Though this concerns a public event, it is a more personal piece than I’ve previously published. On Sunday 29 June, I (alongside my partner, Andrew) was confirmed in the Church of England. The Confirmation service was conducted by the Bishop of Buckingham, Dave Bull, at the 15th-century parish church of Saint Edmund in Maids Moreton, near Buckingham. I realise that not all of my readers share my beliefs, but I hope this personal account offers something of wider interest – about place, community, the distances we travel, and the persistence of faith in some of us.
Regular readers will gather that I am a Christian – albeit a heterodox one, given my undying adherence to the vision of William Blake and my positioning myself as a Christian anarchist. Blake had many unflattering things to say about the Church of England in his day, and while I have my own questions about the contemporary Church, I have arrived at Confirmation fully aware of the tensions and contradictions.
The important factor for both Andrew and me has been our attendance at, and growing involvement with, our local village church – All Saints in Wing. Before we moved from East London to this small Buckinghamshire village, a few miles from Leighton Buzzard, both of us would have avowed ourselves Christian, yet neither of us attended church (save the occasional Easter service). That state of affairs – inward belief without formal outward expression – had persisted in my case for many years.
In a 1993 interview with Plays International, just after the production of my play Fat Souls (once described as “the best Christian play since Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Devil to Pay”), I told Simon Reade: “I think I believe in Jesus, but I don’t believe anything the Church says about Jesus.” This might be called hedging your bets twofold. I certainly did “believe in” Jesus at the time – but to say so openly in a new writing culture deeply committed to historical materialism may have been a career killer. I should perhaps have been hung for a sheep: even the faintest whiff of Christian affiliation was enough to kill my career within a decade in any case. I was also keen to distance myself from the institutional Church. I had read enough Blake, and seen enough of the Church, to know that whatever I believed about Jesus and the Gospel, it was not mainstream. That same theatre culture was virulently anti-clerical, and I suppose I hoped to earn a few anti-establishment brownie points. It’s not a statement I’m particularly proud of. It smacks of cowardice – though I acknowledged Christ at least.
My playwriting has generally held a Christian vision at its heart – to the extent that I was awarded a PhD by Public Works in 2021 for Writing visionary drama: an anarcho-Christian approach to the contemporary British play through four theatre texts by James Martin Charlton: The World & his Wife, Coming Up, ecstasy + GRACE, Coward. By my works, etc.
For many years I worked in the ever-darkening halls of academia – another world, like theatre, where Marxist materialism is the dominant currency. I was fortunate to be involved with the staff Inter Faith Network and to contribute to some Film Inter Faith podcasts. But academia, for all its spiritual origins, has become a spiritual wasteland. Now I’m out – and returning to freelance life, I’ve made a conscious decision to place myself within a Christian community and to be, quite simply, publicly Christian.
Our relocation to Wing has helped enormously. When we arrived, we noted the presence of a historic village church – All Saints – whose origins date back to at least the Anglo-Saxon period (and which may even occupy a former pagan site). An enormous and rather grand edifice for such a small village, I first explored it as an architectural relic, indulging in the agreeable pastime of churchcrawling.
After a few months, we decided to make more of an effort to integrate into village life and began attending the occasional service. The congregation was welcoming, and soon occasion became habit. All Saints is part of the Cottesloe benefice and, early last year, both the team Rector and the vicar left for new posts. Their departure made space for fresh leadership – and the arrival of a new team Rector, Rev Dom Wright, who has been particularly adept at not just welcoming but involving new members. He organised two Lenten study groups, one of which (on the Council of Nicaea) I attended – I wrote previously about how this helped me explore the idea of the Trinity.
Somewhere along the line, without making a deliberate decision, Andrew and I had become members of the congregation.
We had taken a decision not to receive communion before we were confirmed. I had assumed this was a formal rule – and while it turns out to be a little fuzzier than I thought, we chose to observe it nonetheless. When we met with Revd Dom to discuss confirmation, one point that emerged clearly was this: no one can be baptised twice. The Holy Spirit is the one doing the work in baptism, and to repeat the act would be, in effect, to call the Spirit down again – an impudent move. This, of course, was at the heart of the disagreement between the Catholic churches and the Anabaptists (with whom, intriguingly, the recently elected Pope is building bridges).
