A new evangelical communications venture with the Archbishop of Uganda as an advisor has appointed the Revd Mark O’Donoghue, who was barred from Church of England ministry last year, as its strategy director.
Great Truths, which registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales this year, says on its website that Mr O’Donoghue became its strategy director in April 2023.
Evangelicals Now reported in November 2023 that the former vicar of Christ Church, Kensington in London’s West End had received a penalty under the C of E’s Clergy Discipline Measure 2003 for unspecified ‘conduct unbecoming and inappropriate’ to his work as a minister. Mr O’Donoghue received a ‘limited prohibition for 18 months’ in June 2023.
Great Truths says its mission is ‘to offer the majority world’s 10 million evangelical leaders, and the world’s 660 million evangelical Christians, a high-quality multimedia guide to Biblical teaching’. Its advisors include the Archbishop of Uganda, the Most Revd Stephen Kaziimba, and the Revd Angus Macleay, rector of St Nicholas, Sevenoaks, a large conservative evangelical church in Kent. He is a former trustee of the conservative evangelical network Reform and a former member of the C of E’s General Synod.
Among the trustees of Great Truths Trust is Timothy Malton, who is also listed as being a trustee of The Titus Trust, which ran the Iwerne evangelical camps for school children from the ‘top 30’ English fee-paying boarding schools. In 2020, The Titus Trust closed the Iwerne camps, where the savage serial abuser John Smyth groomed his victims in the 1970s.
Richard Heffner, a member of the Parochial Church Council (PCC) of Christ Church Kensington, is also listed as a trustee of Great Truths Trust.
Mr Malton is described on the Great Truths website as former Managing Director of Credit Suisse Emerging Markets. Mr Heffner is described as ‘Counsel, Dechert LLP, an English solicitor, and US qualified lawyer’. The third trustee is Dirk Moerdijk, described as Senior Vice-President Finance at a leading global food ingredient supplier.
Mr O’Donoghue was a curate at St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, the conservative evangelical flagship church in the City of London from 2004 to 2011 before joining Christ Church, Kensington in 2011.
His resignation as vicar of Christ Church, Kensington was announced in The Church Times in June 2021.
Anglican Ink has contacted Great Truths for comment.
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in the UK.
