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In the Church of England, today is designated as Bible Sunday, which seems as good a day as any to admit something. After decades of reading, studying, preaching from, and writing about the Bible, I still find parts of it absolutely strange.

There are passages I do not understand, stories I wish were not there, and verses that appear to sit awkwardly beside other verses. There are also things I once felt completely certain about that I now see very differently, and other questions where years of study have left me with considerably more possibilities than I had when I started. You might think that would make me less interested in the Bible, but the opposite has happened.

The more complicated it has become, the more fascinated I have become by it. Not because I enjoy making faith unnecessarily difficult, but because, somewhere along the way, I realised I had approached the Bible with an assumption I had never really questioned.

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A fresh-faced 20-something Paul viewed the Bible as a book of answers.

For a long time, that seemed entirely reasonable. If I had a question about God, suffering, morality, prayer or how life was supposed to work, surely Scripture would provide me with an answer. All I needed to do was to find the right passage, understand it properly and eventually everything would fit together. It worked for a while as well; it's surprising what you can turn into an answer by cherry-picking the odd verse or two.

That all ended when I met Job.

Obviously, I had encountered Job before. I knew the basic story: a good man loses almost everything, suffers terribly, argues with his friends and eventually encounters God. Somewhere in my mind I had filed it under biblical explanations for suffering. Then I started reading it more carefully and discovered that it does almost the exact opposite.

Job’s friends are the people with the answers. They understand how the world works, so they sit down and explain to Job the logic of what he is going through. Which, to be fair, is kind of unhelpful when you are suffering. They lay it out for him. God is just; therefore, good people are rewarded, and bad people suffer. Job is suffering; therefore, Job must have done something to deserve it. The reasoning is nice, logical and religious.

There is just one large problem with it: it is wrong.

Job refuses to accept their explanation. He knows his own life, and their theology does not fit his experience. So he protests, complains and demands answers from God. At one point, he even curses the day he was born. I remember being surprised that the Bible allowed him to speak like that. More surprising, though, is what happens at the end.

God finally speaks, but he never gives Job the explanation I expected. There is no neat disclosure of why everything happened or a heavenly diagram showing how suffering works. Instead, God takes Job on what feels like a bewildering whirlwind tour of creation.

Where were you when the foundations of the earth were laid? Have you travelled to the sources of the sea? Can you control the stars? Do you understand the wild creatures, the weather, the enormous and untameable world around you?

Job had asked a perfectly reasonable question: So why did God feel the need to shut him down in this way?

It was only later I realised that God’s answer was actually deeply fascinating.

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The friends imagined that reality could be reduced to a simple formula. Behave well, and good things happen. Behave badly, and suffering follows. They had constructed a world they could understand and then tried to force Job’s experience inside it.

Instead, God blows apart that thinking.

Reality is so much bigger than their formula. Creation is wilder, stranger and more complicated than any of them understand. And then comes perhaps the most uncomfortable part of all: God rebukes Job’s friends for what they have said about him. The people who spent chapter after chapter defending God are told that they have spoken wrongly.

I think that was the point that I realised that faith was not about reaching the point where I had an explanation for everything. Perhaps sometimes the faithful response was actually admitting that I didn’t.

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Once I noticed that in Job, I began seeing it elsewhere. There are prayers in the Psalms that ask God why he seems absent, and Psalm 88 goes further than most. I wrote about it recently because, unlike many lament psalms, it never turns towards reassurance. It simply ends in darkness.

That matters to me. Somebody decided that this unresolved prayer belonged among the prayers of God’s people. It reminds me that faith does not always need to manufacture an answer simply because silence makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes “I don’t understand” can still be a prayer.

Sometimes the Bible does something even stranger. In Proverbs 26, two consecutive verses give apparently opposite advice.

Do not answer a fool according to his folly.

Then immediately:

Answer a fool according to his folly.

I love that, not because contradiction is somehow clever, but because life really is like that. Sometimes responding to foolishness simply drags us into it, but sometimes remaining silent allows it to go unchallenged. Wisdom is not memorising the correct rule and applying it mechanically. Real wisdom is learning to recognise which moment you are standing in.

Perhaps I once wanted the Bible to be an instruction manual. Increasingly, I think it is trying to form people who can discern, and those are not the same thing.

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I went looking for answers and instead found better questions. I wanted certainty and discovered mystery. I wanted rules that would tell me precisely what to do, and I found stories that forced me to think more carefully about people, circumstances, and consequences. What surprises me now is how far that way of thinking has extended beyond the way I read the Bible.

I am less troubled than I once was by saying “I don’t know” and much more suspicious of explanations that fit everything together like a jigsaw. I am always more willing to listen when somebody’s experience does not fit the assumptions I have carried with me, without jumping in to correct them. As a result, I have changed my mind about a lot of things and continue to do so.

There was once a time when I probably regarded changing my mind as evidence that I had not understood something properly the first time. These days, I increasingly see it as evidence that I am still learning, still growing and still being formed.

That feels far more liberating.

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None of this means I think the Bible can mean whatever we want it to mean. I think it is the opposite; part of taking Scripture seriously is allowing it to resist us.

Sometimes it confirms what I already believe. Sometimes it really challenges me, and occasionally it annoyingly refuses to answer the question I brought to it at all, and that may be one reason I keep reading.

A book that simply repeated everything I already believed would eventually become a bit boring, and the Bible has never given me that problem. Even now I can read a passage I have known for decades and suddenly notice something I had somehow missed. A question appears where I thought there was an answer. A character I had dismissed becomes interesting. A verse I had confidently quoted turns out to sit within a conversation much more complicated than I remembered.

