A Tide Turning: Writing, Calling, and the Places Christ Is Found

Yesterday, I was in conversation with someone stateside about influences—what has shaped my writing and where it’s come from. I think that’s what’s prompted this: a longer pause, a looking back, trying to name some of the threads.

Something has shifted, though not all at once. It feels less like a moment and more like a tide turning—something you only really notice when you stop and look back. For many years, my ministry held two spaces together. I was part of a mainstream church, preaching regularly and inhabiting what most would recognise as a priestly, pastoral role. Alongside that, there was Lighthouse. Over time, that balance changed. A few years ago, things narrowed in a visible sense. I was seconded more fully into Lighthouse, and the mainstream expression of ministry fell away. It wasn’t a loss in the way some might think. I sensed—and still sense—a call to Lighthouse. It has been a place of grace for me, a place where Christ is not an idea but a presence among those who have been battered and bruised by life. It is a joy, a delight, and, if I’m honest, it is home.

I’ve been part of Lighthouse for over twelve years now, and it has shaped me more than any training ever did. It keeps me close to the ground, close to people, close to reality as it actually is—not as we’d like it to be. These are lives that don’t fit categories, stories that don’t resolve neatly, people carrying addiction, grief, trauma, laughter, and kindness—often all at once. And if you stay, if you don’t rush past it, you begin to notice something else: beauty is found there too. Not instead of the pain, but within it.

Alongside that call, there was also a narrowing—less visible, less voice, fewer of the usual platforms. I felt that at times. But over the last year or so, something unexpected has opened up. Through poems and shared writings, that sense of reach has returned—not in the same form, but wider. It has come as gift. Words written in the quiet have begun to travel, finding their way into places I haven’t been and into lives I don’t fully see. They seem to carry something beyond themselves. I notice it in what comes back—not so much praise, though there’s kindness there, but recognition. A sense that something has been named. People speak of feeling seen, unsettled, comforted—sometimes all at once. The range still surprises me: those rooted in church life, those who’ve slipped away but haven’t let go of Christ, those carrying grief, pain, and doubt, those who know life on the margins, and those beginning to see beyond their own comfort into something more real. I’m grateful for it, but I’m also aware there’s a weight to it. Words travel, and they carry something.

Part of what sits behind all this is simply my own story. I began in a form of faith that was tight and certain, where everything could be explained and everything had its place. It felt secure, but it was also, if I’m honest, a bit reduced. That couldn’t hold—or maybe Christ wouldn’t leave me there. What keeps returning in my writing now is this: Jesus shows us what God is like. Not an abstract idea of God, but God as he actually is—beautiful, kind, fierce in love, and nearer than we expect.

I didn’t always see God that way. There was a period shaped by restlessness and drift—reading Nietzsche, listening to Jim Morrison, pulling at the threads. It wasn’t dramatic, more a slow unravelling that showed up in how I was living. And in the middle of that, not as an argument but as an interruption, I heard it: *come to me*. That stayed.

Scripture has remained central, but it doesn’t behave the way I once wanted it to. Study grounded me in it, but it also unsettled me. It’s less something to master now, more something that meets you. It argues, laments, hopes; it doesn’t flatten out. The larger story has become important to me in a deeper way—creation, fall, Israel, Christ, new creation—a story that’s going somewhere. It’s given me somewhere to stand when things feel uncertain. Lament doesn’t disappear, but it’s held within something bigger. At the same time, I’ve found myself drawn to the parts that don’t resolve—the protests, the tensions, the questions that don’t get neat answers. I find myself sitting there, asking: are you here too, Christ? Because if he is Lord, he must be.

Over time, something else has shifted—a kind of permission to let theology breathe, to let it be beautiful, not just correct but alive. Words that don’t just explain God but open something up, something you feel as well as think. I’ve become more aware of how we know: the difference between grasping something and receiving it, between reducing and attending. For a long time, my faith lived mostly in the first mode—trying to get it right, to pin it down. But poetry, story, and image work differently. They don’t just tell you something; they let you see. They work on the imagination, opening space for mystery. A lecture can inform you, but a poem can change how you see.

I’ve always written in some form. At university I carried a small jotter, scribbling lines when something caught me—nothing polished, just fragments. Then there was a season where that faded as I stepped further into academic work and the writing became tighter, more controlled. It was useful, but something quieter went missing. It came back through pastoral life. Sitting with people in pain, in situations where normal language doesn’t quite hold, I found myself writing again—prayers, poems, fragments—not to publish, just to respond. And something opened.

My preaching has followed a similar path. At St George’s, I would often work from bullet points and speak from there, and there was a freedom in that. I still do it at times. But as time got tighter, I began writing sermons out more fully—not just because I had to, but because I wanted them to carry something, to have weight, to linger, something closer to poetry.

The writing itself still begins in the same way: a phrase, a line of Scripture, a moment that won’t leave me alone. I carry it for a while, and then, often quite suddenly, the words come. There’s a kind of focus that comes with that, where time shifts. Part of that, I think, is ADHD—it lets me go deep into something, though I don’t always get things right first time in terms of grammar or structure. I can remember handing in weeks’ worth of research and writing, and my supervisor, David Wenham—a lovely man and a deep thinker—would hand it back covered in corrections before we’d even begun talking about the ideas. It was humbling, but formative. And then there was Sarah, who went through my MLitt thesis with a fine-tooth comb before submission. She was my Grammarly long before Grammarly was even a thing.

About five years ago I started using Grammarly, and it helped more than I expected. It gave me confidence to share what I was writing without second-guessing every sentence. Even now, I sometimes use an AI writing coach—not to replace the voice, but to refine it, to tidy the edges without losing what’s underneath. I’m still not trying to make things perfect, although I do want to write in a way that is beautiful. I’m trying to say what feels true, to hold together what often gets pulled apart—faith and doubt, beauty and pain—and to place Christ somewhere in the midst of it, not as a neat answer but as a presence.

Writing has become something close to prayer for me, a way of paying attention, of bringing what I see and feel before God. It steadies me, and there is a quiet joy in it. I go back over what I’ve written, editing, trimming, listening. There’s always the pull to make it too neat, to resolve it, and when that happens I try to undo it a little, to leave some rough edges, some space.

Because faith, as I’ve come to know it, isn’t certainty. Doubt hasn’t gone away—it stays, but it changes shape, becoming something that keeps you honest. If the poems carry anything, I hope it’s this: that Christ is still present in the places most of us actually live—in the mess, in the ordinary, in the half-light where things are not fully clear. Still calling, still drawing, and still, somehow, being found.

By God’s grace, I’ll keep writing and sharing.

And thank you for journeying with me.