I had some evidence of my baptism: a few baptism cards from relatives, an empty box which once contained a baptismal cup, and a vague recollection of being taken into our local church – St Andrew’s in Romford – to look at the parish register. I couldn’t find my baptism certificate, so I contacted the church to request a copy. Fortunately, the register for 1967 had not yet been archived, and the vicar was extremely helpful. I was christened on 26 March 1967. There’s a fascinating aspect to this: that an essentially spiritual event – the invocation of the Holy Spirit – is recorded in a parish ledger, then stored in a local archive, and may eventually end up digitised on a genealogy site. Births, deaths, and marriages are corporeal, legal moments. But baptism marks a mystery: either something supernatural occurs, or it’s a carefully sustained cultural fiction. Either way, it stands outside the materialist view of history.
One such archive provided an unexpected encouragement to pursue confirmation. Gerrard Winstanley, the non-conformist leader of the Diggers during the Interregnum, is recorded as having served as churchwarden of the Church of England parish in Cobham, Surrey, in 1667–68. He was also elected Chief Constable of Elmbridge in 1671. Both roles, especially that of churchwarden, would have involved active participation in Anglican life – including, very likely, receiving communion. If a degree of conformity was good enough for Gerrard Winstanley in his later years, it’s good enough for me.
I hadn’t realised that, in the Church of England, a Confirmation must be performed by a bishop. The Bishop of Buckingham, Dave Bull, was to be our officiant, and he asked not only for the date of my christening but also for a short text describing my spiritual journey. This is what I provided:
God has always been a part of my life. I was christened into the Church of England before my first birthday. My father, a Salvationist, shared his faith and values with me before his early death when I was nine. Although I did not attend church as a child, I responded fervently to Hollywood films based on Biblical stories. When I became a writer myself, my work was naturally infused with Christian mythology and meaning. Though my life may at times have resembled that of the prodigal son, I have never stopped believing that Jesus is God. I have had many causes to pray to Him, and to thank Him for answered prayer. Since moving to Buckinghamshire, I have been attending our local church regularly and becoming part of its community. I believe this is the right time to commit myself formally and fully to the Church of England, so that my faith may thrive, and I may be in communion with fellow Christians.
If this statement were to have a soundtrack, it would be Dylan singing:
I’ve escaped death so many times, I know I’m only living
By the saving grace that’s over me
Maids Moreton is a village on the outskirts of Buckingham, a very different setting to the one at which I was christened, on the outskirts of the Waterloo Estate in Romford. St Edmund’s Church, a lovely 15th-century edifice, was filled with light on that sunny afternoon – a fitting setting for what turned out to be an invigorating experience. I had been feeling under the weather in the morning, but my energies rallied during the service. I felt myself growing stronger, as I read the Gospel lesson (Matthew 16:13-19). It felt an enormous privilege to read the Gospel aloud in a church.
Though I’d heard the communion liturgy many times over the past couple of years, it was as if my ears opened to it afresh. I felt the words of absolution deeply – the forgiveness of sins, proclaimed without equivocation.
Blake, too, is at his most exultant on that theme. In The Everlasting Gospel, he writes:
It was when Jesus said to Me
Thy Sins are all forgiven thee
The Christian trumpets loud proclaim
Thro all the World in Jesus name
Mutual forgiveness of each Vice
And oped the Gates of Paradise
It felt like, to quote Van the Man, a Brand New Day.
The benefice’s confirmations, including Andrew’s and mine, had been announced in its churches a couple of proceeding Sundays. A number of regulars from All Saints, Wing, had travelled to join the service – something I found deeply moving. The sense of being accepted into a community is powerful, especially in an age as atomised as ours. The Bishop’s sermon was thoughtful and personal. In it, he spoke of his own journey from atheism to belief in his early twenties. We had an inspiring chat with him after the ceremony. A very personable man, and keen to listen to the thoughts and experiences of his flock.
Outside the Church community, it can be difficult to talk about faith. People often look at you as if you’re either trying to sell them something – or slightly barmy. For all its faults and problematics, the Church of England still acts as a kind of spiritual meeting house. If nothing else, it is a place where one can make a public profession of faith.
There’s a looseness to the CofE today that may disappoint those who long for stricter liturgy or firmer doctrinal lines. But for me, the point of church is not the outward forms. It’s what is promised in Matthew 18:20:
For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
I felt some spirit moving over the occasion of making that public commitment. It felt a fitting thing, to be asked baldly, in public, “Are you ready with your own mouth and from your own heart to affirm your faith in Jesus Christ?” – and to have the space to answer boldly, “I am.”
That, then, was my public profession – recorded henceforth in the parish register for 29 June, 2025.