Hello and welcome...!

Matt: Hello and welcome to episode number one of Church for People Who Don't Like Church hosted by me, Matt Oldham.

Anthea: and me, Anthea Rattan. We're both on the leadership team of River Church Marlowe, which is a loving Christian community who believe in loving God, loving others and bringing hope and nothing else.

Matt: great and our podcast is called Church for People Who Don't Write Church because church is tricky. I really love our church but for me it's not been a smooth journey and we acknowledge that for lots of people for lots of different reasons church is really difficult.

Anthea: we know that many people find church really impenetrable. They find it a complete mystery, sometimes a bit boring even, or have been hurt by it in the past. And anyone who does go to church knows sometimes it can be a bit annoying.

Matt: Yep, so we wanted to create a podcast that sort of can be church or at least an alternative safe space to talk and explore topics of faith and we won't duck any of those annoying bits and happy to call those out. I personally don't have a brilliant or great knowledge of theology or even the Bible so I'm hoping to learn on the way and luckily for me, luckily for you, Anthea does, she's very wise. and is very patient. there you go. I'm not going lie, you are very wise.

Anthea: Well, thank you very much. That's right. hopefully this... Thank you. I received that. And hopefully this podcast will be for people like us who do actually love church, but also for people who don't. And if you felt curious from the outside or maybe a bit excluded from the inside, we just wanted to say you are very welcome here.

Matt: Fantastic. So today, and I guess by way of introduction to us as your hosts, we're going to talk about our, I guess, personal church journeys, how we got here and the twists and turns on the way. And I think we've probably both got here from different routes. But before we explore that, Anthea, what don't you like about church this week?

Anthea: Well, it's a big one. Bad coffee.

Matt: Yeah, bad coffee. So we are really diving into the big ones.

Anthea: We're deep and theological here. Bagged coffee. Yeah, you turn up, it's Sunday morning, you know, you've rushed out of bed, got the family ready, done whatever you do, rushed in the door and you think, I really need a cup of coffee now and ⁓ it isn't good. Sometimes, actually, our church, the coffee is great because it's filter coffee and it's made fresh and it's fair trade and there are decaffeinated options and it's fabulous because I have had a say in it over the years.

Matt: No.

Anthea: but sometimes church coffee can be ghastly.

Matt: Well I come from a different tradition, I'll talk about my journey later, but I come from the Tea Earn School of Church hot beverages and I think the good thing about Tea Earn or the tricky thing about Tea Earn Tea is that it's either really thin and weedy if you're early on in the year or it is thick enough to stand up a spoon if you're at the bottom of the year. So maybe that's a northern thing but good Tea Earn Tea is pretty tough going as well.

Anthea: ⁓ Mm. Mm. Mm.

Matt: over. So what are we going to do about it, Anthea? Is this going to be something we need to create new standards of church coffee?

Anthea: I think so, perhaps, yeah, yeah, a bill through Parliament, I think. Definitely, yeah.

Matt: I think so and I think maybe on another day we need to bring up the topic of biscuits. I think that's probably a bigger topic. We need to bring up biscuits because I think I've got something to say about biscuits.

Anthea: I think there's a lot to be said about biscuits and access to biscuits, yeah. ⁓

Matt: Good, well at least that set the tone of the seriousness of the deep theological questions we're going to challenge. But just as a quickie, I made some bold, stupid statement about this podcast being a church. Do you think podcasts can be church or churches can be podcasts?

Anthea: Yeah. If you'd asked me that pre-COVID, I would have probably said no, because the whole concept of online community was completely alien to me. Now I would say yes, possibly. ⁓ Yes and no. Do we need to be with actual people in person in order to be in community?

Matt: Yeah, we haven't. We haven't really moved the model on for 2,000 years of sort of sitting on uncomfortable chairs and listening to normally a bloke talk for a while. So I think maybe we should challenge the model and explore different things. I'd probably say that it can be a part of church but not replace it. Maybe there's a different channel, different things for different people at different times.

Anthea: Hmm Mm. Mm. Mm. I think so.

