Dan and Norma Wooding reporting for ANS at the MovieguideŽ awards in Beverly Hills, California |
His life took a most rewarding turn when his wife Norma, who he had married back in 1963, said to him, "Dan, have you ever thought that as a journalist you could be used by the Lord to be a voice for those around the world who have no voice? A voice for the voiceless!" In response, Dan mused, "I wonder if it will ever happen?
His career must rate as one of the most unusual in journalism. For he has gone from being a correspondent for the National Enquirer and a staffer on two of Britain's raciest tabloids, to an undercover reporter and campaigner for persecuted Christians in the many restricted countries of the world.
On June 28, 1982, Dan and his family - Norma, and their two sons, Andrew and Peter, moved to Southern California, where Dan became media director for Brother Andrew's ministry, Open Doors.
Dan first got involved with Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in 1982 when Syd Wakeling, his accountant and a fellow-Brit, suggested he might like to start attending the church pastored by Chuck Smith, the father of the Jesus People Movement.
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Dan Wooding with Pastor Chuck Smith after an interview for Front Page Radio |
Eventually, he started broadcasting on KWVE and co-hosted with Brian Brodersen for nine-months or so on Pastor's Perspective three days a week. Then KWVE gave him his own show called Front Page Radio which has been broadcast each Sunday afternoon at 5:00 PM for more than five years. If you don't live in the Southern California area, you can hear the broadcasts by going to: http://www.assistnews.net/
Dan Wooding's articles on Christians being persecuted for their faith are published worldwide and his weekly commentary was carried for ten years on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC. He became one of the first-ever Christians to be allowed to report from inside of North Korea, were he filed stories for UPI each day for a week.
Besides his reporting activities, he has also assisted in taking Bibles behind the then Iron Curtain to Russia and Romania, and also to Cuba.
Zacchaeus couldn't see Jesus because of "the press."
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Dan's parents, Anne and Alf Wooding, pictured besides their beloved River Mersey |
"Thinking he was going to talk about the 'birds and the bees' I settled down for what I thought would be a most embarrassing conversation. But I was in for quite a surprise when he said, 'Son, I want to warn you about getting involved with the press. They are very wicked people and they drink, smoke and swear as well.'
"My Dad, at the time, was the pastor of the Sparkbrook Mission in this industrial city in the English midlands, and had previously been a pioneer SIM missionary in Nigeria, West Africa, where he met my mother, Anne, who was also from Liverpool. They were married in 1939 in the walled city of Kano and I came along on December 19, 1940, in a missionary hospital in the small Nigerian town of Vom located in Plateau state.
"My father told me that his big dream for me was to become a pastor like himself, so when I had expressed the desire to become a journalist, he became very concerned about what I was getting myself into.
"Although it was a bit of a misquote, he pointed out a verse in Luke 19 verse 3 which read, says 'And he [Zacchaeus] sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the press.' (Geneva Study Bible). Of course, this was explaining that Zacchaeus was small in stature and couldn't see Jesus because of his height, but my father, who was also small in stature, told me frankly that he felt that the 'press' was just there to 'persecute and misquote Christians.'
"Despite the dire warning that he gave me that day, I still went ahead to pursue my career in journalism and to start with I was happy with my choice as I joined Billy Graham's London-based newspaper, The Christian and became its Chief Reporter.
"Sadly, it eventually closed and I entered the 'wicked world' of secular journalism, first with a local London paper and then, after five years, I ended up in the British Mecca of journalism, Fleet Street, initially for the Sunday People, which at the time was the second largest circulation tabloid in the UK, and later for the Sunday Mirror.
"Years later, I told my father, 'Dad, you have been preaching for all these years and yet, with one story, I can reach more people in one day, than you have in all these years.'
"He countered with, 'Yes, son, but what kind of message are your giving with these stories?' It was a good question, and one that makes so many Evangelicals shy away from getting involved with secular media.
