Reignite

So I tried to go to church today. My local church is Newcastle Unitarian Meeting House . The trouble is it does not meet every week, it meets twice a month. The website says that there are services on the second and fourth Sunday of the month. And today is the fourth Sunday, is it not? So I trotted along there for worship at 10.30 this morning. When I got there, the door was locked, there were no cars outside, and when I looked at the notice board I saw that in fact they had met last Sunday, at 6 o' clock in the evening. I had missed church. So I decided to wander across Newcastle-under-Lyme to find the Quaker Meeting House that I hadn't been to before. It was very nice, though pretty low on the ground. So I think I've been in Stoke-on-Trent for about 6 weeks now, and I've only managed to get to church once. I was there one Sunday, then I went to Opus/Concentric in Iowa, then I came back, and now I've missed another service because they switched to the third Sunday ...

Strange old word "churchmanship" isn't it? What about "churchwomanship"? It's kind of one of those quaint Anglican things. In Unitarian circles, one is much more likely to ask about someone's "theology." I suppose this is because there is more theological diversity. But I think a humanist or a theist could still have the same "churchpersonship" - with Unitarians its probably low-church-long-sermon-hymn-sandwich churchpersonship. In some ways I'd see my instincts as an emergent churchperson to be much more important than a purely intellectual humanist-theist identity. Anyway, with the prospect of going forward for ordination I expect I might be asked about these things, so I thought I would write a little about them. I like to play with labels. I find labelling can be very empowering. Unitarians are all about reclaiming words nowadays, so here goes. I am: UNITARIAN: human nature is a location of divinity and religious truth CHRISTI...

So, about me and my recent history. I am a young British Unitarian living right now in Stoke-on-Trent. I grew up in the English Midlands, particularly Walsall . My father is an Anglican priest and I grew up in the Church of England. During my time at the University of Birmingham while studying geology and biology I became a Unitarian, though I was still involved in a few Anglican and Quaker things. I began attending New Meeting Church pretty regularly during my last year in Birmingham. After Birmingham I switched tracks in my education and decided to study theology. I attended Boston University School of Theology in the USA where I graduated after two years last June with a Master of Theological Studies degree. While in Boston I worshipped at First Church Boston . Now I'm back in the UK, looking for a job and a place to live and seriously considering becoming a Unitarian minister. I might apply in the next month. I love my faith but I know that it has to change. We need a rev...

So I thought it was about time I started a blog. I'm back in the UK, going into a new period of my life, and thought it would be cool to share some thoughts with the world. I think this will save me ranting on email lists. Here I can rant and people can only pay attention if they want to. Hmm, there is a great deal I could talk about today, but I just wanted to get a first entry in to check this was all working. So I'll write something infinitely more interesting in the next entry.