Reflections and Stories | Page 18 | Student Christian Movement

Are you ready to find your life?

27 Apr 2015

Vocation: what does that word mean to you? I have...

Staying Silent: Why Christians Hide Support for Same Sex Relationships (Part Two)

15 Apr 2015

My name is Joey. I’m a gay Christian. I need to say that more often.

Five years ago, I went home from university for the weekend to tell my Mum that I’m gay. I’d spent my first year as a student embracing Warwick Chaplaincy life, where I was welcomed with tea and cake and made great...

Staying Silent: Why Christians Hide Support for Same Sex Relationships (Part One)

13 Apr 2015

When I was 19 I became a Christian. I was welcomed into a conservative evangelical church in which I was loved and supported. But I was also exposed to some beliefs and attitudes which took me years to shake off and recover from.

Let me set a scene: a teenager in a church youth group asks...

A Journey to Faith

26 Mar 2015

This is a record of my experience as a convert from atheist to Christian in my early twenties. I grew up in a household where my father was an anti-theist, the idea of stepping foot inside a church made him deeply uncomfortable and so, as a family, we rarely did. Christianity was a dirty word in...

International Women's Day: Alberta Williams King

3 Mar 2015

Sunday 8th March is International Women’s Day; this is a day of celebration and recognition of the achievements of women across the world. This year, the official UN theme is ‘Make It Happen’. All too often women’s achievements are sidelined and ignored, and International Women’s Day attempts to...

Incarnational Student Work

12 Feb 2015

I love it when someone suggests a long word for something you’ve been thinking about but didn’t have a way of describing. This week’s word is ‘incarnational’, which basically means living it out, rather than telling people what to do.

I think this is an important word for a movement like...

Doubt and Uncertainty

23 Jan 2015

At the recent ‘Godly Mayhem’ conference organised by the Progressive Christianity Network and SCM, one of the student participants raised the question of whether students are too young to cope with doubt, and whether embracing doubt and uncertainty is something we can only do when we are older...

Chaplaincy and Student Work - Spot the Difference!

22 Jan 2015

I often find myself having circular conversations with church leaders about the differences between chaplaincy and student work.

Sometimes it is hard to spot the difference, but when the student work doesn’t happen it is all too obvious.

We once phoned a chaplain to ask them to...

Faith and doubt: The whole truth and nothing but the truth?

27 Oct 2014

If you made a list of Christian clichés, near the top of it would be something akin to the following: ‘Being a Christian is not easy, there are some tough times.’ In corporate speak, it’s called managing expectations. We do it all the time, and as Christians we may similarly try to change...

Searching for Truth in a sea of doubt

7 Oct 2014

Q: Have you ever experienced doubt in your faith?

There was probably a time when I was younger, when I was certain of what I thought and confident I was right. I guess I thought that was faith. Going to university changed things. University is a place that fosters this...