Peter Owen-Jones

Biography

Peter Owen-Jones (b 1957) is an English Anglican clergyman, author and television presenter. Owen Jones dropped out of public school at the age of 16 and went to Australia to make his fortune. Back in Britain, he began his working life as a farm labourer in South Eastern England and then ran a mobile disco before moving to London where he started in advertising as a messenger boy and worked his way up to creative director. In his late 20s and with a wife and two children, he gave up his commercial life to follow a calling to the Anglican ministry by enrolling at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. In early 1996 he gained notoriety when he conducted a service for the Newbury bypass protestors.[1] In 1998, he ran three parishes in Cambridgeshire as the Rector of Haslingfield (Harlton, Great Eversden and Little Eversden), before resigning from his post in 2005, to relocate to the benefice of Glynde, West Firle and Beddingham. He was recruited by the BBC to front a series of religious television programmes which would look at different aspects of Christian and other faiths where he has received critical acclaim from many quarters.[2][not in citation given] He is married to Jac and as of May 2010 has four children - India, 21, Jonson, 18, Harris, 16, and Eden, 15. [3] In his BBC documentary How to Live a Simple Life (2009),[4] Owen-Jones tried to live a life without money, in the footsteps of Saint Francis of Assisi. His 2010 documentary, The Lost Gospels, discussed the Apocryphal Gospels which were omitted from the canon of the New Testament, and Owen-Jones considers how their contents might have altered Christian theology if they had not been suppressed.