Matt: So I think we should be embracing digital channels. I mean, and there are other good podcasts around that discuss this. quite, you know, I love a podcast. I love listening to a podcast whilst walking my dog Elvis. So maybe either as an accompaniment to church or as a way back to church or a way into church. Yeah, but definitely it's a good event. Hopefully we'll explore that.

Anthea: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's part of that sort of smorgasbord of spiritual things that we do, people do, and I think a good podcast is definitely part of that.

Matt: Hopefully we will be a good podcast. Time will tell. So, Anthea, tell me about your church journey. How did you end up hosting a podcast called Church for People Who Don't Like Church?

Anthea: I hope so too. Time will tell. Yeah, gosh. Well, ⁓ I don't have an extraordinary church journey. I grew up ⁓ in a church. My mum was part of a church, my dad wasn't, but my mum was part of local Anglican church in the town I grew up in. And I went there my whole childhood mostly. ⁓ I have to say, found it excruciatingly boring. It was quite a high charge. I think I've been thinking, the thing is because people didn't really explain what was going on. So I didn't, you you didn't know that this long ⁓ Eucharistic communion prayer that we prayed every week, where the only exciting bit in the middle, in my view, was you got to kneel down at one point, rather than stand up, that all of that came.

Matt: Was it full of haths and doths and ifs and IWs?

Anthea: bits of that and standing up at the right time, sitting down at the right time, bowing before the altar, that sort of stuff. But I didn't know that any of that was kind of linked to scripture, you know, there was reasoning behind it. It was just really dull and boring. ⁓ In the 70s, we lived somewhere else and my mum got, I suppose we call, zapped by the Holy Spirit in the 70s renewal movement and her faith became really life to her and that a massive impact on me. So there were other things that we did other than go to this Anglican church. And I also wanted to find young people so I joined the local Methodist youth group and got involved also in the local Methodist church circuit which was fun and did lots of good things with the sort of Methodist Association of Youth Clubs as well as then and that was good. And then I went off to Polytechnic in Newcastle and joined a big church there which now we would describe as a conservative evangelical type church Anglican again. I think I joined it because it was really good with students and they you you could get a good lunch once a month and they looked after you really really well. Absolutely I think any good student will go for it where there's a good meal. So I used to go there I was also part of a really big Christian fellowship in the poly and that probably was more my church than the church.

Matt: ⁓ You're bribed by free food.

Anthea: met loads of young people and with faith and that was just really, really exciting. And then I'm a bit of a non-denominational person, denominationalist, is that a word?

Matt: What? Denomination. That's easy for you to say.

Anthea: I've just invented a word. Yeah, so I've not really ever thought I must become, I must be an Anglican, I must be a Methodist. I've just gone where I've kind of found a community. So when I moved to London, I joined a big Christian fellowship ⁓ and was part of that for many years. And then when I got married and moved over into Buckinghamshire, I joined the iteration of River Church as it was then and have been part of that church ever since. Yeah, church, it's always been important to be part of a base community to me. ⁓

Matt: Okay, so you've sort of always been in church, with church, around church, but you've gone from more of a traditional church setting to more of a, I guess, contemporary, whatever we are. Going back to that time when you were sort of up and down on your knees and more traditional stuff, there other bits of that sort of ceremony that you sort of miss?

Anthea: Mm. Yes and no. I would say that also there wasn't really much choice to go to church. You kind of did ⁓ sort of dragged along a little bit, felt a bit guilty if you didn't. So there's lots of stuff and baggage perhaps associated with those days. so for me, sitting in a quite traditional church service, I can find quite triggering. Equally, ⁓ what I miss from tradition that I find myself in now which is, we have to admit, very noisy. We're a very noisy tradition when we don't do silence and I love silence. The older I've got the more I like silence and solitude and contemplation and I think traditional churches perhaps embrace that more than certainly than you know our sort of churches do.

Matt: Have you ever done one of those sort of silent retreat things in a monastery somewhere? that appeal?

