Listener Stories

Reflections on an evolving faith

When I left the UK in 1987, as a 21-year-old atheist, to hitch-hike around America for the second time, I was in search of ‘truth’: on the one hand envisaging finding it by meditating on…

Church was always going to be my thing. My mother raised her hand at Billy Graham’s London crusade in ’54, and her life was never the same again. Too soon after, she was making another…

After four decades I’m starting to learn about boundaries. My partner came into my life and introduced them to me. The hippy party scene where he’d spent some years taught him about self-respect in a…

I grew up in the North-Eastern Industrial town of Hartlepool, I was a child of the 50s, just about at the end of food rationing after the War. The early years were tumultuous, suffering three…

In 2006, when I was in my middle-20s, I wrote a short article for RELEVANT magazine titled “Why I am not an Emergent Christian.” In retrospect, I don’t think I understood much about the Emergent…

I grew up in a working-class household on an estate in Essex and spirituality and faith were just not part of my general thoughts or experience. This was mostly because my childhood was traumatic and…

I always hoped I wouldn’t be asked to ‘share my testimony’ at university Christian Union in the 90s, because I didn’t have an exceptional conversion story. And likewise, I don’t have an exceptional deconstruction story…

Never been married, never had children. The youngest of three, the bottom rank is where the novelty has worn off but the ‘fun’ never ends. I was ‘an excitable child’ so my namesake Roman Catholic…

Church on a Sunday morning meant singing, clapping, dancing, and watching the power men on stage fire bolts of spirit at people, knocking them to the floor. The service generally concluded with screaming, writhing exorcisms….

The tranquillity of the park where I sat in my favourite coffee shop with my two-year-old, did not reflect how I was feeling. As I gathered our things together, after a failed attempt for a…

My earliest memory of faith is lying in my bottom bunk each night, repeating the Lord’s Prayer over and over, in the hope that, if I died in my sleep, God would let me into…

My story is one of becoming  Unrecognisable. I was a home schooled child of the 80’s who went to church three times a week and was the star of Sunday School. I was a teenager of the…

In thinking about contributing something of my story here, I’ll admit to flinching a little when ruminating on the final three words of the Nomad catchphrase, “Stumbling through the post-Christendom wilderness, looking for signs of hope.” Given the…

I don’t see myself as particularly special.  I have not been involved in any conspicuously important or miraculous events.  My faith journey has been a gradual one, without significant drama.  Yet in many ways I know I am…

The garbled prayer call was barely recognizable in the din of the midweek market crowd. Four years earlier, I would have stopped and marveled at the droning of the “Allahu Akbar,” but now it was…

As a child growing up in a very conservative evangelical church, we sang with gusto “It only takes a spark”. We were the sparks, and we were to spread God’s love by passing it on…

Raised in a Christian family, I was an earnest and passionate teenager, listening to Newsboys and ready to be God’s hands and feet. I threw myself into exotic and sacrificial adventures for the Lord. In…

Soon after graduation from the academy, my family and a group of ten, took off from Cape Canaveral. We were part of ‘the new mission’; 25 vessels in all. We were all full of excitement….

There is but one journey towards both the authentic God, and the authentic self. I was born in Central Scotland in 1952, and raised in fairly conservative Christian churches – Brethren (the ‘Open’ variety) and…

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