Hugh Osgood

Osgood was born in 1947 into a Salvation Army family in Southall, England. Osgood attended The Knoll School for Boys. He studied at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School and the London School of Dentistry. He received a Bachelor of Dental Surgery in 1970. In his own words, during the summer of 1965 when reading C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, he discovered his calling as an evangelical Christian leader and pursued local church ministry in parallel to dentistry. ==Career==

Osgood was accepted as a missionary with the African Evangelical Fellowship in 1971, but was unable to travel to Zambia due to President Kenneth Kaunda's decision to cut aid to medical projects. in 1991 as an independent resource centre church where he pioneered a TV department (which was to become Charis Communications), the staff of which, including Howard Conder and Rory and Wendy Alec, went on to establish Revelation TV and GOD TV. Broadcasting began in 1994 on the London Cable Network. National and international ministry From 1988, Hugh Osgood worked for Billy Graham's Mission '89, and established the Council of Reference for Morris Cerullo's Mission to London in 1992. In 1997, Osgood founded Churches in Communities International as an accountability and accreditation body for independent churches and ministries. This was in response to the significant increase in independent churches throughout the UK who were not formally recognised due to their autonomy. Osgood is the current President of Churches in Communities International which had 117 member churches, 86 chaplains and 316 ministers in 2022. Osgood was elected as the 60th Free Churches Moderator by the then twenty-four Free Church denominations of England and Wales in September 2014. He is well known in the denominations for his non-partisan ecumenical cooperation. In 2017 he stated, "it doesn’t really bother me that we’ve got lots of denominations as long as we all respect each other and love each other as Jesus said". During Osgood's tenure as Free Church Moderator, he led the Free Churches Group response to the death of David Amess and released a statement along with other prominent British church leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, following the murder of George Floyd. In February 2021, Osgood signed an open letter to the Home Secretary calling for asylum seekers to be no longer housed in barracks. ==Personal life==

Osgood is married to Marion who is also an author. == Apostolic Networks ==

Hugh Osgood has been known to associate with leading figures from the radical house church movement of the 1960s such as Terry Virgo of New Frontiers, Colin Dye of Kensington Temple, Colin Urquhart of Kingdom Faith Church, Noel Stanton of the Jesus Army and John Wimber of the Vineyard Movement who have been criticised by some reformed theologians for misusing the term 'apostolic networks'. Osgood has never referred to himself as an 'apostle' and in 2016 he presented a paper to the Churches Together in Britain and Ireland Conference in which he stated, "many Pentecostals, Independents and other evangelicals increasingly see themselves, regarding unity as being more about respect than institutional convergence". ==Bibliography==