Nomad Podcast

Our regular listeners will remember our Welcome the Stranger refugee special where we looked at the crisis through the eyes of a Syrian refugee and a refugee charity worker. The aim was to raise awareness and money through the sale of David Benjamin Blower‘s album Welcome the Stranger. On this week’s podcast, we’re looking at the crisis through the eyes of […]

Gungor – a multi-grammy nominated Christian band – were the toast of the evangelical worship scene. That is until it became clear that Michael was having significant doubts about his faith. This did not go down well among evangelicals, to say the least. So we talk with Michael and his wife Lisa about the impact this […]

Brian McLaren has a knack for articulating what many of us are feeling. For a decade he has been the voice of those Christians who are concerned about, for example, the Church’s overemphasis on doctrinal belief, its lack of inclusivity, and its lack of concern for the many global issues we are facing. In his latest book – The […]

Mark Yaconelli is – among many other things – a storyteller. Such is his belief in the power of stories that he founded The Hearth, a gathering of local people who simply share their own stories. Mark has seen this simple gathering profoundly impact his local community. So we ask Mark why it is that stories can […]

Kester Brewin was founder of one the UK’s most creative and innovative alternative worship communities, Vaux. He went onto write The Complex Christ, a critically acclaimed book calling for an emerging Church. But over the following years he began to realise that Christianity was just another means of trying to escape his childhood pain. Tune into the […]

Christianity can be quite a disembodied faith. Muslim’s have prayer positions, Hindu’s have yoga, Buddhists have Tai-Chi, whereas Christians tend to pray with little more than a bowed head. We ask theologian Paula Gooder why Christians have separated the spiritual from the physical, and what damage this has done for the faith. And we ask how our […]

Mindfulness has exploded in popularity over recent years, with seemingly every other community centre, school, health service and therapist offering it. But what benefit, if any, does it offer the follower of Jesus? Author, speaker and retreat leader, Brian Draper, believes it has a vital role in Christian spirituality, but only as a doorway to something […]

With the dust just beginning to settle after Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, we thought we’d take the opportunity to look at our relationship with politics. Was Jesus political? Should Christians engage in party politics, or should they be a prophetic voice from the margins? We bring these, and many other questions to political […]

Is faith based purely on belief, and a strong faith holding to those beliefs with certainty? If so, what happens when our beliefs evolve and shift? Prof. Peter Enns  believes that we’ve misunderstood the nature of faith, and it is actually trust rather than certainty that lays at it’s heart. And it is this trust that can […]

The question ‘who is God?’ used to be the starting point for religious reflection, but increasingly spiritual seekers are concerning themselves with the question ‘where is God?’. We ask historian, religious commentator and author Diana Butler Bass about her faith journey and how her shift from a vertical to a horizontal theology dramatically reshaped her faith […]

Why in our multicultural society is the Church still predominantly led by, and our theology predominantly written by, white men? We head to Birmingham to meet up with one of the UK’s leading black theologians, Anthony Reddie. We ask him if the Church is racist and if so what we can do about it? And, what difference […]

We have a humanitarian disaster unfolding on our doorstep. Many of us feel frustrated at our government’s half-hearted response, yet we feel overwhelmed and powerless to do anything ourselves. In this episode we hear the story of Adel Hamad, a Syrian refugee who made the trip to the UK. We then hear from Naomi Jemmett, […]

Why is the Church divided into over 40,000 denominations? Why do Churches in the same town often have very little to do with each other? Why are Christians always fighting on social media? It doesn’t seem much like the one new humanity Jesus came to establish! To find some answers we quiz social psychologist, Christena Cleveland. Interview […]

Professor Gary Burge joins us on the podcast to help us get our heads round the complexities of Israel/Palestine. Gary was a student at the university of Beirut, he now lecturers in the US on the New Testament and the Theology of the Promised Land. He regularly visits the Middle East and has close connections to Christian leaders […]

Apparently the vast majority of us feel uncomfortable talking about death, and haven’t spoken to anyone about our end of life wishes. Buddhist, Jon Underwood thinks this is having a profoundly negative effect on our society. So he pioneered the Death Cafe movement where people gather together, drink tea, eat cake and talk openly and honestly about death. Interview begins […]

Wayne Jacobsen was a successful pastor. But as his disillusionment with the institutional nature of church grew, he decided to walk away and begin a search for the church Jesus was building. 20 years later he says this was one of the best decisions he ever made. So tune in if you’re curious about the sort of Church Jesus […]

Easter is upon us again, so we thought it was a fine time to look at the atonement again. So we popped over to Bristol to chat with Alan Mann. Alan asks the question, what could the atonement mean for a society that doesn’t consider itself sinful in any traditional sense. Rather than ‘sin’ Alan believes the issue we […]

Robin Parry is a theologian best known for advocating universalism. But more recently he’s turned his attention to writing about The Biblical Cosmos. In this book he systematically lays out all the weirdness of the biblical universe, with its flat earth, the dead residing underneath it and God residing above a solid sky dome. Oh, and there’s sea monsters and angel-stars […]

On Nomad we often talk about the changing nature of culture and how the church has changed (or not) in response. But rather than continuing to rely on our own anecdotal and wildly speculative evidence, we thought it was about time we spoke to someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Grace Davie is a professor in the sociology […]

Jamie Arpin-Ricci joins us on the latest leg of our Nomadic pilgrimage of hope. Jamie felt called to leave his comfortable middle class life and move to a high poverty and crime inner-city area. Obviously this presented many challenges, but none more so than being confronted by his own vulnerability. So we ask Jamie to reflect on what it means to make […]