Some Background

My journey through Christendom really started when I was 9. My parents who had left school at 13 and 14 had never owned a Bible. They wanted me to be better educated than they were, and sent me to a Baptist Sunday School with an acquaintance. It was two weeks before I was 14 that there was a lesson on the trinity that I thought was utter nonsense. I’ve often wondered what I said to the teacher as I left that morning; never to return! With hindsight that had been a very significant experience.

After completing National Service in the RAF I moved to London. I met a lad who needed help running a Scout Cub Pack attached to an Anglican Church (read Episcopalian in America). That was my introduction despite my thoughts about the trinity that never went away. It was at church where I met my wife. I was treasurer of our local church for 5 years in the 1960s but walked away in the early 1970s because of what I saw as a lack of ‘radical’ Christianity and an inability to get answers to some of my questions, but my wife continued to attend.
It was some years later that I became a member of a Sabbath-keeping Christian Church that was seen by some as a cult. My wife joined me later.
As a result of a church-split in 1995 I was ‘forced’ to reconsider just about everything I had ever been taught for the second time.
That in a nutshell is how I became an outside observer of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism.

My formal education ended when I was 16. I have not had a full time job for over 30 years. I have been using the internet since 1997 and created a web site in 2000 that subsequently became the foundation of my ongoing blogs.
It was directly as a result of that split that I have been an outside observer of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism especially in America for over 25 years. It didn’t take long to recognise that there was so much emphasis on fear, guilt and shame. I just ‘knew’ that this was misguided.
It was in 1998 that I suddenly became aware of a freedom and liberation from the slavery of legalism.
It was shortly after this that I became very involved with the Emerging, Emergent and House Church scene. (I met Brian McLaren in 2004).
In those days we talked about the tens of thousands every year who were leaving churches that they may have been attending for many years. A few years later estimates were of over two million leaving churches across Europe and America every year. Many wanted nothing to do with anything spiritual, but many others found refuge under the umbrella of SBNR – Spiritual But Not Religious.

It was around this time that a very close friend suggested that I had the knack of asking some of the awkward questions to which there are no easy answers.
Here is a link to Some Earlier Material that I wrote around 2005 (the foundations of my blog as I saw them at that time).
In 2003 I found a book on the web entitled So you don’t want to go to church anymore when the authors had only written the first three chapters. That was my introduction to The God Journey and Wayne Jacobsen, which in turn led to reading The Shack when it was first published privately in 2007. That was a very special experience.

I stopped attending church in 2009 without ever doubting the existence of ‘God’.
It was in 2010 that I was introduced to the writing of Richard Holloway, the former leader of the Episcopal Church in Scotland who once suggested that the symbol ‘God’ is one of the most ambiguous of human inventions. See Broken Myths that I wrote in 2010.

In 2012 I was introduced to Diana Butler Bass and her then new book Christianity After Religion and ended up with a faith that I could hold on to ‘loosely’.
But then everything started to change again in 2013 when I started attending U3A (University of the Third Age) classes where I was introduced to Philosophy, Psychology, Counselling, History of Christianity, History of Religion, Buddhism and Islam – just 2 or 3 hours a week for 4 years.
I’ll leave the reader to imagine the impact that this all had on someone who had left school at 16; who had always been a ‘workaholic’; and who had been a computer programmer and business analyst starting in 1967 (said to have been one of the perfect jobs for someone living with Asperger’s Syndrome or High Functioning Autism). I see all of this as the beginning of my real education at the age of 78. So much has changed in the 10 years that have followed!
Food for Thought contains a reflection of some of the many aspects of the faith that I had at that time.

With hindsight a very significant aspect of my journey in 2014 were the thoughts of Barbara Brown Taylor when she suggested that she had a gift of Lunar Spirituality and that she had found her teacher in John of the Cross, who she says is no help to anyone seeking a better grip on God – he wants to convince those who grasp after things that God cannot be grasped – cannot be held on to – can only be encountered as that which eclipses the reality of all other things. Barbara went on to suggest that John is a teacher in a negative way – he doesn’t teach anything about God by saying what God is – John clears space by teaching what God is not – that images and ideas about God are really obstacles between them and the real thing – offering no handle on this elusive God who cannot be grasped.

It was in 2015 that Diana suggested the question, Where is God? may have emerged as one of the most consequential questions of our time.

There was Another Watershed in 2016 when Rob Bell and Richard Rohr got together for a lengthy podcast. I made some extensive notes. Shortly after this Rob and Pete Rollins had a 4 part discussion entitled Let’s Talk about God (Robcast 111 in July 2016). I collected some of those thoughts in A Few Discussion Topics?
Others who influenced my thinking at this time included Eckhart Tolle, Ken Wilber and Bart Ehrman.

It was a few weeks after listening to Barbara Brown Taylor in 2019 that I saw Two Posts on Facebook from a man who had spent 30+ years in and around Pentecostal and Charismatic churches in the UK, but who described himself as a very active Anglican and an ‘armchair’ theologian.
With hindsight these helped me to appreciate something of the extent of my own experience of all sides of the Christian spectrum.