I’m Not a Very Religious Person (Which Is a Strange Thing to Say)
What I’ve learned about faith, control, and a God who refuses to stay in the box
A quiet reflection for those who have ever found faith both meaningful and hard to define.
I’m not a particularly religious person.
Which is a strange thing to say for someone who spent more than a decade as a vicar.
It usually gets a raised eyebrow. Occasionally, a polite smile. Sometimes a look of confusion, as if I’ve just contradicted myself in the opening sentence.
But the truth is, I’ve always resisted being put into some of the boxes that religion seems to demand. As though I was part of something I cared deeply about, but never quite able to be fully inside it. The neat categories. The clear lines. The subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, sense of who is in and who is out.
And yet, I have led churches while feeling slightly on the outside of them.
I understand where those instincts come from. Religion, at its best, gives language to the divine. It holds stories, practices, and rhythms that help us locate ourselves in a world that often feels uncertain. It preserves meaning across generations. There is something deeply good and valuable in that.
It is needed.
But it can also become something else.
— • —
When Faith Becomes Something to Manage
Over time, I’ve found myself less interested in maintaining the boundaries and more interested in what happens when those boundaries are gently questioned. Less concerned with defining faith and more curious about where it shows up unexpectedly.
Which, I suspect, puts me in good company.
Because one of the most striking things about Jesus is not that he opposed religion outright. He didn’t. He actually stepped into it. He taught within it and took it seriously.
But he never seemed particularly interested in protecting it.
Instead, he kept doing things that made people uncomfortable. Forgiving people without the right process. Healing without the right credentials. Speaking as though authority did not need to be borrowed from the usual places.
It wasn’t just disruptive. It was very challenging.
Not because it was obviously wrong, but because it was difficult to envisage a world outside of the religious structures of his time.
— • —
When God Doesn’t Stay in the Box
Perhaps that is where the tension begins.
Religion works best when things are clear and roles are defined. When the lines are visible. It gives us a sense of stability. A sense that we know where we stand.
But what happens when God doesn’t seem to stay within those lines?
What happens when something feels real, meaningful, even transformative… but doesn’t quite fit the categories we’ve been given?
That question lies quietly beneath many of the Gospel stories.
It’s there in the reactions, the accusations and the unease.
If what Jesus is doing is genuinely from God, then something has to change.
If it isn’t, then it needs to be stopped.
There isn’t much room for comfortable neutrality.
If this is something you recognise, you’re very welcome to read on.
The rest of this reflection moves a little deeper into that tension.
