Heather Bellamy spoke with Deo Gloria Trust about their anniversary and a £250,000 prize fund.

Eric Thompson

Deo Gloria Trust is fifty years old this year. Over that time they have supported numerous projects including Greenbelt, Christians In Sport and Operation Mobilisation. To mark the anniversary they are running a competition with a prize fund of £250,000, so to look back at its history and to talk about their future, Heather Bellamy spoke with Eric Thompson, the director of the trust.

Heather: So let's start at the beginning, what was the founder Kenneth Petter Frampton's story, who was he?

Eric: He was a business-man primarily and he was also from a Brethren background, which is a particular aspect of the Christian faith that was quite strong in the country last century.

Heather: And why was Deo Gloria Trust started?

Eric: He started it at a time when different people were starting to know about Christianity in ways that perhaps were not the normal way of going about it, so not just getting people into churches, but telling them about it in their everyday life. He had inherited through his family quite a large property portfolio and he decided to use part of that portfolio to fund the trust.

Heather: And is that still how it is funded today?

Eric: That is still how it is funded today, yes. Kenneth actually tithed his property portfolio, so he took a tenth of his property portfolio and put it into the trust and the income from that trust today still provides the sufficient funds to run the trust and to give grants of monies away.

Heather: So tell us some of the highlights of those 50 years of the difference Deo Gloria has made and what it's funded.

Eric: Forty odd years ago one of them was Greenbelt. This was one of the first Christian festivals to take place and with the seed money from Kenneth Frampton and the Deo Gloria Trust - it enabled it to happen. There was also a thing called Lonesome Stone, which was quite big at the time and various pop groups that were in existence at the time as well and some of them were even brought over from America to help start Greenbelt. Greenbelt is still running today and has moved to different sites, but in actual fact you can still find it in August around the country.

Heather: Are there any others that you'd like to highlight?

Eric: Yes, he also helped with many other things and one of the things that we still run today is the Christian Enquiry Agency, which is on a website christianity.org.uk. We help to support that. We did a lot over the millennium, with the celebration of Jesus and the Millennium Magazine. We also do the Cathedral project, which we run in various Cathedrals up and down the country. We use tapestry to tell people about Christianity in today's society, to make it relevant to them.

Heather: There are obviously an awful lot of charities out there and worthy causes that need funding. How do you decide who you want to fund and who is in line with your vision as Deo Gloria?

Eric: It's actually quite difficult. As you say, there are so many charities out there and so many worthy causes. One of the things one has to look at is exactly who they are and what they are doing. We need to align it to ourselves in terms of evangelistic Christian outreach towards other people and obviously they have to be a registered charity in England or Wales. We have to satisfy certain legal requirements that go with that; we have to abide by our Trust Deed in who we can and can't give money to. Sometimes they are UK-based charities that help other people abroad and sometimes they are just UK based charities helping people in the UK.

Heather: And you have done something called the Deo Gloria Book Award, tell us about that.