He was ordained in 1991 and served for 4 years as curate of All Saints, Crowborough in Chichester diocese. He and Heather then left to move to Sydney Australia, as Mike took up a post as Junior Lecturer at Moore Theological College. While there he also did research for an MTh, with a dissertation on the concept of truth in John’s Gospel, and made many friends.
I first met Mike in 1998 when he returned to the UK to be a research fellow at Oak Hill Theological College in London. Some of his lectures were quite stretching (such as this one, and this one which he contributed to The Theologian journal), and I never understood his compulsive need to talk about Arsenal football club and include diagrams or witty quotes in all of his handouts! But he was a good friend and a mentor. We met up weekly to read the Bible and pray together during a year when I was doing MPhil research in the Old Testament, and we’d occasionally pore over the Septuagint or a Latin Church Father, or he’d advise me about college committees he had gotten me involved with. Always with at least one cup of coffee (and occasionally with a glass of something different).
Mike’s PhD from Kings College, London (completed in 2004) was on the eternal relation between God the Father and God the Son in selected patristic theologians and John’s Gospel, which highlights his interest in integrating systematic, historical, and biblical theology. Much of this work made it into his most recent publication Your Will Be Done: Exploring Eternal Subordination, Divine Monarchy and Divine Humility. He was keen to encourage Christians to engage more carefully in systematic theology, which he saw as something of a weakness in evangelical circles. In a helpful talk from 2006, for example, he examined the biblical foundations of systematics and outlined a biblical method of engaging in it, which many found persuasive.
Read it all (my emphasis).
(Oak Hill College)
Mike Ovey has been a quiet achiever in the rejuvenation of Anglicanism (and Christianity generally) in the UK. Under his wise and encouraging leadership, Oak Hill has become the leading provider of ministers to bible-believing Christian churches. He was low-key in his approach, but firmly grounded in the scriptures and common-sense.
We pray that his family will be comforted in their grief, and that the Lord will raise up another great leader to carry on his work and extend it.
Good to see Mike Gatiss giving this eulogy also – under his leadership, Church Society has worked more closely with other orthodox evangelical Anglican groups, including Oak Hill, Reform and AMiE.