Perhaps that is what I reflect on the most when Bible Sunday comes around.

We have inherited this extraordinary library of stories, arguments, prayers, poems, laws, letters, protests, hopes and unresolved questions through which generations of people have wrestled with God and with what it means to be human.

I began reading it because I wanted answers. I keep reading because it has given me something deeper. It has changed the way I think, and continues to do so. It has made me more comfortable with uncertainty, more curious about what I may have missed and more willing to admit that the world, other people and God himself may be considerably bigger than the explanations I have constructed for them.

The Bible is strange, difficult and sometimes uncomfortable. After all these years, I still cannot imagine being finished with it.

Thank you for being part of Sacred & Secular. Whether you have been reading for a long time or have only recently joined us, I am genuinely grateful that you choose to spend a little of your time here.

I publish a new reflection every day. Sunday reflections are open to everyone, while the daily weekday reflections are available to paid subscribers, whose support makes it possible for me to keep writing and developing Sacred & Secular.

If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you. Your support means a great deal to me. And if you are reading on the free tier and would like to receive the daily reflections as well, you are very welcome to join us.

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Like most teenage daughters, my sixteen-year-old loves shopping.

I do not.

Taking her to the mall, therefore, feels like an endless procession through shops selling clothes that, to my apparently ageing eyes, all look the same. We wander into one shop, inspect various tops, leave without buying anything, repeat the process several times, and eventually circle back to the first shop where she buys the thing she could have bought an hour earlier. I am sure there is some sophisticated shopping logic involved that I simply haven’t discovered yet.

It doesn’t stop when we get home. Every week, or so it seems, another parcel arrives containing clothes or something else she has ordered online, usually after travelling from a distant part of the world. She has recently discovered the joys of a little financial independence, and there is something lovely about watching her decide how to spend her own money.

Yet one part of it bothers me.

Some companies selling extremely inexpensive clothing have uncomfortable questions hanging over the way their goods are produced, particularly the wages and conditions of the people making them. I have raised this with my daughter more than once, and her response is normally a shrug followed by an argument that is actually difficult to dismiss: “I couldn’t afford it otherwise.” I guess she has a point, although there are only so many tops a girl should need.

That conversation came back to me this week when I read about the UK Ethical Fashion Guide 2026, which assesses 99 companies covering 336 clothing brands on workers’ rights and environmental practices. The wider research behind the guide produced one particularly troubling finding: 87% of companies assessed could not demonstrate that a living wage was being paid to any worker in their supply chain.

It made me wonder what Christianity actually has to say about all of this.

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I have never liked the apostle Paul.

There, I have said it. I realise that may be an unusual admission from someone who spent years as a parish priest and preached from Paul’s letters more times than I could possibly remember. I admire him enormously, and Christianity would be almost impossible to imagine without him, but I have never found him very easy to warm to.

At times, he can sound argumentative, stubborn and, if I am honest, a bit arrogant. He tells the Corinthians to imitate him, calls the Galatians foolish, publicly confronts Peter when he believes Peter is wrong, and occasionally writes with the sort of confidence that makes me wonder what it would have been like to disagree with him face to face. If I were choosing people from the New Testament to spend an evening with in the pub, Paul would not be one of them.

More recently, though, I have softened a little and begun to wonder whether I have been too harsh.

A large part of the problem is that we know Paul mainly through his letters, and letters are not necessarily a very good way of reconstructing someone’s entire personality. Many of Paul’s letters survive precisely because something needed sorting out. Churches were arguing, people were questioning his authority, Christians were behaving badly, or somebody was teaching something Paul believed threatened the gospel itself. His bluntness usually appears in the middle of a crisis rather than simply because he enjoys telling people off.

We hear him when he is arguing because arguments produce letters. In some ways, what survives is a rather distorted highlights reel: we do not hear the evenings around a table, the conversations while travelling, the jokes that were never written down or the ordinary friendships that didn’t require anyone to produce several pages of wordy, closely reasoned theology.

Every now and then, though, one of Paul’s letters seems to allow another part of him to slip through.

Galatians 4 is one of those moments.

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Did Mary ever have to explain something to Jesus?

I know it is a strange question, but I have been thinking about what it must have been like to raise the child Christians believe was God. Did Jesus ask questions because he genuinely did not know the answer? Did Joseph have to show him how to use tools properly? Was there a moment when something that had puzzled him suddenly made sense, in the way things gradually make sense to every other child?

The Gospels do not tell us. In fact, they tell us remarkably little about most of Jesus’ childhood. We get his birth, a few early episodes, one extraordinary visit to Jerusalem when he was twelve, and then nothing until he appears as an adult. Perhaps a gap like that has allowed us to create our own version of those missing years.

I can easily imagine Jesus growing physically. Like any human child, he grew taller and stronger, and moved from childhood into adulthood. But I am not sure I have always allowed myself to imagine him growing in other ways as well.

Luke is the only one who does.

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In 2009, I arrived at theological college to begin training for the priesthood, clutching a timetable that was, frankly, rather intimidating. It was packed with lectures on subjects I had barely heard of, let alone considered studying. I had always taken the Bible seriously, but studying theology at degree level was something altogether different, and to be honest I wasn’t really sure what I had let myself in for.

Then there were the books.

