Paul Mallard: “Our job as parents is to give our children both roots and wings”

With four children and nine grandchildren, Director for the West Midlands FIEC, Paul Mallard, reflects on decades of parenting and grandparenting experience - bringing back memories of wonder and terror and the centrality of the gospel in raising children

Paul Mallard served as a pastor for 40 years in three different churches. He now works as Director for the West Midlands for the FIEC (Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, UK), supporting churches and their leaders across the region. He’s the author of several books, including Invest Your Disappointments and Heaven: Living with Eternity in View. He and his wife Edrie have four children and eight grandchildren.

Let’s start off with the two-minute version of your life. Where were you born? What have you done in life and where are you now?

I was born in Birmingham to a working-class family. My dad worked nights at Cadbury’s Chocolate Factory. My parents weren’t Christians. When I was 11, I became a Christian through the local church’s children’s work. Later, I studied theology at Cambridge, and by 18 I’d fallen in love with Edrey, who was in my youth group and, funnily enough, went to the same junior school as me. We married, and I started out as a teacher for five years before being called into pastoral ministry. I served as a pastor for 40 years in three different churches. Now I’m semi-retired—I still preach most Sundays, lecture at London Seminary, and work for the FIEC a couple of days a week. We have four children, nine grandchildren, and God willing, a tenth on the way.

What was it like growing up? What was the family culture? Was it strict, laissez-faire, creative

It was a home full of love for me and my sister. My dad was a straightforward man, left school at 14 so he wasn’t highly educated. My mum was very sharp but also left school early. There wasn’t a lot of high culture in the house, but there was a lot of love. My mum never once said she loved me, but I never doubted it—she showed it in everything she did. She was an old-fashioned, working-class matriarch—wouldn’t let me in the kitchen, because that’s what mothers did. She just piled on the love. My dad was kind, and because he’d had a very strict father, he set out not to be strict himself. There wasn’t much discipline because it wasn’t needed in that loving environment.

How do you think they influenced you, especially regarding faith?

Neither were Christians when I was growing up, but ……