Anthea: I have, years ago I spent a week in silence in the Tézé community in France, which I loved. It was silent communion with others, so wasn't all on my own. You still had to negotiate doing the washing up and sharing tasks and wandering around with people who weren't in silence. it was, yeah, it was very deep. How about you?

Matt: My journey is, ⁓ gosh, mean, in some ways it is almost, I don't know, a thing that I can even describe a church journey, because I didn't think I would ever have one. Although I was brought up in a church, in a church family. I got old Methodist church, so go Methodists. But it was, my church was a big red brick.

Anthea: Mm.

Matt: Methodist Church and actually I should shout out that today my mum still goes to that church and it is really vibrant, it's busy every day, it's got things going on in the community and you're really, really good but my goodness it was not that. It was so, as you said, just excruciatingly boring and there was no choice involved, it was what you had to do and it was very austere.

Anthea: . You Yeah.

Matt: it was very much put on your Sunday best, wear Sunday hat, two hymns and a hair from the front, you know, a very sort of foreboding sermon from a bloke in a black robe and I pretty much hated it. It was just boring and not what I wanted to do and it was, I guess I was a bit awkward because none of my friends from school went to church and it was a bit embarrassing that I had to go.

Anthea: Yeah. Hmm Yeah.

Matt: and I just didn't want to be there. And I think like the big conflict that emerged was for me, Sundays, I just wanted to play rugby.

Anthea: Okay, yeah. Okay.

Matt: with my mate at the rugby club and that was on Sundays and that sort of escalated into like real bitterness and I don't know, full-scale rebellion from about the age 13, 14 which was really hurtful for my mum looking back because she was very traditional in her views and we have this massive big falling out about and I sort of demanded to go and not come back.

Anthea: Thank

Matt: didn't come back into my early 30s. Yeah, so a long time away. And I think in the time that I wasn't at church, I'd really built up a picture of what church was, which was...

Anthea: Wow, that's a long time away, yes.

Matt: place that was boring and also full of bad ideas and bad stuff and the whole of the church was a load of nonsense and I think I really fortified that view over a period of time and going through university and my 20s and what have you I was not very close to church but the best way to describe is not very close to a lifestyle and ⁓

Anthea: Hmm. Yeah. Mm. You

Matt: and it took my girlfriend, my then girlfriend, now wife, to bring me back to church and she did that by effectively tricking me. ⁓ She basically said that if I watch you play cricket on a Saturday, you can come to church on a Sunday. And so that's how I got back to church. say my...

Anthea: Okay.

Matt: husband in my age 30. Yeah and it was really difficult to go into, in the same way you sort of say it was triggering, it would be triggering to go back to a traditional church. I found it very physically uncomfortable to be in any sort of church environment for quite some time. yeah, I guess it took quite a while for me to feel comfortable.

Anthea: and Mm. and you

Matt: Years and years and years and years. But the good thing is that the church that we, that Tina taught me to, that we became very much members of, was a place that we, I was really, it was okay that I was very questioning and I was very peripheral and people were very respectful of that. people like Kristen Forster, Colin Barnes, who were more than willing for me to ask really difficult awkward questions around, well, why is it hell, are there other gods?

Anthea: Mmm.

Matt: and all this type of stuff. And I think my background was very much, don't question anything about church, you just go, you shut up and you're a good boy and then what have you. So to be in an environment that was really okay not to know the answers and to have questions ultimately meant that I became more and more comfortable.

Anthea: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Mm.

Matt: to be in church again and that was, sounds odd to say that. And again, for many years I was still pretty peripheral, stayed at the back, sort of putting my toe in and then also on Sunday mornings I was, most of the time I was on the side of a football pitch watching my son play football, which I loved and I wouldn't change. But yeah, so it's been a very, very gradual, very, very

Anthea: Right.

Matt: gradual from the outside to the periphery and now into the centre of it. ⁓

Anthea: Yeah. What's pulled you more central would you say?

Matt: So, gosh, I think the big thing that I really grappled with for a long time when I was sort of on the outside or on the edge was this idea that I guess I was misunderstanding fact and faith. And I do have a very sort of logic-based...

