I grew up with the Church, though it took the long way round to bring me all the way here. Looking back, I can trace a single thread through my whole life — a Methodist childhood in Essex, a Salvation Army hall that surprised me, years of quietly searching, a move to a town I’d barely seen, and finally, a small church with an early service and good coffee that became, in every sense that matters, home.
Sunday Mornings in Hutton
My earliest memories of church are of Sunday mornings at the Methodist Church in Hutton — standing beside my dad, my small hand tucked into his, my grandparents sometimes there too, the whole family filling a pew together. I couldn’t tell you now what the sermons were about. What I remember is the feeling of it: the steadiness, the sense that whatever else was happening in the world, on a Sunday morning we would be there, together.
My dad was a quietly faithful man, in the particular way that generation often was — not loud about it, not showy, just present. He didn’t need to explain his faith to me. He simply lived inside it, and took me along with him, week after week. I think that’s where I first learned that faith didn’t have to be dramatic to be real. It could just be a hand holding yours in a pew.
The Methodist tradition, as I knew it then, was stoic and restrained — hymn, prayer, sermon, hymn again — and I absorbed it the way children absorb things, without ever examining it. It was simply what church was.
Leaving Brentwood, Finding the Salvation Army
When we left Brentwood for Wickford, the shape of my Sundays changed. There was no Methodist church waiting for us that felt right, and so, for the first time, I found myself having to go looking for a church rather than simply being taken to one.
And — a little unexpectedly for a girl raised on stoic Methodist teaching — I found the Salvation Army. It could not have been more different from what I’d known. Where the services I remembered were measured and quiet, this was alive with noise and colour and warmth. I hadn’t known I was missing that kind of energy in my faith until I found it. It became my place. My family came along for the special services, and Dad always made a point of being there whenever he was home, sitting quietly beside me the way he always had. He never made me feel like I’d strayed from something. He just kept showing up.
The Years of Drifting
Then, as happens to most of us, life got in the way. Teenage peer pressure pulled me further still, and I drifted — slowly, and then, it felt, all at once.
I don’t think I ever really lost my faith, though. I think it just went quiet — dormant, waiting somewhere underneath everything else. It was still there, the way a pilot light stays lit even when the rest of the house has gone dark. I kept searching for something to fill the space it left behind, without ever quite finding it. I moved around the country over the years, tried a handful of different churches along the way, walked into a few and walked straight back out again. None of them felt right. I don’t think the problem was the churches. I think I simply hadn’t yet found the one that was mine.
But I always knew that when I found the right one, I’d feel it in my bones. There’d be no doubt about it.
Leaving London
Before I tell you about finally finding that church, I need to explain how I came to be in Devon at all — because that part matters too, and it happened well before Dad came home.
In November 2020, my husband Adam and I decided to leave London. It wasn’t an easy time to be living the life we were living there. Adam had been struggling badly with anxiety, and London wasn’t helping — the noise, the pace, the sense of never quite catching your breath. We both knew we needed to get away, properly away, not for a holiday but for good.
So we gave up everything we’d built. We sold our business. We sold our home. We packed up an entire life and brought our two dogs, and we left.
The way we chose where to go was almost absurdly simple, and yet it turned out to be exactly right. We put five points on a map — five places worth looking at — and Bideford was one of them. Adam had only ever visited the town once before, for three days. I had never been at all, until we came down in February 2020 to look, and again in July 2020 to house-hunt properly. Of the five points on that map, this was the first place we visited, and it was the place we chose. We didn’t need to see the other four.
It wasn’t a hard choice, even though by rights it should have been. We both knew, with a quiet certainty, that the life we were leaving behind wasn’t good for either of us. I moved to a town I had visited twice. Adam moved to a town he’d visited once, for three days. We didn’t know a single soul, a single street, the way the tide came in along the estuary. We simply arrived, with our dogs and whatever fit in the removal van, and started again.
Those first months were strange in the way any total upheaval is strange. We were learning a whole new town from scratch — where to walk the dogs, which roads flooded when the tide came in too far, which neighbours waved and which ones simply nodded. There was a kind of vertigo to it, a sense of having stepped clean out of one life and not yet having built the next.
I couldn’t have known then that this unfamiliar town would become the place I brought my father home to, the place where he’d spend his last years. I couldn’t have known it would become the place where I finally found my church. At the time it simply felt like an escape, a fresh start. It turned out, in time, to be so much more than that.
