What started as a fun outing soon became a weekly tradition. Every Sunday morning, my parents and I would go to the beach. We never missed a week. There, we sang children’s songs about the…
It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. Black Elk Sometimes opportunities come along that on…
You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your bodylove what it loves….
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…
As I sit down to write this, I’ve become very much aware of the fact that I’m in the twilight days of my 20’s…and I’ve spent 17 years of my life doing *something* in the…
In 2018 I found myself at a point in life where I was terrified upon realising that my faith as it had been for my entire life didn’t seem to be working anymore. After already…
Hearing the stories of so many others who have left I have wondered why I have not – this is a kind of explanation. I found four reasons. First I was raised in a missionary…
“Suppose you have one guilder. Which poor person would you give it to – the one who’s a Christian, or the one who isn’t?” It was around 1990 and my husband and I were facing…
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…
Hello beloved listener! So let me introduce myself first. My name is Gerrianne (you’ve probably got no clue how to pronounce that– that’s okay, however sounds right to you). I’m turning 30 this year. The…
I grew up in a brethren church in the 70’s and whilst I knew that God loved me unconditionally, I also felt that God was someone who needed to be kept on-side and pleasing him…
I think a lot of my life has been about searching for a sense of belonging. In most communities I think to myself, “I kind of fit here, but not quite”. I feel this about…
I was brought up in the Anglican church tradition and as a child, I understood God to be a loving, ever-present father figure. God wasn’t particularly threatening to me as a child and God was…
We can get quite far through a story thinking one thing, to then find out something significant which reinterprets and makes sense of everything that has gone before. I came to an evangelical expression of…
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…
I was raised a nominal Catholic in Texas, the ultra conservative Bible Belt of the U.S. I thought all I got from Catholicism was guilt and the legalism that I learned from things like needing to…
One of my biggest regrets took place when I was 16, sitting in an all-boys tent at a Christian youth summer camp. It was one of those late-night deep chats with the camp leaders, where…
Although I would date the beginning of my deconstruction from around 5 years ago, in reality it probably began over a decade before. I didn’t grow up in a Christian home as such but had…
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…
“So, Nikki – tell us something of the faith you inherited”. I can hear the Nomad question. Well, values, not faith. That’s what I inherited. My parents were fairly politically orientated. Our family of four…
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…
It was a beautiful fall day, and I was riding passenger seat in my new friend’s car. We had been spending the day getting to know each other and it seemed extra special, for making…
I call myself a transitions nurse. I have been a nurse for many years, I worked labor and delivery for about 15 years, and worked hospice for four. So I do “comings” and “goings”. There…
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…
It took me a long time to get into a frame of mind to write this. Like many of you, there have been few people in my life who I could tell my faith story…
If I can pinpoint a time when I started to have deep questions around faith, I think it would be when I worked in student ministry in Italy seventeen years or so ago. Coming from…
My older sisters ended up getting us all kicked out of Sunday school. I’m not sure why, and I was definitely too young to remember it happening, but my parents tell me this was one…
I’ve been struggling with how to tell this story. My attempts to craft a chronological timeline of events feel like they leave too much out, too many words feel like they’re not the right words…
I was a child of the Charismatic Movement, in quite a literal way. Two years after my Anglican-Presbyterian mother got born again and Spirit filled, God told her to have another child. She stopped taking…
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…
“Getting to where we need to go often means finding a new language for where we’ve been.” Belden C. Lane, Backpacking with the Saints I woke up to the sounds of the rocky river, crawled…
When I was a nurse at a hospital, we had a patient who eventually died of his cancer in our ward. Later his husband wrote a death notice in the papers saying: “The journey not…
Tall. Chiseled features. Blue eyes. Flowing brown hair. Kenny Logins 80s-style facial hair (is that a trans-Atlantic reference or just USA? Well, Google it, I guess). Robes. Lamb draped over him like a towel over…
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…
During a lockdown tidy up, my husband came across some DVDs of old photos. Looking through them was like entering a portal back to the early 2000s: babies, bootcut jeans and, for my husband, a…
I feel like my story is very boring. I went to a kid’s club outreach by a local Baptist Church. I grew with them and decided to take my faith seriously when I was a…
I grew up in a Christian family. My childhood and early teens experience of the church was of a Pentecostal church until I was 12 and then a small brethren chapel ran by my uncle….
I threw my Bible away recently. Actually, I threw away six, in three different languages. That’s what a good missionary I used to be. The only ones I kept were the beautiful gold-edged King James…
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…
The church I grew up in set the bar high for what I feel able to long for in community. It was a tiny evangelical church in Trinidad and Tobago and one of a group…
Two years ago, I went on a short trip to Venice with a friend to celebrate a big birthday. As well as seeing some famous landmarks, I also hoped we could use our famously bad…
One of my earliest memories is of sitting by the fire on my grandmother’s lap, hearing about inviting Jesus into my heart. As I grew up, I always had a sense of God being with…
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…
“All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain…If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.” – Richard Rohr My spiritual journey has certainly been shaped by pain. The…
“I have no idea where I am going,I do not see the road ahead of me,I cannot know for certain where it will end.”– Thomas Merton We were a group of malcontent teenagers. Think the…