Every vicar’s study I had ever visited seemed to contain enormous bookcases filled with impressive-looking scholarly volumes. I had always found them impressive, but if I’m being completely truthful, they also made me uncomfortable. I came from a working-class background in the countryside, and somewhere along the way I had absorbed the idea that people like me, the non-academic types, didn’t really belong in this sort of world.

Yet here I was, surrounded by books, preparing to become one of those vicars myself.

I felt very out of place.

My first year was difficult. There were lectures, assignments, essays and reading lists that seemed to grow every time I looked at them. I wanted to understand Scripture properly, but I approached college with a straightforward expectation. I had questions, and I assumed the books would provide answers.

What I hadn’t appreciated was that one question could apparently generate an entire shelf of books written by people who didn’t agree with one another.

When reading became an obstacle

During that first year, I discovered that I was profoundly dyslexic.

Suddenly, some of the difficulties I’d experienced throughout my education began to make sense. It wasn’t simply that I found academic writing intimidating or that I wasn’t working hard enough. The way my brain processed written information made studying much harder.

I could sit with a commentary, carefully work my way through several pages, and then discover that I had completely forgotten what I’d just read. Sometimes only minutes had passed. I would then have to go back, read the same section again and try desperately to hold on to the argument long enough to make use of it.

This became particularly frustrating when I needed to write an essay. I might spend hours searching for something relevant, only to find that I couldn’t remember where I’d read it, who had written it or even what the argument had actually been.

The college was supportive and introduced various forms of assistance, which I appreciated enormously. But I still needed to read, research and make sense of information that seemed determined to disappear from my memory almost as quickly as it arrived.

Then somebody introduced me to the wonderful world of Bible software.

A library that worked differently

The software was called Logos, and I began using it around 2011.

For anyone unfamiliar with it, Logos Bible Software is essentially a digital library and research platform designed around biblical study. Rather than having to locate individual books on shelves, you can bring together Bibles, commentaries, theological dictionaries, historical resources and other reference materials within one application.

That certainly saved me from having to find room for all those books, but it wasn’t what made the greatest difference to me.

I could change the appearance of the text.

I could adjust the font size, alter the background colours and make the page easier for my brain to process. I could highlight passages, save notes, search for information and copy references directly into the essays I was writing.

These might sound like small conveniences, particularly now that we’re accustomed to doing almost everything on computers. But for me, they were enormously important. Instead of spending so much energy managing the mechanics of reading and remembering, I could concentrate on what the books were saying.

I didn’t suddenly become an effortless student. I still had dyslexia, and some of the difficulties remained. But I’d found a way of working that suited me rather better than sitting behind a growing pile of books, hoping that enough information would eventually stick for me to pass.

And something unexpected happened.

I started enjoying the research.

When the questions became more interesting

When I first began studying theology, I tended to approach research as a way of finding the correct answer.

If I were writing an essay about a biblical passage, I would want to know what it meant. I’d consult a commentary, find an interpretation that seemed reasonable, and hope it would help me produce something suitably academic.

I suspect I was treating scholarly books as rather elaborate answer books. The trouble is that theological scholarship rarely works like that.

One commentator would argue convincingly for a particular interpretation, only for another equally knowledgeable scholar to disagree. Sometimes they differed over historical circumstances, the meaning of a Hebrew or Greek word, or how a story fitted into the wider biblical narrative.

Initially, I found this deeply frustrating. Seriously, surely somebody knew the answer?!

But as I spent more time reading, I began to realise that the arguments themselves were often more interesting than the conclusions. One scholar might notice something another had overlooked. A historical detail could change how a familiar passage was understood, while a word that seemed straightforward in English might carry several possible meanings.

Sometimes I would finish my research more confident about a passage. At other times, I would find myself less certain than when I began. Strangely, I gradually stopped seeing that as a failure.

I was discovering that studying Scripture wasn’t simply about collecting answers from people who knew more than I did. It was about engaging with what they were saying, weighing their arguments and eventually developing my own understanding.

And sometimes, of course, changing my own mind.

From college essays to Sunday sermons

When I eventually moved into parish ministry, Logos came with me.

My research was no longer primarily concerned with essays. I was preparing sermons, leading Bible studies and answering questions from parishioners. I discovered that having access to scholarship was one thing, but knowing what to do with it was something else entirely.

Most people attending church on a Sunday morning weren’t particularly interested in the finer details of a scholarly disagreement, unless that disagreement helped them understand the passage being read. They didn’t need me to demonstrate how many books I’d consulted and have an impressive bookshelf. They needed me to make sense of Scripture in language they could understand.

Sometimes I might spend hours investigating a passage only to use a tiny part of what I’d discovered in the sermon itself. I began to appreciate that good research often sits beneath what we say, rather than appearing in everything we say.

I also continued using Logos because of my dyslexia. Being able to organise my sermon material and display it in a font, colour and size that I found comfortable made a real difference when delivering sermons.

What had helped me through theological college had become part of my everyday ministry.

A different kind of ministry

A few years ago, my work as a parish priest came to an end because of ill health.

It was a difficult transition, and certainly not the future I’d imagined when I first arrived at theological college. Yet one of the things that remained was my love of Scripture.

Today, much of my work involves researching and writing about the Bible, both on Medium and through my own publication, Sacred & Secular, here on Substack.

I still particularly enjoy those moments when something I’ve read dozens of times suddenly makes me stop and look again. Perhaps it’s a seemingly insignificant detail in one of the Gospels, something archaeology has uncovered about the world Jesus inhabited, or an ancient Jewish custom that changes the way I understand a familiar encounter.

