Not What I Expected: On Spirituality, Surprise, and the Shape of Faith

Spirituality is very important in my life. That probably sounds predictable—I’m a minister, after all, and have spent my entire adult life in one form of ministry or another. You’d expect spirituality to be central to me. But the truth is, I didn’t grow up in a particularly spiritual household. Ours was a solid, reliable, secular family—decent and loving, but turned in on itself. Religion was not part of our vocabulary, let alone our practice.

So the spiritual life didn’t come to me as a birthright. It came as a surprise.

It still does.

That may be part of why I’ve been so struck by recent social trends that seem to cut across everything we thought we knew. In England and Wales, two million more people have begun regularly attending church since 2018—an increase driven not by nostalgic older generations, but by Gen Z, and especially by young men. It’s not what the experts predicted. We were told that Western societies were steadily secularising, that religion was a fading relic, that young people (especially men) had long since moved on. But what’s happening now is not a return to tradition—it’s a step into something that is surprising, counter-intuitive, and deeply human.

Nick Cave, in his remarkable book Faith, Hope and Carnage, captures something of this dynamic. Reflecting on his own slow return to faith through grief and art, he writes: “The idea that spirituality wasn’t about escape or certainty. It was about remaining in the presence of something you couldn’t control and letting it shape you.” That line stops me in my tracks. I didn’t become a Christian because it made life easier or clearer. I became a Christian because I glimpsed something I couldn’t explain—something other, something true, something calling me to live not for myself.

Spirituality can easily become another form of self-expression, or worse, self-indulgence. It’s tempting to imagine it as a private garden of peace or a tool for personal growth. But the spiritual life I know—rooted in the gospel of Jesus—is something else entirely. It is not primarily about my interior life. It doesn’t revolve around my desires. It doesn’t soothe my sense of self. It challenges it. It calls me out of myself—toward God, toward others, toward costly love and inconvenient grace.

To borrow again from Nick Cave, religion is “spirituality with rigour.” I used to hear that as a criticism. Now I hear it as a mercy. Because yearning, on its own, can evaporate. Grief, on its own, can curdle. But religion gives them a form. It gives the ache a language. It gives the longing a practice. It asks something of us—our attention, our discipline, our presence. It invites us to kneel, even before we understand why.

And in that kneeling, something happens. We find ourselves drawn into the life of Christ—not just privately, but publicly. We follow a path that is not veiled in fog, but is still strange. It is not designed for our comfort, but for our transformation. It leads outward: to the marginalised, the lonely, the broken, the undeserving. In short, to everyone—including ourselves.

So yes, spirituality matters deeply to me. But not because it confirms what I already know. It matters because it surprises me. Because it reorders me. Because it insists that my life is not my own.

And in a world turned in on itself, that may be the most hopeful truth of all.

Not What I Expected
—a poem on spirituality

Spirituality, for me,
is not a private peace.
It’s a summons.
A voice I didn’t invent
asking more than I thought to give.

Not certainty,
but presence.
Not escape,
but reorientation.

It turns me outward—
to God, to others,
to the odd, public way
of Jesus.

Not to feel better.
But to be remade.