A Theologian in the Liminal Grace
On the strange grace of being told no by every institution that should have said yes. I was supposed to be a priest. I quit. I have, in the years since, been asked to leave four different churches. Not the same year, not the same denomination, not the same reason, but the cumulative message clear enough. Some prayers take a long time to declare what they were always going to mean. The prayer that has shaped my life I prayed in my early twenties. I was at boarding school, away from family, away from anyone I knew well enough to lie to. I told God I was giving him my entire life. I told him I would be the best priest he ever had. I meant every word of it. He took the prayer. He answered it. He has not, however, given me back the life I described in it. I am writing this from a café in Soho: the apron on the hook behind me, a rejection email from Cardiff's pioneer role still open on my phone, a doctorate in a tube somewhere in the flat, and a quiet job offer waiting in North Yorkshire. Before Cardiff, another diocese. Before that, a bible school I will not name, because they were kind in the way they said no. Before that, before that, before that. The strangest rejections come back with the strangest kindness: we are too small for you , they say, you deserve somewhere bigger . Always the somewhere-else. Never the somewhere-here. This is not the priesthood I planned. It is, I think, the answer to the prayer. I have started writing my own theology. It seems it was always the assignment. I want to be careful with the word. I am not a practical theologian. Practical theology is a fine academic discipline, and I have published in its journals with gratitude. But what I do is one step sideways. I am a liminal theologian, a theological entrepreneur, the phrase I use on the Life Seeks Understanding Patreon. I work the thresholds. The apron is the method, not the metaphor. I closed the laptop on the Cardiff rejection. I tied on my apron. I walked to Sacred Ground. Birmingham, in the dark The PhD years did not look from inside the way they look on the website. Four years in a department where I was, much of the time, the only one writing on popular music, and the only one writing on it from a faith stance that took it seriously as theology. I was told, more than once, by senior figures, that what I was doing was not quite the discipline. I failed my first viva. My supervisor, the one who had walked me to the door of the examination, disappeared afterwards. Not 'unavailable'. Gone. I raised this with the department at the time, in the manner one is supposed to raise these things. They responded in the way institutions tend to respond when they have something to cover for: they extended my scholarship, assigned me a new supervisor, and let the paperwork carry the apology. They never said the words. They never acknowledged what had happened, or that the responsibility had not been mine. I went back to the work. I revised. I rewrote the chapter that had not gone through. I passed. There is a particular kind of conviction available to a person who has survived an institution that did not, in the end, manage to stop him. Even when it would not, particularly, have chosen him. By the end of Birmingham I had a doctorate. I also had the clear sense that the people the academy had decided not to take seriously were precisely the people the Gospel was meant for: the post-rock listeners, the Sunday-morning absentees, the friend who would not go back to the church that betrayed her. The academy was not going to fix that. The academy was, in places, going to make it worse. The East London church that asked me to fix it, and then asked me to disappear I will keep the church anonymous, but the pattern is recognisable. An East London congregation had restricted funds tied up in a way the trustees could not unlock. They asked me, on the strength of the doctorate and some administrative experience, to help work the problem. I did. The money moved. The relevant parties were satisfied. A few months later I was asked, with care and practised ecclesial vagueness, not to stay. I was also asked to delete my correspondence: to remove from my own email the record of what I had done. The work would remain. My name would not. Others, I would learn later, took credit for the parts they could. I will not pretend that did not wound me. It did. The wound was specific: I had been useful, then I had not been required, then I had been quietly erased. The Gospel, on paper, knows what to do with this. The Church, in practice, often does not. That is not the whole story of London. Sacred Ground was also London. The Diocese of Southwark was also London. The friends were also London. But this part needs naming. There are people writing theological books in this country whose pastoral lives have been quietly broken by congregations who confused service with disposability. I went back to the espresso machine. The espresso machine kept me. What happened behind the bar There is a story I have not told often, and which belongs here. Some months after that church, after I had taken up the barista work in earnest and begun writing publicly about it, a message arrived in my inbox. A stranger. They told me they had been planning to end their life. They had lost the job their training had prepared them for, and with it the sense that their life had a shape. Reading about a PhD theologian who had learned to pull a shot, on purpose, had moved something in them. They had not, they said, gone through with it. I will not pretend I knew what to do with that message. I still do not, fully. But I want to be honest about what it did to my theology. Until then I had thought of the apron as a survival strategy with a theological gloss. After that message, I could not think of it that way. Whatever the academy and the bible school had been measuring when they declined to take me, they had been measuring the wrong thing. A coffee