Often, the starting point is just a question that won’t leave me alone, and after all these years, I still find myself returning to Logos to explore it.

The software has developed considerably since my college days, and my library has grown alongside it. Recently, I also became a Logos partner, and the team generously provided me with an expanded Researcher Platinum library and a complimentary year of Logos Max.

I’m genuinely grateful for that support, particularly because Logos was part of my work long before anyone suggested the possibility of a partnership.

It has also given me an enormous, wonderful collection of new books to explore. Somewhere, I suspect the student version of me is looking at that prospect with a mixture of excitement and absolute horror.

What fifteen years have taught me

I began studying theology believing that sufficiently knowledgeable people would have worked everything out, and my task was to read what they had written and remember enough of it to pass my assignments.

Now I’m much more interested in understanding the questions.

That doesn’t mean I no longer reach conclusions or that every interpretation is equally convincing. Some arguments are much more persuasive than others, and I still want to know what a passage means. But I’ve learned to distinguish between what the Bible actually says and what I’ve always assumed it means.

We all bring something of ourselves to Scripture. Our childhood experiences, church traditions, theological preferences and personal histories affect what we notice and how we interpret what we read. Research doesn’t remove those influences, but it can help us recognise them.

I still have dyslexia, still forget things I’ve read and still occasionally stare at a paragraph wondering what on earth its author is trying to say. But I’ve learned that none of those things disqualifies me from asking serious questions about Scripture.

In fact, I sometimes wonder whether those early struggles have shaped the way I write today. I know what it feels like to encounter theology that seems almost deliberately inaccessible, and I do not want the people reading my work to experience that same sense of exclusion.

Perhaps the greatest thing theological study has taught me is that learning doesn’t always lead us towards certainty.

Sometimes it gives us the confidence to keep asking questions.

The resources behind my writing

I’ve used Logos Bible Software since 2011, throughout my theological education, parish ministry and now my work as a writer. It remains one of my main tools for researching Scripture, comparing scholarly interpretations and exploring biblical history.

I’m grateful to Logos for supporting my writing with additional research resources and a complimentary year of Logos Max.

If you’re interested in exploring Logos yourself, you can find out more through my Logos partner link. If you buy through that link, I’ll receive a commission. All views are my own.

I use artificial intelligence regularly, and I am continually surprised by what it can do. I can ask it about an obscure Bible passage, explore different interpretations, argue with its answer, change my mind halfway through and then return to the conversation several hours later as though nothing happened.

Thankfully, it is remarkably patient.

More importantly, it asks almost nothing from me. I decide when the conversation begins, what we talk about and when I have had enough. If I disagree, it does not take offence, and if I disappear without saying goodbye, there is no awkwardness the next time I return, even if it does feel kind of rude to me.

Perhaps that is why I have started wondering what it reveals about some of my other relationships.

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There is a moment in Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus gives an answer that might be so familiar to us we might miss everything else that is said.

Jesus begins with beautiful words that would have been deeply familiar to his Jewish listeners. The command to love God with all your heart and soul comes from the Shema, a prayer at the very heart of Jewish religious life. He then brings alongside it another commandment, this time from Leviticus, about loving your neighbour as yourself. Neither of these teachings are new, but Jesus places them together and declares that everything else in the Law and the Prophets hangs upon them.

I have always been struck by this summary of the most essential part of what Jesus explains to be a follower of his.

But then, Jesus asks the Pharisees a question of his own. They give him a perfectly reasonable answer, one that Matthew himself has already given his readers. But Jesus challenges them, and suddenly it all gets awkward. Nobody knows what to say.

Matthew ends the encounter with an unusual observation:

“No one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.” — Matthew 22:46

What had Jesus asked them?

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There is a psalm in the Bible that I have never heard read in church, and I suspect it would make some a bit uncomfortable. Someone cries out to God, describes terrible suffering and asks why God has abandoned him. But unlike many biblical laments, that’s it. Things never improve. There is no answer, no change of heart and no sudden confidence that everything will be all right.

The final word is darkness, and then the psalm ends.

It is Psalm 88, and what interests me is that somebody thought this prayer was worth preserving. Not just as one person’s private anguish, but among the songs and prayers used by God’s people in worship. Nobody added a reassuring final verse, they just left the darkness where it was.

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I love the way Paul finishes his letter to the Romans. After sixteen chapters containing some of the most influential theological writing in Christian history, he gets personal and starts mentioning people by name. Friends, fellow workers and people who had supported him along the way. Some are familiar to us, while others appear briefly before disappearing from the biblical record altogether.

The first person he mentions is a woman called Phoebe, and I suspect most of us have read past her name without giving it much thought. Paul describes her as a minister of the church in Cenchreae and asks the Christians in Rome to welcome her and provide whatever assistance she needs.

Many scholars believe Phoebe was the person who carried Paul’s letter to Rome. If they are correct, then one of the most influential documents in Christian history reached its first readers because of a woman whose life is otherwise almost entirely unknown to us.

But there is something else about Paul’s introduction that interests me even more. He tells the Romans that Phoebe has been a great help to many people, including himself.

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The woman from Cenchreae

Paul introduces Phoebe in Romans 16:1–2:

“I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae. I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been the benefactor of many people, including me.”

We actually know very little about her. Cenchreae was a busy port near Corinth, connecting the city with trade routes across the eastern Mediterranean. Phoebe belonged to the Christian community there, and Paul’s description suggests she was a woman of considerable standing.

