For most of my life, when a form asked for my religion, I wrote atheist and never thought twice about it. I admired the public sceptics. I trusted evidence, process, and things that could be verified. I had a good life, a marriage, six sons, work I was competent at. Faith was a thing other people had, and I assumed the people who had it had stopped asking questions somewhere along the way.
I was not in crisis when this started. That matters, because the only conversion story I knew was the rock bottom kind. A man loses everything, hits the floor, and finds God in the wreckage. My closest Christian friend, Paul, came to faith exactly that way, and for years his story was the shape I assumed all faith stories took. I was nowhere near rock bottom. So, I assumed faith was not for me, in the same way a lifeboat is not for a man standing on dry land.
What happened was slower and stranger. It started, of all places, on a sofa with a projector warming up and a gin in my hand, watching a television drama about the life of Jesus that I had put on out of curiosity. I expected to find it interesting the way history is interesting. Instead, I found myself listening to the teaching, week after week, and noticing that it was not what I had assumed it would be. It was coherent. It was morally serious. It cut through to the exact thing each person most needed to hear. I kept watching, and then I did what I do with anything that interests me. I went to the source material.
I read. I asked questions. I treated the whole thing the way I treat evidence in my working life, which is to say I followed it to see where it went, rather than deciding in advance where I was willing to let it go. That distinction turned out to be the whole story. There is a version of scepticism that follows the argument wherever it leads, and there is a version that has already decided, before it begins, where it will and will not go. I had practised the second kind for decades without knowing it. I only recognised it once I stopped.
The conclusion, when it arrived, did not arrive peacefully. What arrived first was argument, an internal collision between everything I had just worked out and everything I had spent thirty-six years believing. How can this be true? Why did I not know this sooner? How have I been so completely wrong for so long? I sat with those questions in my own living room and worked through them as carefully as I knew how, and the conclusion the evidence pointed towards was not the comfortable one. It was not the one I had spent my adult life assuming was off the table. But it was the only one that held.
I had always thought of faith as a kind of managed uncertainty, a choice to act as though a thing is true when you cannot be sure. What I found was nothing like that. What arrived was conviction. There was no maybe left in it, no room for the agnostic shrug, no comfortable middle ground of the sort I had occupied for years. Once you have seen a thing as true, you cannot unsee it, any more than you can decide to find two and two uncertain again once you have understood that they make four. That, I discovered, is what faith is. Not the suspension of doubt. The end of it.
In February 2026 my wife Chrissie and I were baptised together, by full immersion, at St Philip the Deacon in Upper Stratton, with our sons around us. If you had described that morning to me two years earlier, I would not have known what to do with it.
I wrote a book about all of this, and I wrote it for one reader in particular: the person I used to be. The convinced sceptic. The one who respects the philosophy of Jesus but cannot sign up for the metaphysics, who has good, reasonable, evidence-based questions and assumes those questions rule faith out. They do not. Mine came with me, all of them, and they were answered more thoroughly on this side of the line than they ever were on the other. If that sounds unlikely to you, good. It sounded unlikely to me too. That is exactly why I wrote it down.