"I came into Fleet Street as a Christian, thinking I could change the world. I truly believed that I could contribute something really worthwhile through my writing, but soon I found I was deeper and deeper into something I couldn't handle.
"Looking back, I have to say that many of the stories I wrote for the British tabloids were what I now consider, rather stupid and often involved me in using questionable methods in getting my material. Still, some of it was fun!
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P.C. Wooding |
"On another occasion, I was tipped off that a well-known London hairdresser was making money on the side by disguising crooks so they could go on bank robberies and not be recognized. Once again, I was able to get disguised and then expose the hairdresser for his 'wicked' deeds."
Dan says that it wasn't all bad, however. He was a founding member of the Arts Centre Group (ACG) in London, which was co-founded on July 1, 1971 by the singer, [Sir] Cliff Richard, along with David Winter, a BBC producer, and actor Nigel Goodwin. The ACG, of which he is still a member, was a sanctuary for Christians working in the arts, entertainment and media fields in Britain and in those early days, he was head of the journalism section.
Dan said, "One day, I persuaded the Sunday People to let me do a story on the organization which had the headline, 'The Club Where The Stars Go to Pray.' I managed to assemble a group of show business Christians including well-known British comedy actor called Derek Nimmo, actress Thora Hird and singer, Cindy Kent, who recently became an Anglican priest after many years as a host with Premier Christian Radio in London, and the paper allowed me to work their Christian beliefs into the story, which was read by millions on that Sunday.
Another journalist tried to get him fired!
"Then I received a phone call at the Sunday People from a reporter from the News of the World who told me that he was writing a story about my freelance activities and he gleefully added, 'Wooding, you will probably get fired when the story comes out!'
"I immediately went to my bosses at the paper and told them about this situation and they said they couldn't see any harm being done by me helping a Christian organization in my 'spare time.'
"The story ran and I kept my job, much to the chagrin of the News of the World reporter who had tried so hard to wreck the career of a journalistic colleague.
"There were amazing times when I witnessed reporters from rival tabloids actually fighting over subjects they wanted to interview and on one occasion, a reporter crashed his car into that of a rival reporter to stop him getting a story.
"On another occasion, one of our reporters was sent into the Children of God commune in Bromley, London, to pose as a 'convert' so he could get the dirt on the cult. After a time, our crime reporter was sent in to 'rescue' rescue him and then that featured on the front page that Sunday and it wasn't long before the Children of God moved on.
"It was normal practice for reporters to pose as someone else with a secret tape recorder hidden away to record the unsuspecting victim who would often spill the beans not realizing that this would be used in a scandalous story about them."
Dan says that he was given free rein to write up evangelical stories. Like the time that pop singer (Sir) Cliff Richard had gone to Bangladesh for Tear Fund, a British charity, and came back so shattered with what he had witnessed that he announced, via Dan's interview with him, that he was giving up his career as a singer to become a missionary. (He later changed his mind after being persuaded that he could do more good by using his talents to raise funds to help the poor of this world.)
However, as the time passed, Dan admits that he got more and more tangled up in some of the more questionable tactics of his colleagues and began to lose my faith in Christ.
"It seemed as if I spent most of my time grubbing around the garbage cans of British life," he said. "To make matters worse, I also began receiving death threats from terrorists and gangsters and also Norma, my wife, was threatened.
"As a way to dim my conscience, I began drinking heavily in our local journalist's pub called 'The Stab in the Back' and it all changed one night when Ray Barnett, a dear Irish-Canadian friend, came to see me in the bar and challenged me about my life in the tabloids and asked me to re-commit my life to Jesus and leave my Fleet Street career and go with him to Uganda to write 'Uganda Holocaust', a book about the 300,000 Christians of that country that were murdered during the eight years of misrule of Idi Amin, who had just fled the country.