He calls her a diakonos, a Greek word that can mean servant, minister or deacon. It is the same word Paul uses elsewhere to describe people involved in significant Christian ministry, including himself. Scholars disagree about whether Phoebe held a recognised office within the church, but Paul’s language suggests she was somebody with genuine responsibility.

Then comes another word, prostatis, which is sometimes translated as "helper" but often means considerably more than that.

In the ancient world, wealthy or influential people often supported others through what we would now call patronage. They might provide money, accommodation, protection or access to people who could help. Phoebe appears to have been somebody who used her position and resources to support others.

And Paul openly acknowledges that he was among those who benefited.

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The letter that needed delivering

It is difficult to exaggerate the influence of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Its discussions of faith, grace, sin and salvation have shaped Christian thinking for centuries. Augustine wrestled with its words, Martin Luther found them central to his understanding of the gospel, and countless Christians have studied Romans as they try to make sense of their relationship with God.

But before any of that happened, somebody had to get the letter from Corinth to Rome.

Communication was complicated in the ancient world. There was no postal service available to ordinary people in the way we understand one today. Letters generally travelled with trusted individuals who happened to be making a journey or had been specifically asked to deliver them.

And delivering a letter could involve considerably more than handing over a document.

In a world where written communication was often read aloud, the person carrying a letter might also explain its contents, answer questions and provide information about the person who had written it.

We cannot know whether Phoebe read Romans aloud or helped explain its arguments, but we know that ancient letter carriers sometimes performed these responsibilities. If Phoebe did so, she may have been among the first people to explain Paul’s extraordinary letter to its original readers.

Imagine that for a moment.

Paul has written an extraordinarily detailed letter to Christians he has never met. Some of its arguments are complicated, and his words might raise questions. He cannot simply telephone them afterwards to clear up any misunderstandings. Yet he appears willing to entrust the letter to Phoebe.

The responsibility was significant.

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The people Paul needed

I think we sometimes imagine the great figures of the Bible as rather self-contained individuals. Moses leads Israel, David rules his kingdom, and Paul travels around the Mediterranean establishing churches, writing letters and somehow holding the emerging Christian movement together.

Of course, when we read their stories carefully, we discover something different.

Paul depended upon other people constantly. His letters are filled with references to friends, travelling companions, hosts and fellow workers. People who provided accommodation, supported his ministry, carried messages and helped the Christian communities remain connected.

Without them, much of what Paul accomplished would probably have been impossible.

I sometimes wonder whether our familiarity with the Bible makes us forget just how human these relationships were. Paul experienced disagreements, disappointments and loneliness. He needed somewhere to stay, something to eat, and people willing to help him when things became difficult, and he wasn’t embarrassed to acknowledge it.

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When helping is easier than being helped

During my time in parish ministry, I became very familiar with the expectation that the vicar should somehow know what to do. People came looking for advice, reassurance, practical assistance or simply somebody who would listen. It was a privilege, and I genuinely enjoyed helping.

But ministry also taught me how dependent I was upon other people.

No parish priest can do everything, although I suspect many have tried. Churches depend upon an amazing collection of people who contribute their time, abilities and resources. Some take on considerable responsibility, while others do things that might seem small until the day they stop happening.

I quickly came to appreciate that leading a church did not mean personally doing everything within it. Sometimes it meant recognising that somebody else was far better equipped for a particular responsibility and trusting them to get on with it. That sounds obvious when I write it down, but I am not sure it always felt that way at the time.

There is something about being the person that others depend upon that can make receiving help surprisingly uncomfortable.

Most of us like being useful. We enjoy knowing that we can make a difference, and there is a certain satisfaction in being able to say that we have managed something ourselves. But needing help puts us in a different position. It means acknowledging that we cannot always cope alone, that somebody else may have abilities we lack, or that circumstances have left us needing support rather than providing it.

We might spend an entire afternoon helping somebody with a problem, yet feel awkward asking them for twenty minutes of their time when we need something. We encourage friends to talk about their difficulties, but when they ask how we are, we insist that everything is fine.

I recognise that tendency in myself, and I don’t think it has always served me particularly well.

There is an interesting connection here with something Paul writes elsewhere. In 1 Corinthians 12, he describes the Church as a body, made up of different people who need one another. He even says that the members who seem weaker are indispensable. I wonder whether his relationship with Phoebe gives us a glimpse of what that looked like in practice. Paul wasn't simply teaching Christians to depend on one another. His own ministry depended upon the generosity, abilities and faithfulness of others.

Perhaps the body of Christ was never intended to be a collection of self-sufficient individuals.

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Learning to receive

There is a temptation to turn Phoebe into an illustration of how important it is to help others. And certainly, her generosity deserves recognition.

But I wonder whether we might learn just as much from Paul.

Here was a man whose writings would influence Christianity for centuries, yet he was willing to acknowledge his dependence upon a woman from a relatively small Christian community near Corinth. Whatever authority Paul possessed as an apostle, it didn’t make him independent of the people around him.

We sometimes talk about Christian service as though everyone should be giving all the time. We celebrate generosity, sacrifice and the willingness to put other people first. Those things matter enormously, but a community cannot consist entirely of people who give while nobody is willing to receive.

Relationships work in both directions, even when the balance changes over time. The person helping today may need support tomorrow, and somebody who once depended upon us may eventually be the person we turn to when our own circumstances change.

There is nothing particularly shameful about that. In fact, I would argue that it is simply part of being human.

