Dave Burfield - battered kid, heroin...

Dave Burfield grew up in Bermondsey, South London. He set fire to his room as a child, his dad left his mum. She remarried, and later they moved to Basildon in Essex to get a new life. He bullied Dave verbally and physically, and eventually properly battered him. So at the age of 13 he ran away from home.

Finding Ecstacy shortly afterwards it made him feel a way he had never felt, and just wanted to take it for life. By the time he was 17 he'd be in HMYOI Feltham for retaliating against some people who'd harassed his girlfriend. It was here he was introduced to heroin, and he left as a young man with a heroin addiction.

So he had set off, at a fair pace, down path to drug addiction and pain. It came to a point where he had a child who was born a heroin addict. This gave him so much guilt that he began to cry out to anyone who was out there to be changed. Later he turned himself in, so he could go to jail and come clean from heroin.

Shortly afterwards he met some Jesus people through their Alpha Course leafletting of his neighbourhood, and having told his using friends he wanted to go to church, they handed the leaflet to him. He then met a young woman who introduced him to the church he is now at. He's been saved since 2006 or so, and is now helping get the message the church has been commissioned with out to those it is meant to get it to...