If God really was as angry as those violent stories suggested, I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of his punishment, or on the wrong side of a church “marching out to war.” I never wanted to feel like the people drowning in the flood waters as Noah sailed past. It was confusing. Was God the person standing with the lamb, the children, and the flowers, or was he an angry warrior destroying people?
I brushed these thoughts away from my mind, as they were too much for me to figure out at that tender age. My simple childhood faith was one rooted in God’s love and kindness, so I tried to focus on the stories that emphasized those qualities. Besides, I had no reason to believe I’d ever be “out of the club.” After all, I was part of God’s army, not someone his people were fighting against. I was “inside the ark” and always would be—not someone left outside to drown. At least, that’s what I imagined back then.
Another thing that stood out at church was that God was always described as male. Jesus was male too, of course, and our senior pastor and elders were all men. God was called Father, not Mother. It gradually dawned on me that girls and women were seriously underrepresented.
When anyone preached about marriage, St. Paul’s teaching was quoted: “The husband is head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.” Boys and men were in charge at church, and men took the leading roles in the exciting Bible stories, whereas women were almost always supporting characters. I wasn’t used to challenging “what the Bible clearly said” as a child, but something about it didn’t sit well with me. I guess I felt shortchanged for being female, and sad that maybe I couldn’t be part of the action.
Back then, in the mid-1980s, most UK churches weren’t ready to give women the freedom to lead. Singing or teaching kids’ church was allowed, but being a senior pastor or priest-in-charge was not. It was a stained-glass ceiling, a layer of promotion through which women could not pass.
The Church of England wouldn’t see its first female priests ordained until 1994, when I was fifteen, despite the campaign for this change spanning back to the time of the suffragettes at the turn of the century. The first female bishop wasn’t consecrated until just a couple of years ago, in 2015, when I was thirty-six.
At school, I tried to express my faith passionately, especially as I had dreams of becoming a missionary like my grandparents. I told other children in my class about God, hoping they might get converted. At the age of four, I had a very serious chat with a female classmate about the fact she was going to hell unless she accepted Jesus and became a Christian. All of this happened while playing in the sandbox, an unlikely setting for such severe theology. Several of my friends came to church with me a few times—possibly because of my fire-and-brimstone preaching in the sandbox, or perhaps because the elderly women in our congregation handed out jelly babies and fruit gums to us kids after the meeting.
I was well-meaning at heart. Even in those early years, God had become a genuine presence in my life. He was a constant companion and friend, and I wanted to share that, in my simple childhood way, with everyone I knew so they could experience it too.
When I reached the age of eleven, our family moved from the Pentecostal denomination to a small Anglican church in our village. Our goal was to help revive it, as its numbers were shrinking and many smaller parish churches like this were at risk of closure.
The Church of England congregation was far more moderate in its theology than our previous church, but the longer we were there, the more it started to reflect our charismatic evangelical values. My mother and I started playing guitars and keyboards on Sundays, rather than the traditional pipe organ, and enlisted a drummer and saxophonist when we could find volunteer musicians. My parents hosted small meetings at our home one evening a week, where people studied the Bible, sang songs, prayed for the sick to be healed, spoke in tongues, and prophesied over one another. We also organized trips to conferences so the people in our new church could hear well-known evangelical and Pentecostal speakers.
Alongside all this, I continued to go to local youth events linked to my previous church too. So, despite moving to a more moderate denomination, little changed for me. I retained the beliefs that had been woven into me during my formative years and, rather than growing out of them, I held on to them with even more passion.
As most British kids do, I started high school at the age of eleven, and it was a shock to my system. My village elementary school with only forty pupils seemed tiny now as I entered a huge building containing a thousand students in the nearby city of Canterbury. It was a girls’ school with an associated boys’ school a mile down the road. Single-sex education seemed great at first, but it would bring me some unique challenges as the years went by.
Once I acclimated to the size and scale of the new environment, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The high school had an entire wing dedicated to music: several private rooms with their own pianos, plus a drum kit and a cupboard full of acoustic guitars. Every lunch break I’d try and get one of these rehearsal rooms, where I would make up piano compositions or learn new guitar chords.
Sometimes my classmates and I would go there and sing. We’d take our lunch boxes with us and spend an hour making up songs and harmonies as we ate and talked. More often, though, I’d head over to one of the music rooms alone. With the security of a locked door, I found a privacy for my singing and playing that I’d never experienced before. I began writing very personal songs—mostly about faith and spirituality. Before long, I’d filled several notebooks with compositions.
My mum overhead me playing them at home in my bedroom and encouraged me to share them at church sometime. The idea terrified me—standing up there in front of so many people—but after months of her encouragement, I agreed to give it a go. I vividly remember that teenage debut. My mum was leading worship, and I was playing guitar. I’d agreed to play one of my songs during the service, and I became increasingly racked with nerves as the evening progressed.
With my eyes clamped shut so no one could see how nervous I was, I stood in front of the fifty or so people in the congregation and sang into the microphone. To my amazement, when I finished and opened my eyes, people looked visibly moved and tearful. Several of them were quietly praying. Somehow, my simple song had helped them connect with God.
What could be more rewarding than that? I pondered, on an emotional high as I packed my guitar into its case at the end of the church service. That first experience made me want to write more songs that would help people to worship. That day, and that song, set the course of my career.
My first experience singing in church, and the positive welcome it had received, had been formative. As the months went by, I wrote and sang more songs, and my shyness slowly went away. I was growing up, discovering my place in the world, finding my voice. But, simultaneously, all that growing up and self-discovery was revealing other aspects of who I was becoming—and not all of them were easy.
As my classmates began nervously giggling about which boy they “fancied,” I was experiencing something totally different. I kept noticing girls. And I was increasingly embarrassed each time it happened. By this time, I’d found out what the word “homosexuality” meant (the older kids at school liked to try and educate us about anything and everything), and I’d made the connection between the Bible stories of my childhood, the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah, and my attraction to girls.
All these feelings had come totally out of left field for me. It baffled me; I knew I wasn’t choosing them. The conversations I’d overheard among Christians about gay people being sinful all centered around it being a willful choice, but I knew what I was experiencing was involuntary. Even if I didn’t want those thoughts and feelings, they kept happening regardless. It was as normal and natural for me as my friends giggling and getting butterflies over their