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Someone like Phoebe

I keep coming back to those two words at the end of Paul’s recommendation.

Including me.

He could easily have described Phoebe as a generous woman who supported the church. That would have been complimentary enough. Instead, he makes it personal.

She helped me.

Two thousand years later, we still don’t know exactly what responsibilities Phoebe held, how she came to know Paul or what happened when she arrived in Rome. But we know that Paul valued her, trusted her and was willing to acknowledge what she had done for him, and I think there is something rather liberating about that.

Perhaps we don’t always have to be the person holding everything together. There may be times when allowing somebody else to help is every bit as important as offering help ourselves.

After all, even the apostle Paul needed someone like Phoebe, and he wasn’t afraid to say so.

Recently, something rather extraordinary happened. Sacred & Secular received its bestseller badge on Substack, recognising a milestone I had been working towards for some time. You may know this already, because I posted about it to just about everybody! I was so delighted. When I started writing these reflections, I had no idea whether anybody would want to read them, let alone pay to support them. Reaching that point felt like a genuine achievement, and I am enormously grateful to everyone who has helped make it possible.

Then, almost before I had finished celebrating, I started thinking about what came next. How many subscribers should I aim for now? Could I maintain the momentum? Was I doing enough? Before long, I was putting myself under much more pressure, second-guessing my writing and deleting drafts I would probably have published happily a few weeks earlier.

It took me a few days to realise what was happening. All of a sudden, something I loved doing was becoming another thing to worry about. I had begun writing because I enjoyed exploring Scripture and sharing what I discovered. Now, I was becoming preoccupied with whether I was succeeding at it.

That experience came back to me while reading Mark’s Gospel. Jesus asks two of his disciples a question that he repeats almost word for word a few verses later to a blind beggar sitting beside the road. I had read both encounters many times without noticing how closely they were connected.

Because their answers could hardly be more different.

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I came across a story this week about a man in Lebanon whose family has been making church bells for more than 300 years.

His name is Naffah Naffah, which, to be fair, is certainly a name you are unlikely to forget. He works in the mountain village of Beit Chabab, where generations of his family have cast bells since the eighteenth century. At one time, the family operated ten foundries. Today, only one remains, and Naffah is teaching the craft to his sons, Charbel and Youssef.

What caught my attention was a detail about how he works. When a church orders a bell, Naffah wants to know about the village and how far the sound needs to travel. That helps him decide what size bell to make. Before the metal is poured or the bell has made a single sound, he is already thinking about the people who will hear it.

It is something I have never considered before, which is odd because I have spent a considerable part of my life around church bells.

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There is a woman in one of Jesus’ parables who may have been a bit more troublesome than we usually imagine. We call her the persistent widow, and I have often heard her presented as an example of patience in prayer. Keep asking, keep trusting, and eventually God will answer. It sounds encouraging, unless you have prayed for years without an answer.

But recently, while rereading Luke 18, I came across a curious detail that made me smile. The widow is so persistent that the judge worries she might give him a black eye. I mean, that is one possible sense of the original Greek, and if read that way it paints a rather different picture from the patient, long-suffering woman I had carried around in my head.

I guess we should probably meet the judge before deciding whether he deserves one.

Luke tells us that he neither fears God nor cares what people think. That is a damning description of anyone, but particularly of a judge. His responsibility is to administer justice, yet apparently he feels no obligation to God or to the people whose lives depend upon his decisions.

Then a widow appears, demanding justice against someone who has wronged her.

We are not told what happened to her, who her opponent is, or whether she has anyone willing to help. But in the worldview of the Bible, widowhood could leave a woman terribly exposed. Again and again, Israel’s laws and prophets insist that widows must be protected, precisely because they were vulnerable to exploitation.

This judge seems entirely unmoved by any of that. He refuses her request. She comes back. He refuses again, and she returns once more. I can imagine him seeing her approaching, rolling his eyes, and wishing he had taken the day off.

Eventually, he admits to himself that although he neither fears God nor respects anyone, he will do her justice because otherwise she will not leave him alone. The Greek word behind his complaint can literally refer to striking someone beneath the eye. Some scholars think Jesus is using deliberately comic language, while others understand it as the judge fearing embarrassment or simply being worn down.

We cannot know how Jesus’ listeners pictured the scene. But the prospect of a powerful, thoroughly unpleasant judge being made miserable by a woman he has tried to dismiss is difficult not to enjoy.

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Taxes have a remarkable ability to cause arguments, whatever the generation.

Perhaps that's one reason I've always enjoyed the story in Matthew 22, when Jesus' opponents try to catch him out with a question about paying taxes to Caesar. You can almost imagine their conversations beforehand, as they consider what he might say and how they can use his words against him. They arrive confident that they've thought of everything, only to discover that Jesus is better at this than they are.

I have read it many times, usually with a certain satisfaction at the way Jesus deals with his opponents. But recently I realised that, while I’ve been enjoying the answer, I’ve paid less attention to the problem behind the question. For the people who had to pay those taxes, it wasn’t just an interesting exercise in catching out a religious teacher. It was part of their lives.

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Today, I reflect on how the experiences we never planned for can become part of our family stories, and a curious detail Mark includes about the man who carried Jesus’s cross.

Being a parent can sometimes involve making some big decisions.

Now that my youngest children are teenagers, I can look back and see how some of those decisions forever shaped our family life together. Choosing when to move home, deciding which schools the children should attend, and working out how to respond to the various challenges that come with raising a family have all played their part.

