Mary – Slow Down
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 moment of peace over my coffee, I heard it clearly. “Slow down.” The words came from deep inside. They stopped […]
Matthijs Vlaardingerbroek – The Parable of the Sea, the Beach and All That Wretched Sand
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 Sea and listened to exciting stories about people who had experienced adventures at Sea. If there was time left, we […]
Carolyn – How a Plant Medicine Experience Has Supported My Faith Journey
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 the one hand seem totally outlandish but also offer a chance to grow and reframe old ways of thinking. My […]
Alissa Rose – You Do Not Have to be Good
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. – Mary Oliver In the dusky twilight of Alaska, my faith grew in the arms of my father’s faith. I […]
Roger Nuttall – Still Coming Home
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 a mountaintop, on the other hand not really believing ‘truth’ existed. I’d previously run away twice, including ‘eloping’ with a […]
Andy Read – Five Days in France
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 big choice; delaying chemotherapy until after I was born. Her last words six months later were filled with prayers of […]
Tim Annan – It Started with a Cup of Tea…
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 church. That’s more than half my life. *Insert exacerbated expletive here* This is, to those that knew me growing up, […]
Tim F. – How Stepping Out of Church Brought Me True Salvation
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 suffering a few years of general anxiety (often subconsciously and not knowing any obvious cause), there seemed to be a […]
John Griffiths: Why Am I Still in Church? – A Story of Deconstruction From the Inside
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 family so left home aged 6 to go to the mission school and left the far east aged 9 to […]
Ann van Wijgerden – An English Dutch Filipino Journey
“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 The Dreaded Grilling by his home church elders. We worked with Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in the Philippines, were […]
Emma Ellenn – Boundaries
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 way that Christianity hadn’t for me in a half life time. Quite the opposite in fact – I grew up […]
Gerrianne Pennings – Traveling to Remote Places With a Backpack Full of Questions
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 Netherlands is my passport country, but I live and work in the humanitarian sector in Yemen. So quite literally have […]
Lisa Andradez – Finally Fearlessly Pursuing Freedom
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 was paramount. When my parents divorced, and my dad subsequently left the church, I realised for the first time in […]
Stephen Lingwood – Searching for Radical Faith, and Deeper Belonging
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 the Nomad community too. I feel I have a lot in common with the people I’ve encountered, virtually and in […]
Anonymous – Travelling the Road through Fear to Freedom
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 just always ‘there’ and wanted me to be good or ‘live well’. Christian faith continued to be important to me […]
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 […]
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 […]
Charmaine Clark – Songs of Fire
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 to everyone we met. It was a happy kind of love. The fire it started would be warm and glowing […]
Adele Jarrett-Kerr – Expansive Faith and Shifting Communities
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 of churches Canadian missionaries founded across the Caribbean region. My sense of God was grounded by expressions of togetherness that […]
Jenny Simpson – Through the Labyrinth
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 sense of direction to enjoy getting lost in this city known for its labyrinth of narrow streets. I was right […]
Erica Bailey – Faith that Sustains
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 me. My grandmother had come from a non-churchgoing family but chose to become a Christian in her teens. She attended […]
Becky – Honestly Free
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 my early twenties I was offered a job co-ordinating short term missions trips for young people – it would have […]
Brian Ralph – Lost in Space?
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. The overall mission coordinates were set by the academy; they determined the what; our ships determined the where and how. […]
John Dempster – Just One Journey
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 Baptist. As a child and teenager I felt strongly the pressure to be and to become the person my parents […]
Rachel Huskisson – Trauma and Transformation
“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 point from which we as a family tend to measure all time is 8am on November 16th 2003, when we […]
Kandace Burnhams – Searching for Signposts
“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 churchy version of those hooded youths loitering outside of Sainsbury’s late on a Saturday night. Dissatisfied with the status quo, […]
Miche Spring – Whispering into Cracks
When I think of the word “Nomad” I think of how it can include the idea of being a misfit and I relate strongly, and fondly, with that idea. I experienced events early in my life that mean I shall forever feel like a misfit. As a child, my internal life was crushed, pulled part, and […]
Liza Cucco – How to Survive in a Desert Place
How do you feel about almonds? Personally, I love them in every single form, from the marzipan that covered the wedding cake my husband shockingly made us to the milk in my cereal this morning. The thing about almonds is that they come from very thirsty trees. The thirsty nature of these delicious, life-giving nuts […]
Catherine Gale – The Box
In the beginning, I had a box. It started out small, in black and white with hard edges. As I grew and experienced new things, my box grew too. I decorated it with colour, and as I pressed against the walls, they moved outward. There was room to breathe, to expand. I grew to be […]
Chris Peters – A Place Worth Staying In
I’ve always lived more inside my head. Things just felt safer and looked more hopeful in my imagination. I grew up in the Christian tradition, with those stories of hope, yet it became harder and harder to reconcile them with the world I knew. Spirituality became an escape from the world rather than a way […]
Alice Huntley – Beyond Words
I like words. I rarely find myself stuck for them. Words have been my friends all my life. I like to talk, to say what I think, to express how I feel through them. I lose myself in books, I love learning languages, to wield new vocabulary like a weapon, testing the heft and the hew […]
Joscelyn Cole – Navigating the Space Between
I have a confession: I find it infinitely easier to find God in fiction than I do in church. It may sound obvious, but a book doesn’t have to be by a Christian author to be able to strike at heart of what Love is. One of the most compelling stories of relationship I’ve read […]
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 […]
