About

Raised in a Christian home and church, Martin Bleby has known God as his Father for as long as he can remember. He has come to know Jesus as his Redeemer, and the Spirit of God within. Martin was ordained to ministry in the Anglican Church in 1971. Married to Vivien, with four children and fourteen grandchildren, they have seen God at work during twenty-seven years of parish ministry in country, outback and metropolitan South Australia, followed by fifteen years in the cross-denominational New Creation Teaching Ministry, and subsequent locum and teaching ministry in local churches and groups. There has been appreciative exposure to a wide range of worship styles across anglo-catholic, evangelical and charismatic expressions of Christian faith.

Crucial to Martin’s ministry has been a lifelong quest to know what happened in Jesus on the cross, and coming to a fuller understanding that it encompassed both love and judgment, wrath and grace, substitution and identification, satisfaction and oblation, in a way that brings solid assurance of total forgiveness of sins and humble freedom in living, through Jesus’ resurrection, under God’s sovereign grace (see booklet The Vinedresser).

Martin has served as secretary of the Anglican–Lutheran Dialogue in Australia and as chair of the cross-cultural mission agency CMS–Australia. Martin’s gift and passion in ministry has been teaching in a pastoral setting. Mark 6:34 (‘he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things’) and Acts 6:4 (‘we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word’) have been key texts. Martin has authored a number of books for use in teaching and pastoral ministry, and has composed numerous songs.

‘Why did Jesus have to die?‘

‘Won‘t someone explain to me just what “He died to save us all“ really means?‘

This small volume, packed with much radical and revolutionary material, is a most significant treatment of the reality and power of the Cross. It is also in the form of a most unusual testimony, of how the answer to this cry came to the heart of a puzzled Christian.

Martin Bleby, Anglican minister, trained in a fine family tradition, has discovered the freedom which comes to a human being via the Cross and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like P. T. Forsyth, from whose writings he liberally quotes, he sees the Cross as solving the seeming dilemma of God’s holiness and His wrath. What he discovers is not only significant for himself, but also for the whole Christian community and indeed for the confused world in which we live.