Of course, plenty of things have happened that we never had any say in. Illness, accidents and unexpected events have shaped our family life just as much as the decisions Rachel and I made deliberately. Sometimes we responded well, and at other times we simply did the best we could with circumstances we would never have chosen. Sometimes, of course, we made mistakes. Looking back, I can see how those experiences have become part of our family story, influencing the way we live together and, I suspect, shaping how our children understand their own lives.

Why am I reflecting on this? Well, I have recently been reading a familiar passage in Mark’s Gospel about the crucifixion. It concerns a man called Simon, who found himself caught up in the final hours of Jesus’s life through circumstances entirely beyond his control.

But when I read it again, I discovered a detail Mark includes that I had never really given much thought to before.

Simon was a dad, and Mark tells us the names of his children.

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Two days ago, the Catholic Church marked the memorial of John Henry Newman around the world. There is something particularly interesting about the date chosen to remember him. Newman did not die on 9 October, nor was he born on that day. It was 9 October 1845 when, after more than twenty years as an Anglican clergyman, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

I find that fascinating.

Newman would eventually become a cardinal and, much later, a saint. Yet the date associated with him commemorates a moment when he crossed one of the largest religious boundaries imaginable in nineteenth-century England. For many of the people around him, this was not simply a theological adjustment. He had left the Church in which he had been ordained, preached, studied and become one of the most influential religious thinkers of his generation.

As someone ordained in the Church of England myself, I am not particularly interested in using Newman to reopen an Anglican-Catholic argument that has already been going on for quite long enough. There are plenty of people willing to do that without my assistance.

What interests me is something much more personal.

What happens when taking your faith seriously leads you to question something you have previously believed just as seriously?

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The uncomfortable side of conviction

Christians tend to admire people who stand firm.

We celebrate conviction. We tell stories about people who refused to compromise, held onto their beliefs in difficult circumstances and would not be moved simply because the world around them changed. There is something admirable about that. A faith that changes direction every time the cultural wind blows would not be much of a faith at all.

Yet I wonder whether we occasionally confuse faithfulness with immovability.

Newman had strong convictions. If anything, that was part of his problem. He had spent years trying to articulate a distinctive Anglican position, particularly through what became known as the Oxford Movement. He believed the Church of England could recover something of its ancient Catholic identity without submitting to Rome.

Then he began studying the early Church more closely.

What followed was not a sudden emotional conversion. Newman later described a long and uncomfortable process in which the arguments he had used to defend his Anglican position gradually became less convincing to him. Studying ancient controversies began raising questions he could no longer put back in their box. Even then, he resisted leaving. As late as 1841, he could still write that his duty was to remain where he was.

It took years.

That detail matters because it would be easy to tell Newman’s story as though he simply discovered Catholicism and immediately changed sides, but the truth is he wrestled for some time.

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Changing in order to remain the same

A few years later, Newman wrote one of the sentences for which he is now best remembered:

“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

Taken on its own, that sounds wonderfully modern. After all, you could put it on an inspirational poster and use it to justify almost anything. Changed your theology? Newman approves. Changed your politics? Newman approves. Bought another MacBook because this one has slightly better battery life? I guess Newman probably has nothing useful to say on the matter.

But that is not really what he meant.

The line comes from his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, in which Newman sought to explain how Christian belief could genuinely develop over centuries without simply becoming something different. Just before the famous sentence, he describes a living idea encountering new situations and new questions and says that it “changes with them in order to remain the same.”

That is much more interesting.

For Newman, genuine development did not mean throwing away yesterday’s truth in favour of today’s preference. He described authentic development as change which remains continuous with what came before, protecting and deepening it rather than simply reversing it.

Something living changes because it is alive.

A tree that looks exactly the same at fifty years old as it did when it first broke through the soil would not be a particularly impressive tree. Yet its growth does not mean it has ceased to be the same tree.

Newman wondered whether faith might work something like that.

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When conscience becomes inconvenient

There is another part of Newman’s thinking that prevents this from becoming a comfortable celebration of changing our minds whenever we feel like it.

He took conscience extremely seriously.

Today, we sometimes use follow your conscience to mean something close to do whatever feels right to you. Newman meant almost exactly the opposite. He understood conscience as something capable of confronting our preferences rather than simply approving them. He even warned that human reasoning can become very good at supporting what we already want to believe.

I recognise that tendency all too easily.

I can normally construct an excellent argument for something I already want to do. Give me enough time, and I may even be able to convince myself that buying the expensive version was an act of moral responsibility.

The much harder task is allowing something to challenge us when we do not particularly like where it is leading. That is what makes Newman’s story compelling, even if we do not agree with the conclusion he reached.

Becoming Catholic cost him.

His journey towards becoming Catholic had already cost him. He resigned his position at St Mary’s in Oxford. Important relationships became strained. Friends watched painfully as connections which had shaped Newman’s life were gradually severed. One of his contemporaries described how much Newman seemed willing to sacrifice as he moved towards the decision he eventually made.

Whatever else we think about Newman, convenience does not seem a very convincing explanation for what happened.

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Peter had a problem like this

This reminds me of a moment in Acts that feels strangely relevant.

Peter is praying when he receives the famous vision of a sheet filled with animals and hears the instruction to eat. His response is immediate: absolutely not, and understandably so.