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Ray Barnett and Dan Wooding at Entebbe Airport in Uganda |
"On the platform the assistant pastor Jotham Mutebi sank to his knees in prayer. Amid the mayhem, hundreds more quickly dropped to their knees between the pews. With upraised arms they began to praise the Lord. The sturdy red brick church was filled and with a cacophony of incredible sounds -- a combination of prayer, praise and bullets -- then a member of the church orchestra raised his trumpet to his lips and blew it as loudly as he could. The Amin soldiers thought the Christians were about to counter-attack and fled the sanctuary.
Eventually, 200 church members were attested and taken to one of Amin's torture centers where they were told they would be burned alive. Amazingly, the man who was due to sign the execution order was injured in a car crash and was unable to sign the paper and eventually they were freed."
Dan and Ray were there at the church on the Sunday after their release and each one of them stood up and thanked God for their safety and then prayed that Idi Amin, who by now had fled to Libya, would be saved by giving his life to Christ.
"They showed no anger at all, but just forgiveness," said Dan. "What an example they were to me."
That trip was the turning point of Dan's life and he did quit his job in the tabloids and began a whole new career as a voice for the persecuted of the world.
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Dan Wooding pictured on a recent reporting trip |
Jon Courson from Applegate Christian Fellowship joined the group and spoke through an interpreter where many people came to the Lord. This trip showed the people of Lebanon that the team was doing what Jesus had instructed them to do and was a faith-building experience for Dan.
When Dan did leave the tabloids and with his suitcases packed he was always ready to go undercover as a reporter for the Persecuted Church. Surprisingly, his experiences in the tabloids proved invaluable in doing this kind of dangerous work in many of the world's restricted countries. He learned how to make complicated stories easy to understand, write good headlines and persuade unwilling people to talk to me, something that is a "must" in secular journalism. After all, the world might then just see Jesus because of the "press."
In 1984, Dan was awarded the Bronze Halo award from the Southern California Motion Picture Council for his stories on the "Suffering Church." The Evangelical Press Association in the USA awarded him first prize in their 1984 "Higher Goals" contest for his eyewitness reporting from war-torn Lebanon.
In February 1987, he received a Silver Angel from the Hollywood-based Religion in Media organization for eyewitness reporting from Albania. The Friends of the Library of the University of California, Irvine, has honored him with awards for eight of the 44 books he has written. One of the latest is Blind Faith, which he co-authored with his 93-year-old mother, telling the moving story of her work as a pioneer Braille Missionary amongst the blind people of Nigeria. Pastor Chuck wrote the foreword for Blind Faith and Queen Elizabeth has subsequently honored the book.
The Christian Film & TV Commission based in Hollywood, California, gave Dan Wooding a special award for his journalism at their annual media breakfast in Beverly Hills, California, in March, 2002.
Wooding, 70, was born in Nigeria, West Africa, in 1940, the son of British missionary parents, Alf and Anne Wooding, who were both from Liverpool met and married in Nigeria. He has toured Southeast Asia and other parts of the world as a speaker and has been married to Norma for 48 years and they have two sons, Andrew and Peter. Andrew lives in Sheffield, England, and has been running the Fresh Expressions website for the Church of England and has written eight books himself. Peter, who lives in North Wales, is the director of ASSIST Europe and is also the CBN correspondent for the UK and is regularly featured on CBN with his news reports. Dan and Norma have six grandchildren, all living in the UK.
Educated at Queensbridge School, Moseley, Birmingham, England, and a the Birmingham College of Commerce, Wooding began his journalistic career in 1968 in London, England, with The Christian, Britain's oldest evangelical newspaper, rising to become its chief reporter. His first-ever interview for the paper, then owned by Billy Graham, was with Coretta Scott King at St. Paul s Cathedral where she was due to speak at a memorial service for her late husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Shortly after that, he did the last-ever interview with the legendary black Gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson, two days before she passed away.
When The Christian closed, he then moved to the Middlesex County Times in Ealing, London, where he wrote the first-ever story on the Monty Python team, who made most of their programs at the BBC film studios in Ealing.
