Liam Dacre-Davis – Escaping Tiny Boxes
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 of the reasons they didn’t bother with church anymore. We didn’t seem all that interested. I wouldn’t return to church […]
Jenn Johnson – Weaving a Place of Belonging
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 to transition one moment into the next. And then I realized, this is not a story. This is a tapestry. […]
Andrew Killick – A Gathering Sense of Home
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 the pill, and I was born about a year later. I grew up Charismatic Presbyterian in 1980s New Zealand and […]
Jenna Gillies – Unravelling
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 heaven*. I became a “born again” Christian when I was 13, after my family started attending a local evangelical/brethren church. […]
Kerin Beauchamp – At Home in the Wild
“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 out of my sleeping bag, across the tent, quietly unzipped the door flap so as not to wake my brothers. […]
Kirsten Bühler – The Journey Not the Arrival Matters
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 the arrival matters”. I have kept the notice ever since – maybe because my journey was long, and I hoped […]
Matt Jones – Mattamorphosis: Shedding a Superhero for a Shepherd
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 a beach-goer’s neck on his way to the sea. Growing up, that was my Jesus. Or at least that was […]
April Hunter – Unrecognisable
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 90’s who went on an international mission trip every single summer and lived for church and youth group. I was […]
Rhys Parry – Signs of Hope
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 current COVID-19 pandemic, a few years of faith deconstruction and a glass half-empty modus operandi, I wondered if I’d have anything hopeful […]
Kim Eames – From Here To Uncertainty
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 full head of hair. And there on the TV screen were people I hadn’t seen in years – mostly friends […]
Alsa Bei – My Life – Shaped by Death
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 teenager. I left school and spent about 3 years working with a missions organisation overseas and in the UK. I […]
Sonia Mainstone-Cotton – Christian Feminism, Church and Creativity
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. Both of these churches were evangelical, they were led by men and believed that women’s role was to be caregivers […]
Olivia Jackson – Schrödinger’s Faith
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 version I was given for my christening and the Russian one given to me by a woman whose house I […]
David Roberts – A Long-Time Love Story
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 not your average early-50s white Anglo-Saxon ‘Protestant’ (more or less) cisgender heterosexual bloke who works with computers. For starters, I […]
Christine Dixon – A Bazaar Epiphany
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 just background noise. I pushed an umbrella stroller in front of me, my son lulled to sleep by the motion […]