Meet Ash & Anji
“There is a kind of wisdom that only comes from staying. Ash has stayed.”
Shane Claiborne
Rev Dr Ash Barker
Founder, Seedbeds
I help denominations, trusts and charities raise up local leaders in overlooked places. For 35 years I’ve lived where the work is hardest, from Bangkok’s Klong Toey to Birmingham’s Winson Green, and I’ve learned that the leaders a place needs usually live there already.
Seedbeds helps you find, form and release them.
3 places:
Melbourne.
Springvale’s refugee streets, where welcoming one Burmese neighbour in 1995 would connect Seedbeds to Myanmar thirty years later.
Bankok.
Twelve years in Klong Toey, where 100,000 people share one square mile and survival comes before flourishing.
Birmingham.
Winson Green since 2014, where a near-derelict chapel became the busiest building in the neighbourhood.
How did Seedbeds get it’s name?
Kuala Lumpur, 2014. Over a food court table, Ash tried to explain to civil rights leader John Perkins what he hoped to do next. Perkins grew animated: “You wanna grow seedbeds!”
Four months later the family moved to Winson Green with a few bags and little money. The name helped provide a centre to return to when none of the iniIal plans survived impact.
In 1993 two denominational leaders, Don Smith and Alan Hirsch, took a chance on an unconventional 23-year-old. They found the money, sponsored him through the poliIcs and had his back. Seedbeds exists to help today’s leaders do the same.
CREDENTIALS:
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- Ash has a PhD in local community transformation
- Ten books, including At the Scent of Water, No Wastelands and Make Poverty Personal
- Founder of Seedbeds: over 3,000 local leaders formed across 35 years around the world.
Rev Anji Barker
Pioneer Minister & Social Entrepreneur
Anji has made her home in marginalised urban neighbourhoods for over 35 years, from Melbourne to Bangkok to Birmingham’s Winson Green. There she led and grew Newbigin Community Trust to thirty local staff across four sites.
Today she leads pioneering for the West Midlands Synod of the United Reformed Church, walks alongside Seedbeds leaders in Myanmar, and is the author of Missionary, Not Just a Position. She believes the margins are not the end of the story.
The margins have more than anyone thinks.
“Ash and Anji Barker have been key mentors for us over the years and miles, always encouraging us to stay faithful to our own ‘corner of the world that is worth gathering around’.”
Jenny and Archbishop Justin Duckworth, Urban Vision, Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia
Hear from Ash
Hear from Ash. Ash writes The Local Catalyst each month for leaders who want to back local leaders.
Speaking
Invite Ash and Anji to your event.
Bring grounded, hopeful voices to your conference, synod, assembly or staff day. Ash and Anji speak from the street, not just the study.
At the Scent of Water
Why old stumps are not dead wood, and what happens when churches and neighbourhoods let local people lead.
The Three Headed Monster
How scarcity, professionalism and programme-ism quietly starve local leadership, and how leaders can starve them back.
No Wastelands
Every place has more potential than it thinks.
Risky Compassion
What the Good Samaritan did differently.
Hope in Troubled Times
Why local belonging answers the politics of fear, and how communities learn to open the clenched fist.
“Ash Barker combines the urgency of an Old Testament prophet with the tenderness of Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet.”
Samuel Wells, Vicar, St Martin-in-the-Fields