If you were to go back in time to when these writings about the SSUC Library began, you’d find that the very first “Featured Book” previewed/reviewed was a curious one, indeed. Just consider its title: How to be a Bad Christian…and a Better Human Being. Someone named Dave Tomlinson wrote this book. He authored others, including The Bad Christian’s Manifesto and Black Sheep and Prodigals. These, too, sound to be capricious, what with such titles, and they are. Your Library’s holdings include all three.
Who would write such stuff, you wonder. A singular someone, surely. Someone off-beat, eh? Uh huh.
Liverpool-born, Dave Tomlinson—who insists on people calling him Dave—is, in his own words, “a writer, a speaker, a passionate seeker after truth and wisdom, and an avid explorer of theology, spirituality, and life in general.” But sometimes he describes himself…rightly, as you’ll see…as being a round peg in a square hole. Much is made of “his common touch,” and how “quirkiness is very Dave T.”.
A while back, Premier Christianity [which describes itself as the U.K.’s “leading Christian magazine”] called him “a liberal-leaning Anglican priest, with high-church tastes (he wears vestments) and a low-church manner (he sometimes swears). He’s most at home when chatting over a pint, and…it’s his ability to speak to ordinary people…that’s getting him noticed.”
Here’s Dave’s story—read on, and you’ll see how and why he came to be “noticed”:
“I grew up in a Brethren church background,” he reported in an interview with Premier Christianity. This is the Plymouth Brethren, a nonconformist, insular, evangelical Christian sect; he describes it as “a very fundamentalist kind of Christianity”. As a teenager, he explored beyond its borders, and went on to become a leader in the then burgeoning house church movement: “The charismatic world touched me very deeply,” he confessed during that interview. His involvement grew, such that he led a team of 15 who planted and supervised more than 50 of these churches.
Still, he started questioning its restrictive doctrines: “I came to a place of feeling that I didn’t belong.” (“I got unhappy because I loved the Beatles and the Liverpool football club and girls.”) He broke with the movement: “It felt like career suicide at the time.” Out in the wider world, Dave discovered “that there were lots of people around who wanted to ask questions,” who “fancied chewing the fat over a pint of beer.” The result? The legendary Holy Joe’s (“a kind of hostel for battered Christians”). Launched in 1990 in a London pub, it attracted disillusioned Christians, church misfits, and folks who had no church background whatsoever. And notoriety.
This topsy-turvy background left Dave “zealous to demonstrate a different way,” Britain’s Church Times reported. Mind you, “what shines through,” the publication noted, “is Tomlinson’s commitment to people whom the Church has missed.” Enter the Church of England. Following enough discussions with the bishop of London, Dave, who soon enough earned a master’s degree in biblical interpretation, came to be ordained into England’s official state church. No kidding.
“Given the radical picture of Dave already painted,” The Church of England Newspaper observed, “the Church of England may seem an unlikely place for such a person to find his calling, but its broad church nature attracted him.” As he himself remarked, “The bishop of London, Richard Chartres, who ordained me in 1997, said to me, ’There will be much in the Church that will frustrate you, Dave, and you will be very critical of many things. But the church will benefit from your criticism.’”
“I wasn’t at all sure being a parish priest was what I wanted,” Dave told Reform Magazine, “but it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. And one of the big surprises was to discover how alive the whole experience of parish still is.” Under him, it’s been that at St. Luke’s, his parish church in north London from 2000 till his retirement. (A visiting cleric called it “the most inclusive church I’ve ever attended.”) Dave describes it as being “a glorious mishmash of urbanites sharing friendship and groping after God.” Being its vicar has been, he added “the best job in the world!”
In recent years, Dave, in retirement, served as chaplain at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London; tutored at the London Jesuit Centre; and established (this in his own ramshackle studio) The Holy Shed, a multimedia community platform featuring weekly ’shedcasts’ on YouTube and podcasts exploring theology, spirituality, and contemporary issues.
And then there was this: he became the “unofficial mentor” to the founder of the Sunday Assembly—the “godless church,” the “atheist church”—Sanderson Jones. Which caused quite a ruckus (“I got so much hate mail from around the world”). Still, as Reform Magazine noted, “He is not new to controversy.” In fact, Jones invited Dave to give a talk in his “church” on an Easter Sunday on why, in Dave’s words, “the Easter story still has such a powerful resonance.”
Back in 2014, during his Premier Christianity interview, he got asked, “Would you rather encourage someone towards Christ than church?” “There is an awful lot of things that could drive me away from Christianity,” Dave answered, “but the thing which always brings me back is Jesus. I find Jesus utterly captivating, not just as a historical figure, but as a reality in my life today.”
For Reform Magazine, he reaffirmed this commitment: “My life and the lives of my friends are hugely enriched by our faith in God through the person of Jesus.” He told then how Jesus’s “passion is the Kingdom of God, which is a state of being, a culture of life, hope, and liberation. The church is here to be the agency of the Kingdom of God. Insofar as the church does that, it’s really important that it survives.” (Elsewhere, he has cried out, “I want people to…find a place in this community without being handed a list of beliefs they need to sign up to.”)
For The Church of England Newspaper, Dave reckoned, “Millions of people never darken the doors of a church, yet there is great spiritual hunger and curiosity within people.” But, “if we are willing to evolve and adapt our structures, forms, and message to the needs of people today, I believe there is a great future for Christianity within our society.” He said likewise in another newspaper, the Islington Tribune: “We need to find fresh ways to connect with the spiritually hungry hordes of people I think still exist in our world.”
In a conversation it once had with Dave, spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com introduced him as…and by now you see why…“a wonderful storyteller and truth-seeker,” adding, “In many ways he is a wonderful guide to those of us seeking a renewed and renovated faith….”
The truth of this is plain to see in How to be a Bad Christian…and a Better Human Being. It points readers to “a more satisfying and purposeful life by following the way of Jesus”—this is how The Church of England Newspaper puts it. Christianity “should not be confined to the trappings of formal religion and churchgoing, or by beliefs and dogma, but instead [should be understood] as a spiritual practice, a way of life….”
The book’s written for the legion of people who are “bad Christians,” Dave has remarked, those “who never go near a church, who shrink from the idea of reciting a creed or singing hymns….” Besides, “I don’t think God cares whether or not you come to church. I think God is more interested in who we are as people.”
The critic for The Church of England Newspaper ended his review of this book by declaring it “superb”. It “made me laugh and cry in equal measures. I intend to give a copy to as many people as I can. I really believe the ripples of kindness will filter out into the wider community…and we’ll be the richer for it.”
—Ken Fredrick