​I have been fortunate to have been brought up in a loving Christian family, so I have always known about God and had the freedom to explore Christianity on my own ground. Although I was never pressured into coming to church, I turned up to pretty much every Sunday school session without fail or questioning up until I was about 11 when I started to think about what Christianity was all about. I realised that I couldn’t get my head around a God who could not be seen or touched yet was real, or a God that allowed suffering.  At this age I suffered from what I call ‘not being cool enough’ phobia which I believe most teenagers suffer from. I realised it wasn’t cool to be a Christian I distinctly remember my friend asking me if I was one of ‘those’ Christians and I said NO in a very dismissive way. Due to this and further stereotyping I became very embarrassed about the idea of being a Christian and decided to give up church altogether. From being a regular member in Sunday school I became a non-existent member in the youth group Pathfinders.
Although I would love to say my faith grew from here it only got worse as I got older when all the real pressures kicked in: alcohol, gossiping, sex, boyfriends, beauty. This is the age cool is no longer a straightforward definition of not being a teacher’s pet, it’s a whole other dimension which is extremely hard to follow. At this point I was weighed down with all these pressures:  I wasn’t pretty, I didn’t have a boyfriend and I wasn’t popular so therefore in my eyes that  amounted to not being good enough. The idea of church was now a distant memory, my Sundays were filled with pretending to do homework instead of church in order to have a lie-in or a TV veg. I wasn’t anti God or Christianity though, I could see my parent’s passion for Jesus and I knew it couldn’t be all made up, but I chose to ignore it in order to fit in.
So why do I believe? Basically I got into the wrong crowd when I went to Sixth Form, they pulled me into their clique, but I ended up becoming one of them, obsessed with guys, parties, alcohol and I thought it was fun at first, I thought I had finally reached “cool” and this satisfied me for a while until I realised I wasn’t happy. These girls didn’t know me at all, they didn’t care for me but I stuck with them to fit in, I was trapped. My only escape from this was my Wednesday afternoons at Christian Union, where I was welcomed and listened to and not pressured to be someone I wasn’t. I could dare to be myself and fully explore this faith. Eventually this love and acceptance gave me the strength I needed to leave my group of friends and the pressures behind. For a while I was alone and that was hard, but somewhere inside of me I trusted God and decided to pray to him. I prayed that I would find true friends by the time I left Sixth Form this wasn’t answered straight away but I didn’t mind because I found the most amazing friends by the end of my first year. They were from my Christian Union, they challenged me to be a better person, to be comfortable in my skin and to dare to be a Christian in today’s selfish materialistic society.
From then on I have been a follower of Jesus, I know the Lord will provide, and that feeling of not being enough is slowly fading away. I feel free and I have realised that to say Christianity is restricting is extremely wrong. I’ve never felt more liberated. That doesn’t mean I don’t still struggle with these pressures from society, but this time when I struggle I know whom to rely on. 

And the scales fell off...
 
People come to faith in many different ways.  For some, it is through finding a sense of peace in reading the Bible.  For others, it may be a family thing. For others, it is feeling God’s presence in one of the “thin places”, where heaven and earth are only separated by a gnat’s whisker.  For others, fewer I suspect, it comes through wrestling with God in a very Old Testament way, and that’s how it was with me.

But let me backtrack.  My mother and father were not Christians.  If put on the spot, my mother would have said that she was C of E.  My father might have done.  My maternal grandmother was a regular church-goer and organ-player, but I never asked her about her faith, because it wasn’t the sort of thing we ever talked about. But I was a cub and then a scout, and I went to church, because there was a three-line whip on church parades.  Probably as a consequence of that rather flimsy connection, I was confirmed.  It didn’t change my life, but it did give me an oversensitive conscience and a sense of guilt.

During university, teacher training and for the first eight years of working life, I went to daily services (three on Sundays), because I sang in college choirs and then cathedrals.  The Word and the words literally went over my head every day; they stayed in my memory, but not in my heart.  With the benefit of hindsight, I see that I was searching for something, but I didn’t know what or how to set about finding out. From time to time I would meet clergy who inspired me and with whom I had in-depth conversations, but, at the critical moment, I always shied away.