After five years with this local paper where he became the Chief Reporter, he also became a correspondent for all of Britain's national newspapers, including The Times, and eventually was given a staff job as a senior reporter with the Sunday People in London, which at that time had the second highest circulation of any newspaper in Europe.
Specializing in crime, religion and show business, he interviewed people like Ronnie Kray, Britain's most infamous gangster, Johnny Mathis, Burt Lancaster, David Soul, as well as Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr from The Beatles.
In 1975, he flew to India to interview Mother Teresa in Calcutta and Wooding was also a London-based correspondent for the National Enquirer, America's largest circulation tabloid and later worked as a senior reporter with London's Sunday Mirror.
After a spiritual renewal in his life, Wooding left this form of journalism and has specialized in eyewitness reporting of persecuted Christians around the world. He has filed stories from Albania, Burma, China, Cuba, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Grenada, Lebanon, North Korea, Romania, Uganda and Vietnam, to name some of the hot spots. (He was one of the first-ever Christian journalists to be invited to report from North Korea and he spent a week there filing stories for the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC.)
Wooding has worked as a writer and broadcaster with Billy Graham in Moscow, Russia; Essen, Germany and in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He wrote the cover story on Billy Graham, his wife Ruth, and son Franklin, for the March/April 1996 issue of the Saturday Evening Post and also the cover story for the re-launch of Plain Truth magazine on Billy Graham.
Wooding is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) based in Lake Forest, California, and is the president and chief editor of the ASSIST News Service that sends stories to 2,600 media outlets around the world. People can get a free subscription to the ASSIST News Service by going to http://www.assist-ministries.
While still in London, Dan was a reporter for BBC Radio 1. In the United States, he has been the co-host of the TV show, The Hollywood Connection, as well as a regular guest on the "700 Club." He is now a host of His Channel Live, a one-hour live Internet talk show that that goes out to 192 countries. (www.hischannel.com).
Dan also hosts a weekly half-hour radio show called Front Page Radio which is carried each Sunday at 5:00 PM on KWVE 107.9 FM in Southern California and on many of the Calvary Chapel stations in the US and also on Calvary Chapel Radio in the UK, Lighthouse Radio in Belize as well as a station in Cape Town, South Africa.
Dan Wooding is a member of the National Union of Journalists and the International Press Association, and, since moving with his family to the United States in 1982, Wooding has received numerous awards for his writing.
Looking back now and strange as it may seem, Dan says, "My time in the British tabloids was a blessing in disguise as it was there I learned how to interview people, write strong headlines and easy to read stories."
Dan's story is reflected in this Scripture portion:Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it. (Isaiah 40:4-5, King James Version)
To get more information about Dan's autobiography, From Tabloid to Truth, please go to: http://www.assist-ministries.
Note: This story is adapted from a chapter in an upcoming book by Sharon Fischer called "Where Two or More are Gathered," which tells the extraordinary story on Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa.
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Sharon was born in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, Canada and 1953, and when she was a teenager, her parents moved the family of six to Costa Mesa, California. It was there that in 1955 she met and married her husband Hal Fischer and they have been married for 55 years. They have three children Terri, Lynnette and Lonnie and seven grandchildren. As a six year old, she became a Christian in a little Pentecostal church in Canada and later in Southern California, Sharon worked in the fashion industry as a photography and fashion model for many years and wrote fashion articles for the Newport Beach Ensign and in the 1960s she wrote articles on inner beauty for a Christian newspaper called Acts. Hal and Sharon Fischer were charter board members of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in 1961 and had the privilege of being involved in the hiring Pastor Chuck Smith in 1965. This year (2011) is the 50th anniversary of CCCM and the book she has written "Where Two or More are Gathered" reflects its small beginning in a trailer court recr eation room with about 10 people to its present day with over 2,000 churches and ministries. The primary emphasis of the book is to show how God's hand has raised up this worldwide ministry.
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