Confessions of a New Unitarian

It is always good to have Phil Waldron leading our services at Chester as he brings great warmth and humour to what he does and his sense of the dramatic means you never know where you might be going next. Last Sunday he even sang which all of us enjoyed very much apart from Mariecarmen's dog, who has been living under the misapprehension that church is where you go to catch up on sleep. Probably if the truth be known, there are people in churches all over the country who feel the same way, and some of them are in the pulpit. Phil's service was memorable, and not just for the singing. We meet in a sports centre, and just as the service was about to begin the fire alarm went off so we had to go outside where we were met by another group of people carrying bows and arrows. For a moment I wondered if Phil's sense of the theatrical had got the better of him and we were about to become the unwilling participants in a dramatisation of the s...

As requested, here is a version of my 'Wizard of Oz' address delivered in services at Newcastle-under-Lyme, Macclesfield and Chester. Part 1: There's No Place Like Home Many years ago I wrote a play based on The Wizard of Oz and with a group of university friends I took it to the Edinburgh Fringe festival which was very exciting for everyone except the poor audiences that sat through it. It was not a play that deserves to be remembered but the process of researching that play developed an interest in the Wizard of Oz that remains strong to this day. The Wizard of Oz is really America's only successful fairy tale. It was the first feature film ever shown on American television and for many years on public holidays normal programming was suspended so the film could be enjoyed again. The only other films TV networks did that with were religious films. In writing a play about The Wizard of Oz one of the questions in my mind was why it was so successful.   So...

When Methodists receive non-alcoholic communion wine, they do not share a big cup but each receive their portion in small glasses that look like the ones commonly used in American bars to serve up hard liquor. This comparison does not fit well with Methodism's temperance tradition but is illustrated in an episode of Antiques Roadshow in which a Methodist communion set was wrongly identified by an expert as a gentleman's drinking set. I was never that comfortable when participating in a Methodist communion service for all sorts of reasons. Whilst I always considered it purely symbolic and open to multiple interpretations (such can be the value of ritual), part of me could not escape the dramatic sense of it being a form of ritualistic cannibalism no matter how hard I tried. The imagery of the death of Christ is powerful but there is a danger that in the image of the empty cross or the sharing of the body and blood of Christ in bread and wine, we legitimise violence and re...

It seems after just two entries, this blog has attracted some readers. I really appreciated those people who read the 'Strangers in a Strange Land' entry and got in touch to tell me about their experiences as Methodist-Unitarians, Catholic-Unitarians, Pagan Unitarians and so on. It is really good to hear so many parallel stories. However, by far the most read blog entry so far has been 'The Letter' which by pure coincidence I uploaded at the time of the British Methodist Conference. Somehow word got around, and suddenly I had lots of Methodist readers and a lengthy discussion took place on the UK Methodists Facebook page about whether it would have been appropriate for me to stay in the Methodist Church. For the most part, people's comments were polite and helpful and I was tempted to join in the conversation, for I had a few hopefully constructive things to say about the points raised. However, in the end I did not enter into correspondence because I thought t...

I have an interest in immigration history, fuelled to some extent by my own work on nineteenth century English immigrants in the United States and the role that religion played in their Americanization. Most people assume that the English fared well in America but being an immigrant from anywhere was always hard. John Hodgson was a farm labourer from Yorkshire, who moved to Wisconsin because he heard that land was cheap there. On Christmas Day 1856, he wrote to his relatives and friends 4,000 miles away in a spirit of utter dejection and loneliness, ending his epistle with the words, ‘P.S. You cannot tell how bad I want to see someone that I have seen before.' To some extent, John Hodgson’s suffering was a result of the harsh challenges of the Wisconsin frontier. He had never been so hot in his life, nor so cold and nothing in Yorkshire prepared him for rattlesnakes and mosquitoes. However, more significant was what he had left behind, particularly the people he missed. This inevit...

In October, 2011, I decided to stop being a Methodist. I grew up in the Methodist Church, as did my parents before me and their parents before them (although one of my grandfathers started out as an Anglican and as a child I was so Methodist that this seemed vaguely exotic). For fifteen years I worked on Methodist history, for over twenty years I was a Methodist local preacher, and I even had a stint as the director of a Methodist museum. All this made me pretty Methodist! Given all this, I am finding the process of change from Methodism to Unitarianism challenging. Of course, I am still me, and my thinking has not changed very much since I was leading worship in Methodist pulpits. Certainly the jokes haven't improved. My final Methodist service was a harvest festival in which I picked vegetables out of a box and said things like 'turnip' for church, 'squash' injustice and, most irreverently, 'peas' be with you. The last thing out of the box was a lettuce an...