Fast-forward several decades.  I reached a crisis point in my life, which turned out to be a point of no return.  I must have been a particularly hard case, because I wrestled with God (or at least I thought I did) for two whole nights, separated by a few months, and finally he broke me into submission.  Thy will be done!  I then started to examine my former life and tried to work out what my new life in Christ was (as though you could do it unaided and once and for all).  I was turned upside down and inside out.  I hardly knew how or what to think or how to put one word after another.  I lost my sense of humour, too, because I didn’t know what was funny anymore.  And it took a very long time to be put back together again.  The remarkable thing was that my old self did come back, except that it wasn’t my old self, but my renewed self.  The old personality was still there, the old abilities, but softened, remoulded and re-orientated, refined, as only God’s fire could refine.  The change soon spread into all aspects of life: family and work, not least.  And it was very hard for my three sons who couldn’t understand what was happening to their dad.

I also experienced the scales falling off my eyes, whenever I read the Bible.  So, it wasn’t just for singing to a handful of people on a Monday night –it was for all day, every day, and it did actually mean something!!  And it wasn’t just for life, it was the stuff of life itself.  Amazing (as I kept saying to myself for several years).

I needed to know more and no time to lose.  I went to a home group, but I was confused, because there were two translations of the Bible round the table and they did not sit comfortably together.  How could this be?  I decided I had to go back to the original.  I studied modern languages at university and taught Latin for a time, so I enrolled for Greek in a Week at St. John’s, Nottingham, and have read the New Testament in Greek regularly ever since.  You may have already guessed the next step.  Yes, Hebrew!  That’s a really steep learning curve and I’m still on it (I don’t think you ever get off!). The study of these ancient languages has shown me how much we miss in translation today and how important it is to look at scripture in its context first in order to find its application second.  God took my gift for languages and channelled it in a new direction.  Amazing!

I have now grown used to the fact that I won’t always sense God’s presence as deeply or as often as I did in the first flush of faith, that prayer is really hard for everyone (not just for me), that faith is a muscle that needs to be exercised even if, metaphorically, you’re not feeling like getting out of bed, and that I still make mistakes and go wrong.
​
And that faith is a journey.  It’s exciting, it’s scary, it’s challenging, and we’re all on it.  Together.
 
 
Chris Knowles is married to Julia Fletcher and they moved to Ely in August 2015.

As a child I considered myself an atheist - because my dad was - but I happened to attend a Christian school with compulsory church services. Perhaps unsurprisingly, compulsory church didn’t bring me to God, but the school chaplain - affectionately called ‘The Rev’ - reached out to me simply by caring for me, and I became interested in what it was he had that I didn’t. One Lent, when I was fourteen, I decided that I would say a couple of set prayers every day and see what happened. Nothing spectacular happened at all, only by the end of Lent I didn’t want to stop. Around then I also started to attend the non-compulsory services. These were high-speed communions on a Friday lunchtime and, looking back, they were a funny introduction to church, but these services provided me with my first Christian community, and they made me feel loved and valued in a way I hadn’t before.

On going to university I began to doubt more and more about Christianity that I had previously taken for granted. I found the number of churches and ‘types’ of Christianity unsettling. My subject, Classics, didn’t help, in that I was being taught to pull apart and question texts written at the same time, and within the same cultures, as the bible. And compulsory philosophy definitely didn’t help, making me question whether I knew anything at all. “Could you be a brain in a vat?” This essay question is hard to forget, and I still can’t prove that I’m not.

I have never recovered my teenage certainty in my faith. Today I have many standard doubts and questions - why did God allow the recent earthquakes in Nepal? - plus many which are more specific to my day job. I now myself teach Classics to university students, and my research focuses on Roman religion and their many gods: thinking about ‘dead gods’ all day can be an excellent way to wear away at your own faith!

