Ashleigh Dueck – My Body
My body has been through some difficult times already. There came a point where people began remarking: “Of course, this happened to you. If it’s extreme/random/unlikely, it’s going to happen to Ashleigh.” Now, this looks harsh written out. At first it didn’t feel harsh; it felt true. And the people who say this do not […]
Azariah France-Williams – Love Your Excluded Neighbour
It was the mid 1990s. A new teen, Jonathan, had joined the church youth group. He was cool; he had a black leather jacket. Jonathan was clean cut, held passionate opinions and was sensitive. We became friends. He was different to my other friends. Even though I was only 17 I was one of the […]
Joy Brooks – Freedom from Unhealthy Religious Systems
Glancing up at the screen I register the song lyrics – ‘You’ve never failed me yet’ – and experience a familiar surge of frustration and pain. I’m sat at the edge of the room with a notebook, so I start journaling: There’s a part of me that would like to shout ‘bollocks’ to that…And yet […]
Maggie Jones – A Weak, Vulnerable and Dependent Saviour?
I love singing, and have over the years developed a compendious knowledge of Hymns Ancient & Modern, through to a range of current (ish) worship songs. However, I find myself struggling with a lot of the implicit or explicit theology, particularly as expressed in some of the accompanying graphics on YouTube where Jesus is wafting […]
Mike Powell – Starting Over
The archetypal narrative of a Christian often begins with that remembered moment when they first welcomed Jesus into their life as a young person. However, what has instead become the most defining aspect of my life’s journey to date took place in September 2007 – when I was 27 years old and I discovered that […]
Heather Payne Reynolds – Grace, Truth and Surrender
I’ve always felt that if I had to describe my life in terms of the tortoise and the hare fable, I’m the tortoise. My spiritual evolution has been slow and steady. I grew up in the seventies in a denomination where the only way to be saved was by immersion at some ambiguous “age of […]
Marcus Rempel – Whereto, Nomads?
The podcast I was listening to cut out halfway to my Aunt Hilda’s funeral. Like a switch being flicked, I suddenly saw my surroundings. I saw the greyness of the sky, the blankness of the white fields, the flatness of the landscape. Driving through the prairies in wintertime is like wandering the corridors of an […]