Who are we?

We are Simon and Julie Sparkes and we have been married for 34 years and have two children both who have now left home. Our daughter is married to a wonderful husband who now have their first child, so we are now proud grandparents! We are really pleased they only live about a mile and a half away. Our son is currently doing a PHP at York University. We are both committed bible believing, Holy Spirit filled Christians who want to continually honour our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We have both been believers since childhood.

What do we do?

Simon has been involved in IT and software since graduating from university, working for a diverse set of companies such as Capital Radio, UBS (Switzerland), Computer Associates and PALSupport / Phoenix Recording Systems. He owns and runs a part-time business called SwiftTec (https://www.swifttec.com) which sells software that he has written.

Julie spent her early career doing occupational therapy before becoming a full time mother and then home educating our children initially from our home in Switzerland and then continuing on our return to the UK. Both children went on to get university degrees.

As Christians we have always been involved in church and worship in particular. Simon has been playing guitar and keyboards in church from about the age of 16 (in fact he was playing piano when we first met!). He then went on to leading worship and writing worship songs, many of which now feature on this site and can also be found on Spotify and other streaming platforms.

In 2016 we left the church we had been part of for about 12 years to join a house church, which we were later asked to take over by the then leaders. So for the last couple of years we have been leading the house church from our home. Since the Coronavirus outbreak in 2020 we have also been running online worship evenings called Encounter Worship which allow us to bring people together using Zoom as a platform. We meet approximately every 3 weeks, typically on a Saturday evening. We will continue to do this as long as there is a call for it. You can find out more at https://encounterworship.uk/