pulled with attention had reached a person no lectureship would have reached. The barista work was not the consolation prize. It was the work. I did not become a barista to save anyone. But I cannot pretend it has not, on at least one count, saved. Church on the Corner: the place that did not ask me to disappear Not every London congregation is the East London one. I have to say that, for honesty's sake and for the sake of any reader who needs to hear it. Church on the Corner became home in a way I had not let myself hope for. They knew the viva story. They knew about the bible school no. They knew about the church that had asked me to delete my emails. They did not flinch. They did not ask me to leave anything at the door. They asked, instead, what I was working on, and whether the coffee shop they were planning needed a hand. I have been quietly held there. I have served them, and they have served me, and the line between the two has been less anxious than the line had been elsewhere. They are not perfect. They are simply, genuinely, the closest thing to a spiritual home I have known in this country, and I do not say that lightly. I want to be clear about what comes next. I am not leaving Church on the Corner because they have asked me to. They have not. I am leaving because somewhere further north has asked me to come, the work there needs someone, and the home a church gives you is meant to make you brave enough to leave for the next thing. Eight hours, and the Easter sermon I had not planned to preach The job offer from the Methodist circuit in North arrived on a Thursday. My brother died eight hours later. I want to be precise about that timing because the timing is the theology. There is, somewhere on a server, an email opening a door, and a message from my family closing one, and an interval of eight hours between them that I have not been able to describe and have given up trying to explain. The night was so quiet I could hear the upstairs flat's pipes. I did not pray. I could not. I had run out of words for God. Not because I had stopped believing. Because language, the thing I built as a theologian, the thing I make a living from, had refused to come. It had been ten years since I last stood in a pulpit. The fall-out with Hong Kong churches that trained me had happened a long time ago. By their choice and by mine. I had moved on, or tried to. The pulpit, I had assumed, was closed for good. On Easter Sunday this year, a Hong Kong church in London asked me if I would preach. I said yes before I could talk myself out of it. The room was full of teenagers who had every reason not to be interested in another sermon. I told them all of it. I told them about boarding school in England, the first time I knelt down and prayed God a serious prayer. I told them about the theology degree in Australia I had not wanted to do. I told them about an academic prize in America I had not expected to win. I told them about a Thursday night in London when the door opened and the door closed, and I knelt somewhere between grief and gratitude and could not say a single word. I did not preach with hymns. I preached with London Grammar, and Billie Eilish, and Linkin Park. Sometimes the songs that hold our broken prayers are not the ones we sing in church. They are the ones we play alone at two in the morning, when we do not know how to speak to God but cannot stop reaching for something. Music became my language when theology ran out of words. I told them about the blind man in John 9. He does not ask Jesus to heal him. Jesus comes anyway. Maybe that, in the end, is what prayer actually is. Not eloquence. Not certainty. Sometimes just staying in the room. When I stopped speaking, the young people did not leave. They gathered round. They asked about faith. They asked about loss. They asked whether their lives meant anything. They do. Every one of them. I do not yet know what last Easter Sunday means. I know I walked in carrying ten years of distance, and I walked out carrying something I did not yet have a name for. The place that said come The Methodist Church in Britain now has around 170,000 active members , down from nearly twice that within living memory. The Church's own Statistics for Mission show membership has fallen by roughly a third in the last decade . Linda Woodhead, the sociologist of religion at Lancaster University, put it bluntly in Christian Century : 'It's totally dying out. On current trends, [the Methodists] will disappear, very soon.' John Hayward, the mathematician behind the Church Growth Modelling project, puts the projected extinction date for British Methodism at 2036 , with a more generous fit pushing the date to 2045. Methodism does not have parishes; it has circuits. One presbyter, increasingly, serves a long line of chapels strung across rural Yorkshire. Chapels whose congregations are overwhelmingly retired. Chapels where the children's work has largely closed. Chapels where the elderly congregations built the buildings and have, over the decades, buried most of their friends in the chapel yard. This is the church that has asked me to come. I am going. I am bringing the apron. I am bringing the PhD. I am bringing my brother. I am bringing the message from the stranger I will never meet. I am bringing the Easter sermon I did not yet have a name for. To anyone reading who is still waiting The institution that should have said yes may never say it. The theology you trained for does not live there. It lives in you. It can be incarnated wherever a kettle boils and someone walks in. The apron is the vestment. Onwards. Slowly. With company. Editor’s Note: The following essay was originally published on Life Seeks Understanding Patreon space on May 24, 2026. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author, Dr. Chee Man Tang (Michael). All rights remain with the original author. 🔗 Read the original article here
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