Anthea: Mm.

Matt: you know, brain or thought process. And it only when I was able to sort of set us, make a difference between the two things and be comfortable with the fact you don't have to know everything, it's okay. You have to sort of make this crossover from being totally fact and logic based into stepping into faith is like, okay, I don't know that, but I'm prepared to just have faith with that. Because some of the stuff we're talking about, it's impossible to know the answers. And it's only when you stop trying to figure

Anthea: Right.

Matt: everything out with logic and allow faith to come in that it's actually it's actually a massive relief and it's also that's the part where where faith takes over and I think that's probably a long rambling answer to a short question but that that was probably the trigger point of saying okay well I haven't got this figured out and it doesn't seem to matter

Anthea: Even though. Mm, mm, I like that.

Matt: Yeah, so there we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's, yeah, I think the big thing about it is this, you've talked about a traditional journey and traditional things. I think there's different places for different people. don't think there's one perfect place or one perfect church or non-church experience.

Anthea: So yeah, and here we are. Yeah. Absolutely. I love that there are so many different ways to do church and be church. Part of my role is working with other church leaders in the town and I love that. I love hearing what they do and listening to their stories and knowing that I'm securing my space but they've got different spaces. I always say there's different flavour of church for everyone and normally you can find what will fit you. So, yeah.

Matt: Yeah, and I think that can change over time. So interestingly, my mum and dad sort of go to different churches and that was because a while ago, maybe seven, eight years ago, the church that I grew up in, the church my mum is still like a warden in, was modernizing ⁓ in a very Methodist way. know, things like the worship was becoming more modern.

Anthea: Thank you.

Matt: And my dad got to a point where he I don't like that. I don't like that anymore. And he now goes, his roots were high Anglican, so he goes to a proper, know, men in dresses, swinging incense and full liturgy type stuff. And he feels, that's where he feels comfortable. That's how, you know, and he's really, it's helped him reconnect as well. So it's funny how it's different things for different people.

Anthea: Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yes. I think it things and I heard somebody say once, we've usually got more than one church in us. And yeah, we don't, it's okay to move church sometimes if you're not quite happy where you are. But I think for me, it's also about the community that you're part of. Here we've, you know, I've been part of the community for a long time and I've got lots of very deep friendships. ⁓ and relationships and I think there's something about that increasingly. Like you said, I used to think you had to believe all the right things and do all the right things and I increasingly believe that less but I think it's about being a community of people together. I think it's really exciting and we don't have to have all your ducks in a row to do that.

Matt: Yeah, no, that's true. I think we've, we as a church have experienced that recently and I think we probably should not fess up, but be quite open and clear if people who don't know are listening to this, that we've recently gone through a journey of becoming a fully affirming church. And, you know, that's not everyone's cup of tea. Some people will really not like that or approve of that.

Anthea: Mm.

Matt: Can you just, I mean maybe it's something we can explore in a different episode in more detail about how we got to that, but can you just like maybe explain what that means for you and what that would mean for people who are with us in our community?

Anthea: Again, I think it is perhaps a whole episode to talk about the process and what we did and why we did it and how we did it, but it means that we're a fully affirming inclusive church, our theology is affirming and that we just believe that everybody is welcome at all stages of church life and that absolutely includes anybody in the LGBTQ plus IA community and that someone's sexuality or gender will not make a difference to what role you can play in our church. and there aren't any sort of hidden pink ceilings that people have hit. Oh, you're really welcome here, however, you know, there's no ifs and buts, everybody's welcome here. So, you know. Well, you may find, and this is something that I think causes a lot, can cause hurt, that...

Matt: which is something to mean like pink ceiling so like some churches would say that you can't do this.

