John White was born on March 5, 1924 in Liverpool, England. He grew up in Manchester. White served in the Fleet Air Arm as a reconnaissance photographer during World War II. He completed medical training at Manchester University. He went on various short-term mission trips, including beyond the Iron Curtain as a Bible smuggler. White met Loretta Mae O'Hara in Pennsylvania at a missions conference on June 10. They married on June 25, 1955 and left for a mission to Bolivia with New Tribes Mission on October 25 of the same year. They had five children while on the mission field: Scott, Kevin and Liana, and Miles and Leith. The entire family left the mission field and move to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1965. White completed his residency in psychiatry and then took a position as associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba. John and Loretta became involved in a small group, which they were asked to lead, and which would eventually become the Church of the Way, growing to around four hundred. After retiring in the 1980s John moved with his family to Pasadena, California and focused on his writing. In 1986 the White family moved again, this time to North Delta, British Columbia to serve as assistant pastors at North Delta Vineyard Church which would eventually become Surrey Vineyard Church. He died on May 11, 2002 after battling Alzheimer's disease and heart disease.
One of Dr. White's earlier popular books is Eros Defiled which tackles the topic of Christians and sexual sin. White would later come to regret this book and its continuance in print because he no longer held that psychiatry was the answer to freedom from sexual sin. Instead, he recommended his later book entitled Eros Redeemed. In the section on homosexuality in Eros Defiled John White describes how, as a junior high school student, he suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a Christian Youth worker.
Quotations
These quotations represent significant aspects of Dr. White's thought, with an emphasis on what might be considered the less orthodox and more exploratory areas.
" stirred the most deeply in people. And I have a feeling that the stories in the historical records in scripture are far more important than the doctrines and prophetic utterances based on them. That we read to read the stories first. We need to focus on the stories because I’ve learned from my own experience that the stories are more powerful."