My Father, Alone in South Africa
In 2021, my dad — living in South Africa after thirty-five years there — lost his wife. I couldn’t get to him, not with all the restrictions we were living under. It broke my heart to know he was grieving alone, so far away.
It wasn’t until February 2022 that I was finally able to travel and bring him home, as he’d asked. After thirty-five years abroad — an entire adult lifetime built on the other side of the world — he wanted, in the end, to be back in England, near me, near what family he had left.
Two days before I was due to fly, I got the phone call every child dreads. Dad had been attacked in his own home, in the night, and left for dead, with a fractured skull. I remember very little about the hours after that call except a kind of white, roaring panic, and trying to book a flight with hands too shaken to type properly. The doctors believed he’d make a full recovery, and I clung to that the whole way over, not letting myself think beyond it.
When I arrived, I found he’d been living in a way I never would have wanted for him — not in his eighties, not ever. I can’t really go into the details, but it wasn’t right, and seeing it broke something in me. What followed was a long, exhausting battle: chasing his passport, sorting papers that should have been simple and weren’t, fighting through bureaucracy while trying to hold both of us together with whatever strength I had left. There were days I didn’t think it would happen. But finally, I got him on a plane. I brought him home — not to London, but to Bideford, the town I’d chosen off a map two years before, the town that was about to become the setting for the last chapter of my father’s life, though neither of us knew that yet.
He only asked for two things once he was back: a men’s breakfast club, and a good church. Just two things, after everything he’d been through — after losing his wife, after nearly losing his own life, after leaving behind thirty-five years of a country he’d called home. I promised him we’d sort it out, though I had no idea, in that moment, where either would come from in a town I barely knew myself.
Finding St Mary’s
A few weeks after he arrived, he had a scare with anaemia, so it wasn’t until the end of March that he felt strong enough to try church. When the day came, I remember thinking, “here we go.” St Mary’s had an 11:15 service with tea and coffee beforehand, so that’s where we went first.
We had our coffee, settled in, and went into the Encounter service together. Afterwards, Dad turned to me and said, very gently, in that dry way of his, “This isn’t really for me — too happy-clappy for me.” I laughed, and told him not to worry, we’d try the 9:30 service the following week instead. Neither of us ever looked back.
From that very first week at 9:30, we were welcomed so warmly it caught me off guard. People came over, asked how we were, asked our names, made us feel like we already belonged before we’d properly arrived. Claire came to see us too, and we were glad to give her our details so she could keep us in the loop. It was lovely — the kind of lovely that settles into you and stays.
If we’d given up after that first service, I don’t know that we’d have found our way to St Mary’s at all. Sometimes the right door is right next to the wrong one, and all it takes is trying the handle again.
Faith Through the Fog
With Dad’s dementia, and later his passing eighteen months ago, St Mary’s became a real source of joy and comfort for both of us, through everything that came after that first hopeful spring.
Dementia takes so much from a person — pieces of my dad, slowly, over time, in ways that were hard to watch and harder still to describe to anyone who hasn’t sat with it themselves. It is a strange, cruel illness, the way it takes someone from you in instalments rather than all at once. But I don’t believe it ever touched his faith. He’d been raised in a deeply religious Methodist family, and that early foundation never truly left him, even when so much else did. If anything, the illness seemed to draw him back to it, closer than he’d been in years — as though the part of him laid down as a boy in that Methodist pew was the part that stayed steadiest at the end, the part the illness simply couldn’t reach.
I noticed it in small ways. A hymn he still knew every word to, even on days he couldn’t remember what he’d had for breakfast. A calm that settled over him in the church that I didn’t see anywhere else in his week.
Whatever else it took from him, those last years were happy ones. He had his breakfast club. He had his church. He had, in the end, exactly the two things he’d asked for, and I hold onto that with everything I have.
Alan’s Light
Since he passed, I’ve tried to keep his light alive in a different way. I set up Alan’s Light, a charity for the unpaid carers looking after someone with dementia — the sons and daughters, the parents, the sisters and brothers, the whole quiet network of people who gather around one person who’s ill and simply carry on, day after day, without much notice or support. I know now, from the inside, what that work costs. I know what it is to fly across the world for a parent, to fight bureaucracy on their behalf, to sit with them through anaemia scares and confused mornings, to hold someone else’s whole world together while quietly, privately, feeling your own coming apart at the edges.
