The Flat, 18.41.
The preacher stands at the pulpit with a smile as bright as the sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows behind him. He does not look the type, dressed in a blue hoodie and an oversized black baseball cap with the word “King” emblazoned in white capitals upon its front, but there is no mistaking the fervour of his faith when he speaks. He sees me, a newcomer, take a seat toward the back of the church and introduces himself immediately. He makes a point of singling me out for a special welcome in the introductory prayers. Half of the worship is in song form. They’re easy enough, but I recognise none of them. There is a testimony from one of the congregation, a passionate sermon on the theme of Pentecost, the partial revelation of a prophecy and one last unfamiliar worship song. As the service draws to a close, the preacher offers us the chance to come up for prayer – the laying on of hands. I feel it may be targeted at me and I briefly consider staying behind. It isn’t shyness that changes my mind – I am not the child I used to be – but a sense that this isn’t the place. As I leave, the preacher races to the door to bid me farewell. He must have moved fast; I could have sworn he had his back to the congregation when I got up to leave.
He has done all the right things to make me feel at home. But he cannot contend with the empty chairs and empty tables. Ruefully, I concede defeat, and cross another option off the list. I am seeking my generation, church by church, and struggling to find them.
I am thirty-one years old, Catholic, and looking for a spiritual community around my age in Somerset – and not having much luck. I am in the wilderness. The search for a church continues.
Since moving here a couple of years ago, I have flirted with the idea of having a church of my own. I left a friendly community behind when I left my last school, though by the nature of it being a school-based religious community, I was rather hoping that striking out somewhere new might give me the chance to meet others my own age in a setting removed from work. As ever, it seems, I have been swimming against the current of my generation. While the millennial salmon run crowds the concrete streams of London, I have ventured downstream for a change of scenery – so it should have come as no surprise that all the young folks I might have hoped to meet are long gone. On my head be it. However, I had hoped that the church might provide.
Sadly, this is not the case. I have tried quite a few churches around Taunton now, and everywhere I go it is the same story. A handful of young families – children under ten – and a slightly larger gathering of pensioners, but no middle line. In many cases, more than half of the congregation consists of immigrant families, who seem to be keeping our churches in business with their comparatively strong belief. The demographic that sits somewhere between twenty and forty, however, is nowhere to be found. They aren’t in the Catholic Church. They aren’t in the Anglican Church, and they aren’t even among the evangelicals. Where are they?
The simple answer, I suppose, is that they aren’t in Taunton. My friends in London and Edinburgh had larger and younger communities in their churches, this much is true, but those are the capital cities of their respective countries, so I feel they may be anomalies. The struggle I face here in Taunton is, perhaps, merely symptomatic of a far greater spiritual decline across the country, and my generation – with whom I have always been at odds – seem to have been leading the exodus all along.
I should preface this with a home truth or two. I am, by all accounts, a pretty poor Christian. I sin, I don’t go to church on Sundays and I don’t lead a Christ-centred life. I draw more strength from my prayers to the Virgin Mary than I do to those I make to Jesus, since I associate her so closely with the wellspring of light that is El Rocío. I am no evangelist, having a fierce aversion to the belief that there is only one truth, and I certainly don’t hold by the idea that salvation is a concept reserved for God’s chosen. In that sense, I am just as guilty of picking and choosing with the scriptures as the next man. However, in spite of these contradictions – and contrary to so many my age – I choose to believe. I have my doubts, of course, but I choose to believe precisely because I doubt. That is why it is called faith.
I wish I had others my age I could bounce these ideas off, but they are proving hard to find. While I worked at my previous school, I was living inside a bubble – but out here, in the real world, the faithful are on the retreat. A recent survey conducted by the Pew Reseach Center found that the UK now ranks among the top seven countries globally where no religion holds sway over the others, with the number of people identifying as Christian down from 71% in 2001 to 46% in 2026. In the past, most of us simply ticked the “Church of England” box on such surveys because we’d been baptised, whether we were practising Christians or not. These days – quite reasonably, I might add – there’s a lot more people questioning why they have to identify as something which has no meaning to them whatsoever.
The trouble is, for hundreds of years, going to church on a Sunday has never been about deepening your faith for the average Joe. There have always been more sceptics than true believers, I am sure, and for every prayer sent to the heavens over the last two thousand years, there must have been at least two or three sideways glances. What the church did provide – what it still does provide – is community. It takes a village to raise a family, as the saying goes, and at its best, the spiritual community generated quite naturally by a gathering of the faithful must have been a family like no other.
Which is why, every time I enter a new church, it breaks my heart a little to see all those empty chairs, and the front rows occupied only by the elderly, as though the gift of faith comes included with one’s pension and bus pass at the age of sixty-five.
I must confess myself a hypocrite at this junction. Spiritual growth has nothing to do with age, and there is much I could learn from my elders. But my heart longs for a community of kindred spirits, and my career in education only makes that longing for contemporaries all the keener. I spend six days out of seven and seven months out of twelve working with people less than half and more than twice my age. In much the same way that babies forge instant connections with others of the same age whom they perceive to be equals, it would be nice to meet some people of my own age for a change.
Where have they gone? Why have we traded away something that was once so central to our world? Everywhere I look in the news, it is all of woe. Frustration and rage against the situation in Israel and Palestine and the role of religion at its heart. Mental health concerns on the rise. Young people (like myself) exhausted with modern dating and struggling to find partners, despite there being more options than ever before. A generation obsessed with the way that it looks. A generation obsessed with itself.
I imagine I would have more luck finding people my own age if I joined a gym, since that seems to be the altar at which the millennials worship. But I cannot, will not set foot in one of those places. I have never been much of a sportsman (understatement of the millennium), but while I recognise their value in keeping an increasingly industrial community healthy, I fear for their impact on our children. Unchecked, they can twist a person’s self-image beyond recognition – and, sometimes, they can distrort the very person themselves. The idea that we might have traded a free community based around love, faith and spiritual growth for a subscription-based hall of mirrors unsettles me deeply.
Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with a healthy fitness routine – you cannot look after others unless you look after yourself, after all. But by throwing out God, the Church and the community that went with all of it, we have left ourselves with nothing but our own autonomy – and that is not all it is cracked up to be. We are sociable animals by design. To deprive us of that is, in the words of John Wyndham, “to maim us, to outrage [our] nature”.
I am speaking to the void. There is nobody here who can temper my spiritual ennui. And that is precisely the point I am getting at. But I will keep searching. I must. She may be out there, it is true, but she is proving hard to find, so before I find her, I should like to find a community with whom to share my faith.
The current is fierce. The tide is coming in and the dry land around my feet is receding, I know. But I remain hopeful. Hope, as ever, is my polestar. I will find you someday, I swear it. BB x
The Book of Barnabas 