The articles on Bread for the Bride are all written (unless  otherwise stated) by me, Cheryl McGrath.  Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, I became a follower of Jesus Christ in 1963 at the tender age of 13 years.  I’ll leave you to figure out the math.

My journey as a Christian has led me through a diversity of church settings and worship styles across denominational, Pentecostal, and Charismatic expressions of local church life. I was also highly involved in leading a house church for several years and in teaching conferences on prophetic intercession and prayer in various venues in Australia and New Zealand.  

In 2001, after nearly forty years of church attendance, in which I had witnessed both the best and worst of local church life,  I sensed a calling from God to come aside and seek His heart for the next stage of my journey with Him.  My vision was already becoming increasingly attuned to broader Kingdom issues focused beyond traditional local church settings.  After much prayer and waiting, to my surprise Christ called me away from institutional church attendance and into a wilderness experience with Him.  And so began a deeply intimate, wonderfully intriguing and often unpredictable adventure in getting to know Jesus Christ more deeply and completely than at any time during my long years in institutional churches.  It is an adventure that continues to this hour. 

I have been privileged to minister to Christ followers through prophetic teaching and preaching in a number of  ‘off the beaten track’  locations in Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and have loved leading small teams of women on short term missions on some of these occasions.  The joy of witnessing these women learning to release their own spiritual gifts to the wider church has been something very special and precious to me.  The full release of women into all aspects of church life and leadership roles, as well as their healing from centuries of spiritual oppression,  remains one of my chief passions.

In 2012 I began a writing ministry through this blogsite, Bread for the Bride.  My deep passion and my current calling is to awaken, edify, encourage, equip and strengthen the Bride of Christ worldwide and help establish her on a firm foundation of Christ Jesus.  As such, a significant  part of this ministry is directed toward those disciples of Christ who have been burned out, turned off, or simply left spiritually hungry by institutional Christianity, and who find themselves in what is commonly called ‘a spiritual wilderness‘.  I do this while continuing my own Christ-journey from outside the walls of organised Christianity, walking alongside those I seek to encourage. 

Having raised our own four children to adulthood, my husband and I now live along with our three inquisitive Springer Spaniels in northern New South Wales, Australia.