I’ve talked a lot about doubt, and this is supposed to be a post about belief! So what do I believe? Well firstly I believe - and I know this hardly sounds like ‘good news’ - that there is a lot of suffering in this world. Much of this is caused by things outside of human control - a couple who want children but can’t conceive, a family left without a dad because of cancer. But much suffering has human causes, and not just the headline grabbing stories like the grooming of vulnerable children or trafficking of migrants, but common or garden suffering too - a marriage that falls apart because of an affair, a child who develops an eating disorder after being bullied online, an old man who only has his tv for company.

I also believe in the transforming power of love. Not the Disney kind, but the Corinthians 13 kind: love that is patient and never gives up; love which always forgives; love which doesn’t set conditions; love which always hopes. I believe that love of this kind could transform all of the above situations (which is not to say it would ‘fix’ them). In my own family life there have been situations so sad and so difficult that I know that only love like this could have made a difference. That love wasn’t there, but that doesn’t shake my conviction in how much it was needed.

My faith starts, then, from the simple act of looking at the world around me, with all its happiness, but also all its human brokenness. And I am convinced that we need something very different to our normal way of doing things. From there I am drawn to the Jesus we meet in the gospels, who embodies the kind of love I’ve talked about, and whose teachings completely overturn human norms, the way we instinctively act and expect others to act. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ has become such a commonplace of Christian teaching that it’s easy to pass over it, but what a radical and crazy idea! If we all actually did this, how unrecognisably different our world would be! What Jesus calls for us to do is so mad, so unimaginable, so radically different to what we normally do, that it seems to me that here is something which could be enough for the depths of brokenness in our world.

There are days when I struggle to believe in God, especially if I think of him as a bearded man on a throne in the sky. There are days when my heart says yes, but my brain says no, and the academic in me berates me with doubt after doubt. On many days like that I stick my head in the sand and make another cup of tea. But on other days like that I think about these beautiful and profound words:

“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us.” (1 John 4:16, The Message Version)

God isn’t just loving. He is love. When I first realised this I was filled with joy, surprised by joy even, as C. S. Lewis described it. I have to keep re-realising it too, reminding myself that no-one is asking me to believe in a bearded man in the sky. Rather believing in God is believing in this radical kind of love, in its power to transform, to make broken lives new, to bring joy where there is pain and hope where there is despair. No matter how many doubts I have, my faith in that love remains firm.

I became a Christian about a month into my first term at university, on Remembrance Day 1973 – an easy date to remember! – after nearly three years of searching, asking questions, and talking to anyone who would talk to me about their experience of faith. That period of questioning was triggered by my father’s death when I was just 15 – he died unexpectedly a few months before his 50th birthday – because it made no sense to me that someone who had been so very much alive, a lovely man who loved his family and was loved and liked by so many people, could suddenly disappear without trace, and that that was all there was to life. If that was the case, I thought, then why didn’t we all just give up now? There had to be more to it than this.

I had had faith of a sort before that time – been to Sunday School, got confirmed at 13, went to church occasionally after that – but it was as if my father’s death, which was a tragedy for my family and changed my own life completely, somehow kick-started a different type of awareness and belief in God which hadn’t been present before, and which then culminated in my conversion nearly three years later. After the various conversations I’d had with friends and strangers, when I arrived at university I started attending the college chapel, ostensibly just as a way of meeting people, and there I found a group of people my own age who talked about God as though they knew him and had a shared experience of him. That, I realised, was what I wanted, and eventually God made it possible for me to say ‘yes’ to him instead of holding him at arm’s length, which is what I had been doing up to that point.

So why do I still believe today? Why, some 42 years later, am I still trying to pray, reading the Bible, going to church, spending time with my Christian friends and trying to serve God in whatever way he might ask me to? That’s a harder question to answer. Though in many ways I have been extremely fortunate in how my life has turned out, it has still had its ups and downs, its sadnesses and disappointments, its share of things that don’t seem to make sense – and that early tragedy still casts its shadow. But none of these things alters the fact that God is there, that he is reliable and he loves me, and that he can be turned to in sorrow and in joy, not to wave some sort of celestial magic wand and make the difficult things go away, but much more importantly, to be the rock that I can cling to and lean on no matter what happens. I guess that sense of being on solid ground is one of the things I lost the night my father died – it was as though a chasm of fear and uncertainty opened at my feet, and it stayed there for years – but God has filled that hole, that gap, with himself, and though I still miss my father, and the way I miss him changes as I get older, I can cope with that, and with whatever else may come, because my heavenly Father is there, and underneath are his everlasting arms.

