Tim Prevett – “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made” – An Autistic Epiphany
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 faith in 1986 aged 13. Full of zeal, I’d avidly read scripture daily, pray, and be prepared to use Scripture […]
Geoff Hall – Only Half the Story…
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 near-death experiences by the time I was Eight years of age. I think because of this I was very reclusive. […]
KC – Practicing Recovering in Community
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 go to confession after sinning to avoid hell. Dipping a finger in the holy water and doing the sign of […]
Nathan Brooks – In Search of Community Without Shame
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 they coax out your angsty teenage struggles so that they can smooth them over with a healthy dose of conservative […]
Gillian Crossley – Throwing off the Ill-Fitting Mould to Embrace Discomfort
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 a Christian Granny who was definitely an influence. My teenage years were far from happy ones but involvement in Christian […]
Traynor Hansen – Learning Not to Know
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 Church movement that was rushing through my Evangelical communities. What I did know was that most of my friends in […]
Nikki Vesey – No-One Has a Monopoly on Compassion
“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 would have mealtimes where everyone talked at once and we put the world to rights. I knew my parents loved […]
Susan Carleton – God is Love
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 at times emotionally abusive and neglectful and this led to me having a severe eating disorder from the age of […]
Amanda Oster – “What Are You For?”
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 new friends as an adult doesn’t seem to happen that often, at least not in my life. A couple of […]
Kari Lane – Things I have Learned from Hospice
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 are some very real similarities in the journeys that intrigue me. Certainly my outlook on life is affected by these […]
Melanie Lambert – Being Enough
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 either. But in nearly half a century on this planet, the truth is there are ten thousand stories I could […]
Jojo Scoble – On My Own, Never Alone
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 Grandmother put it. Born in the latter part of the 70s there was still the unmistakable whiff of sexism not […]
Kit Johnson – A Friend Lost, A Friend Found
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. It was always a sound that disturbed me, but at least it signaled it would soon be time for refreshments. […]
Jessica Sabo – The Path That is My Own
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 to with any expectation that they’d understand. Some would understand the being a Christian part, but not the deconstruction part. […]
Delyth Johnson – Love the Questions Themselves
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 a deeply evangelical tradition and being part of an evangelical protestant mission organisation, I become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea […]