Beginnings of faith .... Thank you to Gerry.

Dulwich College, my secondary school from 1960 to 1967.  18 rugby pitches and a 2 mile run round the perimeter!

I phoned my old old school-friend Gerry today. Gerry is a member of the Church of England synod and a superb source of balanced and precise information on religion in my home country.

He is also possibly the man to whom I owe my Christian faith more than anyone else. For seven years, between the ages of 11 and 18 we travelled every day by train to our elite grammar school in London, paid for under a generous government bursary system.  He introduced me to the Crusaders Union, an 'inter-denominational Protestant boys bible class'. Every Sunday afternoon about 60 of us boys aged 10 to 18 met in a church hall, sang hymns and choruses, read bibles, heard simple sermons by our lay leaders. No priests, no girls.

It was there that I ‘caught God’ and learned large chunks of the Bible off by heart. By today’s standards it was embarrassingly simple and unsophisticated. But the leaders were honest, decent men, of the generation that had gone through the war, of real faith and who prayed. 

The result is that, forty years on, of the twenty or so of us of my own age, ten are still deeply involved in church life, including five priests. Not bad…