My journey towards Christian faith happened in two stages: first I came to believe in God, and a little later I came to believe in Jesus Christ. The moment when I came to believe in God occurred when I was 16 years old, on my first day in Sixth Form. I had spent the summer worrying about whether everything in our future was predetermined by an impersonal force of destiny, and struggling against an overwhelming wave of adolescent pessimism. I had also spent some of the summer in Paris, where I had visited lots of churches and felt admiration for people of faith. I heard in my heart, quite clearly and distinctly, the words ‘fate is unjust, but God is just’. The words were accompanied by a sense of certainty that a loving God presided over my life, and that nothing is predetermined by impersonal fate. My pessimism vanished instantly to be replaced by an optimism (the gift of hope) that has never left me. Indeed, my optimism is so unshakeable that it can become a weakness.

This encounter with God sent me to read Mark’s Gospel, which I had studied at school but always found boring. I was now reading the text with new eyes, and the personality of Jesus jumped out at me as the perfection of human nature. Over the course of the next year, I made several extended visits to a Christian community where I stayed and did some voluntary work. It is hard to pin down the exact moment when I became a Christian, because I gradually came to accept that Jesus was the Son of God and I began to pray. However, the moment when I encountered Jesus as a living person happened about a year and a half after my first encounter with God. I was at a community eucharist. At a certain point in the service I experienced the complete and perfect certainty that Jesus Christ was truly present with us in the chapel, and that he is alive. This was the gift of faith, and like the gift of hope, it has never left me.

The reasons why I believe are closely linked to the experiences I had all those years ago. I believe because it is clear to me that love is the principle underpinning all reality, and that a loving God has the power to change the course of our lives and the course of history. I believe because Jesus Christ is the perfection of human nature, the hope for what we will be in the future, as well as the Lamb of God who takes away our sins. To know him makes us more human, and the further we depart from his friendship, the further we leave humanity behind. But ultimately, I am convinced that faith is a gift that God will give us if we ask him for it.

"Lazarus Come Out!"

I was watching a video on YouTube the other day by a preacher called RW Glenn. He was talking about a thing called ‘irresistible grace’. I had never heard the term before but when he started explaining what it meant it made me start to giggle. I was laughing like a little kid because it was the first time someone had described what had happened to me when I became a Christian.

When people talk about their conversion they often point to a specific sermon, or bible passage, song or even words on a plastic carrier bag (that’s another story!) For me I can remember very little of what was said, sung and sold.

What I do know was that I was an atheist at a Billy Graham rally! I had been lured to Kirkcaldy ice rink in an elaborate Christian ‘honeypot’ by my then girlfriend. I am aware that I watched an old american guy on a giant TV screen who talked about sin and God and hell. I had heard all that before. This time it was different. It was like being in a movie where suddenly it goes silent. It is silent but you can still see everyone else moving their lips but no sound is coming out. It felt to me as if I was inside a bubble. Into that bubble came a voice saying one word....

JASON.

My name. The voice just said my name in a calm, gentle way, like someone trying to wake me from sleep. Calm but with purpose. It is totally weird but it was like I knew the voice, had heard it all my life in the background ‘noise’ of the world, had sensed it whispering to me in answer to my searching questions.

This was my moment of irresistible grace. I knew this voice was the voice of the one true God. What else could I do? I could not resist. I woke up, got out of my chair and was born again.

Oh, the title, ‘Lazarus come out!’? Some people, half joking, half serious, suggest that Jesus had to call Lazarus by name because his grace is so irresistible that if he hadn't, ALL the dead people would have come out!