Anthea: you are in a very lovely warm welcoming church and there are many churches like that that are great but if you're somebody who thinks ⁓ I quite like to lead a thing now can I lead a small group you may suddenly find a no coming along your way because because of your your sexuality or ⁓ yeah how you're yeah absolutely because you're actively gay or transgender or something like that, it may be that you discover that there are avenues that you aren't able to go down. In the same way that some churches don't agree with the idea of women in leadership, so for women sometimes you might arrive again at a lovely wonderful and friendly church and then discover well no actually you can't talk at the front or you can't be on the eldership team because you're a woman. And you know I have respect for people, I don't agree with it, I have respect for those sort of churches. As long as they're clear in their theology and they're clear from the beginning, what I have a struggle with is a sort of sense of abate and switch where you arrive and you don't know these things and then they bite you later on and that's when I think church can become hurtful and traumatising. So yeah, I think it's really important that we're clear, we're a fully affirming church here at River Church, Marlow.

Matt: Yeah, it's amazing. for me, for someone who's been, as I say, relatively peripheral to sort of church and a bit oblivious to sort of church politics, it is amazing how many people I know sort of in and around church who have been hurt by church, which is really sad. It's sad when it's the opposite. Yeah, I mean, and for a whole host of reasons.

Anthea: It's not good. not good. Yeah.

Matt: Yeah, again, this goes back to us wanting to create a different space that people can...

Anthea: Absolutely. And where people can actually talk about it and not get shushed in any manner of ways, we're not perfect at all. And I'm sure as people who leave church, we've done stuff that may well have upset and hurt people. If I know about it, ⁓ I want to talk about it and try and learn and do things differently and apologise. And I want to hear people's stories of what's not being good about church so that we can try not to be that.

Matt: So how can we do that in this podcast? What's your vision for what we're going to be talking about, the topics, and how can we almost face into some of those challenges? And again, it's called Church for People Who Don't Write Church. I think that's of semi-joking, but it's also semi-seriously about we want to push into some of those areas that have been hurtful in the past for people. What's your vision for how we will do that?

Anthea: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I think there's all sorts of different things we can do here. We want to be a bit of an extension of our actual church, River Church Marlowe, so it may be that we talk about things that we've been talking about in person, that we talk about them here. Maybe there's a great kind of talk that has impacted us and we want to unpack that a bit. Maybe get the person who spoke on, interview them, dig deeper. some of that stuff. If we get a bit of a following, we'd love to have some questions and people just messaging in saying, hey, how about this? What about that? Talk about this. We'll try. And if we can't find a way to do that, then we can probably find a person who will want to talk about it. So we've got some amazing people that we know, haven't we, that can come on and be chatted to. Yeah.

Matt: Yeah, I think it would be great to have guests and to get different perspectives. I also think really importantly that we don't create an echo chamber, that we somehow manage to get people in who might have very different views towards us and explore that in a way that challenges us as well. So I think that would be interesting. Personally, I'd really like to speak to people who are...

Anthea: .

Matt: outside the church environment entirely and just get their views on the stuff as well. Most of my friends, for example, are outside that and it's funny because they've been through a bit of a journey with me. A lot of my friends when I first started going to church were like, what, you're going to church? Are you mad? You.

Anthea: Yeah. Yes, most of mine. in you

Matt: But they've come to, think hopefully come to respect that and certainly interested in it. And they're always keen to ask me questions about church, but I'm also quite keen to ask questions of them about their perspectives and what are their blockers and barriers and challenges as well. So I think that might be quite interesting too. Might be challenging for me.

Anthea: Absolutely. Definitely, yeah. Lots to explore, yeah.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, look, ultimately, hopefully we find something, we create something that's fun and interesting to listen to, something that people like to listen to when they're walking their dogs or on a journey. yeah, looking forward to it. I'm excited about the journey. Fantastic. So I think that's probably we should wrap up our intro episode number one.

Anthea: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, me too. Me too. So... Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Well, of like, if you're listening, please hit like and follow and you can find us on all the normal platforms, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we're not influencers. We're not trying to do that. We're just real people chatting church.

Matt: We needed to get good at that, didn't we?

Anthea: Yeah, okay, we'll work on these. We welcome feedback. Okay. Andrew?

Matt: Fantastic. Anthea, it's been a pleasure. Look forward to doing this and see you all soon.

Anthea: See you soon. Thank you. Bye Matt.