Video: My faith story before the start of this blog

Now it is a reasonable hour of the day, as opposed to the dead of night like my first post, I'm going to set out a few more details of who I am, and my faith journey so far, to give a bit of background to where I am now.

Who am I? From a secular point of view, I grew up in a rural village in a middle class county in the south of England, with my mum, dad, and younger brother. I was schooled at a private girls school and a mixed state sixth form, spent a gap year first on work experience then travelling (see this blog) and I realised I was bisexual age 14 (see another blog. You can see I like blogging). I went to drama school to do a degree in stage management, and I have been working in the theatre industry in London as a freelance stage manager since August 2014, so for just over a year as I type. This in itself was a vocation that I wanted to do since I was 15, but I have since realised that it was a step within my greater vocation ie. my calling to ministry.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. My mother is an atheist and my father is a non-practising pluralist. It wasn't that I grew up without God or being told God didn't exist, God just wasn't mentioned. I was baptised, but my parents really did it for social and cultural reasons. But my uncle gave us various children's Bibles so I had one as my favourite book for a while as a young child, without any real understanding of the stories as 'scripture'.

When I was 6, I spent two years at a Church of England primary school, so I learnt the Lord's prayer, said grace at lunchtime, sat through assemblies given by the local minister, and went to church twice a year, Harvest and Christingles services. I didn't like Harvest because it was at the really modern URC church (we had an ecumenical partnership in our village) but Christingles was in the tiny, ancient parish church that backed onto the fields. My love affair with the church started in those services, dark and cold but lit by candlelight with the magic of Christmas in the air, with the bonus of being trusted with open flame, and sweets of course. I'd blast out Shine Jesus Shine in the same way others my age sang the latest chart toppers or Disney tunes, and even when I left the school age 8, my dad took me each year for the next decade.

Consciously engaging with Christianity as a philosophy began in my Religious Studies classes at my new school. When I was about 12, my teacher answered a girl's question about what she personally as a Baptist thought counted to be Christian. She said if someone believed Jesus Christ was the Son of the one God, and he lived, died and was resurrected to save us from our sins, everything else was arbitrary, and even the how/why of those statements was up for debate. I looked down at the textbook on Christianity on my desk and realised I have thought of myself as a Christian since primary school but never thought about what I believed. It was more of a cultural default, part of being British. But I knew in that moment I did believe those two statements, so for the next years of school, I digested and dissected the different beliefs and practices of the different churches and navigated my own belief system.

When I was almost 14, I started noticing a girl around school who had a crucifix necklace, and I

On holiday after starting to wear
a cross. I still have that one.

asked for a cross necklace for my birthday (ie. one without a figure on it). I've worn a cross around my neck at all times since, nine years so far, and I've amassed a collection of different styles.

It was at sixth form, age 16, I met a girl who would become my best friend, who had grown up in a Church of England household, so knew a lot more about community worship. I knew the theory of worship styles, but had yet to find the motivation to go to a Sunday service or become involved in a congregation. So we would have discussions about our shared but basically very different religions, and she took me to one Sunday service in our two years studying for our A-Levels, as well as helping me pick out a Bible, which I had never actually thought about buying before, oddly.

On my gap year trip, I started going to church. It happened quite naturally, almost incidentally. My work experience had been with a Christian theatre group on tour, so I had had a little go at being with other Christians, like church-lite, but one day in a town called 1770 on the Australian coast, I went to a Sunday service and every week after that I googled the local Anglican wherever I woke up on the Sunday morning. I also picked up a devotional so I read that and the readings from my Bible, which I took with me, every day for a couple of months until it ran out.

Moving to London, one of my priorities was finding a church where I could throw myself in and really go for it. Having spent years working on my personal faith, time for some community faith.  [This is a view I have gained retrospectively. At the time, none of it seemed liked the steady step by step progression it was.]  I had met the associate rector of St James' Piccadilly in New Zealand, and I went along a few months after starting uni, and fell deeper in love. I could go on and on about St James', but for the purposes of this blog, the main things that SJP has done are: I go to church every week, I'm a reader, server, alto in the choir; I run the youth discussion group, gave a talk at the general discussion group. run the LGBT group including marching in the Pride parade with the Christians, do the tea and coffee after the service once a month; and I was confirmed in St Paul's Cathedral.

IN SUMMARY
6yr I went to Christingles
12yr I turned to Christ
14yr I wore a cross
18yr I went to church
19yr I found my church
21yr I got confirmed

I'll cover the last two years of my life in my next post. See you then!

God bless.