Hello, Folks. I’d like to share with you a brief description of the sort of spiritual journey I have been travelling for many years now. This is snipped from the preface to my new book, Stories in the Scriptures.
Whilst I am very much out of step with fundamentalist and authoritarian versions of belief, I am equally at odds with the belief-debunking skeptic who takes the view that all religious belief is naive and who comes across as very much like the smart-alec ten-year-old who enjoys sneering at the little kids who still believe in Father Christmas. My own religious position is not at all any sort of middle ground between these two extremes. It is in a different place altogether – and one which I commend to you.
Half a lifetime ago, when I was coming back to religious involvement after a few years of secularity and beginning to explore the possibility of entering the Methodist ministry, I had an interesting and encouraging conversation with the Reverend Bill Horton. Bill was at that time General Secretary of the Church’s Division of Ministries and was probably curious to find out a little more about the strange guy who had shown up in church after such a long absence from belief and now wanted to offer as a candidate for ordained ministry. He asked me why I had chosen to come into the Methodist Church rather than another. I replied that so far as I could see at that time the Methodist church in the UK was committed to promoting unity of fellowship without imposing uniformity of belief.
This was important to me having come from a distinctly odd background. I had grown up in the Watchtower movement of Jehovah’s Witnesses where the whole doctrinal package was imposed from the top down and rigidly enforced. That meant the process of questioning and searching for answers was associated only with the beginning of the journey of faith. But since leaving that mindset behind I had taken a degree in philosophy and logic and had nurtured the habit of constantly questioning what I believed. So it was vitally important that every member of the Christian fellowship should be free to question, to doubt, to change our minds – and never to feel that coming to a different view of what to believe meant anyone should have to move on and find a new fellowship whose members all believe that revised opinion. I found Bill’s warm agreement with that answer greatly encouraging.
That was my position then, and it remains my position now. I came into the Methodist Church well over at the liberal end of the spectrum of belief and have progressed further in the direction of freedom. And that is why, even though I no longer lead worship since I retired, I nevertheless remain a Methodist minister. The church fellowship must be open to all who wish to engage with the stories in the Scriptures – those who seek to come into the presence of the Divine at the Communion rail and those also who seek the Divine whilst walking in the forest.