So much attention goes to the person with dementia, and so little to the people holding everything together around them — the ones doing the driving, the worrying at three in the morning, the ones who understand, better than anyone, what it costs to love someone through an illness like this. I know that cost myself now. Alan’s Light is my way of bringing those carers together, so they know they’re not alone, and so they can find the support I wish I’d had more of, when I needed it most. It’s named for my father, because it felt right that something built out of the hardest years of his life should carry his name forward into helping other families through theirs. I like to think he’d have approved of it, in his own quiet, dry way.
What St Mary’s Gave Me
Looking back over all of it — Hutton, the Salvation Army, the drifting years, the map with five points on it, London, Bideford, my father’s illness and homecoming — I keep circling back to how much St Mary’s has given me, quite apart from what it gave my dad.
One of the great gifts has been the friendships I’ve made there — real ones, the kind that have held steady through everything since that first Sunday with the coffee and the service that wasn’t quite right and the one the following week that was. Moving to a town where I knew nobody could so easily have left me isolated, could have left both Adam and me on the outside of a community we hadn’t grown up inside of. Instead, I found a whole community that took an interest and kept showing up, long after any obligation to be friendly to the new family had reasonably expired.
St Mary’s has also given me space to explore my Christianity in ways I never thought I could — to ask questions I might once have been too shy to ask, to sit with doubt without feeling I had to resolve it immediately, to let my faith be a living, evolving thing rather than something fixed in place back in a Methodist pew in Hutton. It has felt, at times, like being allowed to grow up all over again, spiritually speaking — to take everything my dad gave me as a child, and everything the Salvation Army gave me as a teenager, and finally have somewhere to bring it all together.
And, perhaps unexpectedly, it’s given me a way to use skills I inherited from my father — the practical, technical side of him, long before I understood I’d absorbed any of it. My computer skills, built up over years of work that had nothing to do with church, have found a use here in helping to grow the church’s social media, helping St Mary’s tell its own stories the way I’m trying to tell mine now. There’s something quietly moving in that — that a skill I got from my dad is now being used to help build the community that gave him such comfort in his final years, and that has become my home as well as his.
Trusting the Plan
If you’d told me, back when I was drifting through those years of half-hearted church visits, that one day I’d understand all of it as part of a plan, I don’t think I’d have believed you. It didn’t feel like a plan at the time. It felt like wandering, like failing to settle, like something in me being restless without knowing why.
I understand it differently now. I look back at the whole shape of it — the Methodist pew in Hutton, the Salvation Army hall, the years of searching, the five points on a map, the town neither Adam nor I had ever really known, my father’s suffering and his long journey home, a happy-clappy service that wasn’t quite right and a quieter one the following week that was — and I don’t see a series of accidents anymore. I see a path I was being led along, even in the years I thought I was simply finding my own way.
There’s a verse I keep coming back to, from Jeremiah 29:11 in the NIV translation — the promise that God knows the plans He has for us, plans meant for our good and not our harm, plans to give us hope and a future. And another, from Proverbs 3:5–6, that feels almost written for the years I spent trying to work everything out on my own: trust the Lord with your whole heart rather than leaning on your own understanding, and He will make your path straight.
I spent so long leaning on my own understanding — trying to reason my way to the right church, the right life, the right place to put down roots. It never worked, not really, not until I stopped steering quite so hard and simply let myself be led. I don’t think that’s an accident either. I think it’s the plan working, in its own time, whether or not I was paying attention to it. Now, I try to hold onto that more deliberately than I ever used to — to trust that God has a plan for me, and to let Him lead rather than insisting on finding my own way to everything. It hasn’t made life easier, exactly. But it has made it feel less like wandering, and more like walking somewhere on purpose.
Coming Home
I grew up with the Church, though it took the long way round to bring me here — through Hutton and Wickford, through a Salvation Army hall that surprised me, through years of searching. It took a marriage, a decision made off five points on a map, and a move to a town neither Adam nor I had ever really known. It took my father’s grief, and his long, hard journey home. It took a happy-clappy service that wasn’t quite right, and a quieter one the following week that was.
But it brought me here, in the end, to St Mary’s — to a church that gave my father a place to belong in the last years of his life, and that gave me back the faith I’d never quite lost, only misplaced for a while. I’m so grateful, more than I can properly say, that we found our way there — both of us, together, at exactly the moment we needed to.