Peter’s resistance is not based on personal fussiness or some irrational prejudice. He believes he is being faithful to the religious practices he has inherited from Scripture and followed all his life. Then comes the unsettling reply:

“What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Peter does not immediately understand what is happening. Acts tells us that he is initially puzzled by the vision. It is only as events unfold and he enters the home of the Gentile Cornelius, that he begins to realise that the question is much larger than food. His understanding of who could be included within God’s people is being stretched.

Peter has not suddenly stopped caring about faithfulness; in fact, it is the opposite. His difficulty is that faithfulness itself is forcing him to reconsider what he thought faithfulness required.

I suspect that is one of the hardest places to stand.

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The beliefs we inherit

Of course, most of us are unlikely to face Newman’s particular decision.

We will not spend years studying fourth-century theological disputes before deciding whether Canterbury or Rome has the better claim on us. Most of our mornings present rather less dramatic problems. Yet I suspect many of us know something about discovering that what we once believed no longer seems as simple as it did.

Perhaps we were given a very clear picture of God when we were young. It helped us enormously then, but life complicated it.

Perhaps suffering arrived, and some of our easy answers stopped working.

Perhaps we met someone whose life did not fit the theological category we had carefully constructed for people like them.

Perhaps we read Scripture more closely and discovered passages that refused to behave in the way we had been told they would.

Or maybe we simply got older. I certainly do not believe exactly what I believed twenty or thirty years ago. Some convictions have become stronger while others have become more nuanced. A few have disappeared altogether.

I don’t necessarily see that as evidence that my faith has weakened. In fact, sometimes the opposite has happened.

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What are we trying to remain faithful to?

What intrigues me most about Newman’s eventual conversion is the way he described it afterwards.

He did not believe that becoming Catholic had required him to discard everything he previously held sacred. He said that his belief in the Church, bishops, sacraments and Christian doctrine remained. In his words, he had “added Articles to my Creed”, while the old convictions remained.

Of course, an Anglican might tell that story rather differently.

But Newman’s own understanding matters. He believed he had changed precisely because he was trying to remain faithful to something deeper, and perhaps that leaves us with a more interesting question than whether changing our minds is good or bad. What are we actually trying to remain faithful to: our previous opinion, the people who expect us to hold it, the security of knowing exactly where we stand, or the truth, even when following it takes us somewhere we did not expect to go?

There will be times when faithfulness means standing firm, and there will be convictions worth holding when almost everyone around us tells us to let them go.

But perhaps there will also be times when faithfulness means moving. Newman’s life does not tell us that change is always good, and Peter’s story does not tell us to distrust everything we inherited. They simply leave open the possibility that sometimes the most faithful words we can say are:

I may have been wrong.

Maybe faith is not always knowing where the road eventually leads. Sometimes it is simply having enough trust to take the next step.

There is an uncomfortable moment in the Old Testament when a woman goes to the house of God to pray and ends up being accused of drunkenness by the priest.

Her name is Hannah, and her story is found in the opening chapter of 1 Samuel. She has been trying to cope with something that has caused her enormous distress, and eventually she finds herself sitting in the sanctuary, pouring out everything she has been carrying. She is so overwhelmed that her lips move, but no words come out.

The priest, Eli, watches her for a while before deciding that he knows exactly what is happening.

“How long are you going to stay drunk? Put away your wine.”

It is a dreadful thing to say to somebody who is already struggling, particularly when they have come looking for comfort. Yet what interests me about Hannah’s story is that Eli is not the first person to misunderstand her. By the time she reaches the sanctuary, she has already spent years living among people who seem to have made up their minds about what is wrong with her.

And almost everyone has got something wrong.

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I have read Luke’s description of Jesus travelling through Galilee countless times, but until recently, I was not sure I ever stopped to ask a very boring but practical question.

Who paid for lunch?

I know it sounds slightly ridiculous when put like that, but somebody must have bankrolled it all. Jesus was travelling from town to town with a sizeable group of people. The Twelve were with him, but Luke tells us they were not alone. There were women travelling with them as well, along with others whose names we never learn, and all those people needed to eat, sleep somewhere, replace worn-out clothes and somehow manage all the ordinary expenses that accompany human life.

Christian art has perhaps not helped us here. We tend to picture Jesus walking along a dusty road with twelve men following faithfully behind him, apparently surviving without food, money, laundry or any of the other irritating necessities that follow us everywhere, perhaps assuming that Jesus just provided food out of nowhere on demand.

Luke gives us a rather more realistic picture.

He tells us:

“The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene)… Joanna, the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.”

I had read that final sentence many times, but I am not sure I had really allowed myself to picture what it meant.

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There is a strange moment in the book of Lamentations that I had never really noticed before.

Lamentations comes from one of the darkest periods in Israel’s story. Jerusalem had fallen to the Babylonians, the temple had been destroyed, people had been killed, and many of the survivors had been carried away into exile. The poems seem to emerge from the devastation left behind, so this is not somebody having a particularly miserable week.

The world the writer knew really has fallen apart.

For chapter after chapter, that grief is allowed to speak. By the time we reach Lamentations 3, the writer describes himself as battered, abandoned and exhausted. His language becomes so bleak that he eventually says his endurance has gone, and so has his hope.

Then, only a few verses later, he says something completely different.

“Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.”

That little word yet stopped me. Because nothing appears to have happened between those two statements. Jerusalem has not suddenly been rebuilt. The temple is still gone. The people who have been taken away have not returned. Nobody arrives with news that the crisis is over.

His circumstances are exactly as bad as they were a few lines earlier.

What changes is what he remembers.

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