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Generous Faith: Creating Vibrant Christian Communities
Giles Goddard embodies the story of the Church of England's struggles to understand and accommodate differences in human sexuality. From the paradox of feeling both excluded and called to the priesthood, to becoming the only openly gay priest on the Living in Love and Faith co-ordinating group, this book reflects on thirty years' experience of trying to make the church more inclusive. In his work as priest of St John's Waterloo, he has continued to push the boundaries of inclusion, offering a prayer space for the Muslim community, welcoming refugees, the street homeless, and Extinction Rebellion activism. Anyone who shares these dreams for the church will recognise themselves here: Giles is a kind of everyman for everyone whose faith and work bring them into conflict with the stance of the Church. The story is told through the lens of the Christian year with its seasons of preparation, retreat and growth.
176 pages, Paperback
Published July 5, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 11, 2025
A wonderful book full of hope and love that inspires me and hopefully the church to be a more inclusive and generous space. Rev Giles is a great writer that keeps you engaged and reading along. I picked it up expecting it to be a practical book and was pleasantly surprised to find it to be more of a theologically minded memoir. Goddard is incredibly open and raw with some of the stories that he tells in a way that is a testiment to the radical vulnerability an inclusive church enables not only in their communities but also in their leaders. I would recommend this book for anyone in church leadership - and I would especially recommend this book for those who have felt alienated and excluded from Church.
June 1, 2024
“We can’t do it alone, can we?”
Even the smallest steps in this journey have been fiercely resisted. But there is hope. The hope is founded upon the truth that each of us is fully loved, fully loveable, and fully equal before God. This is the truth that lies at the heart of the story of Jesus, and it is the truth I have been trying to articulate in my years as a priest. It is a truth from which the Church cannot escape, and it is the truth that keeps bringing refreshment and renewal to structures that would otherwise become sclerotic.
Giles Goddard, Generous Faith
At the end of this month the newest book from our wonderful Reverend Goddard will be published. Generous Faith is many things-- beautifully written, complexly structured, wonderfully rich. It is not quite an autobiography, not quite the chronicle of a place, a people, or an institution; it is instead a story that finds a steady, if uncomfortable, rest in its own uncertainties, one that demands an enthusiasm from its questions as much as its answers. It is a fractal memoir of a challenged and challenging priest, an unflinching examination of the life and transformation of a two-hundred year old church in her stalwart pursuit of belonging in the 21st century. But Generous Faith is, most profoundly, a narrative of undeniable, unyielding courage.
As anyone who has met him can attest, Giles is a man so immediately, so obviously, and so widely beloved that it is difficult to imagine the reservation, the doubt, self-sabotage, and utter bewilderment that hounded his early life and career like some particularly disgruntled ghost. Through the chapters, the story of the Goddard family weaves in and out of the Christ story itself, plotted along an axis that curves forward and backward in time, carving out the Reverend’s path toward Waterloo like the slow and ancient drag of the Thames. The St. John’s community, completing this tripartite construction, develops in time, too: the many misgivings, frustrations, and setbacks that have accompanied her many obvious successes brought to light. The changing makeup, convictions, positions, and actions of the church, too, mirroring the development of her space and her advancement into the community. Generous is, indeed, an adequate description of the piece, with rich language that presents layer after layer of this story in enrapturing chiaroscuro, images fleeting and shadowed and interconnected, from the pre-industrial marsh flats of London to the wide, low downs of Goddard’s childhood, to the exacting halls of Lancing College and the long, pondering hours of seminary-- his own theology and spiritual journey are presented with unflinching honesty and admirable courage.
The spiritual development over the course of the book is a remarkable, dynamic thing to witness, delicately analyzed and masterfully described. We are, by nature, tradition, and Creation, codependent. There is nothing we can do alone. And just as our triumphs and prevailings are celebrated by those who made them possible, so, too, are our hurts communal. Goddard here argues for a radical self-recognition that condemns the blindness that is so damaging: a kind of secret-keeping from ourselves that, in concealing our own shortcomings, hurts not only ourselves but those accomplices throughout our lives who continue to pay the price for the faults we cannot acknowledge as our own. While admirable in his humility, Goddard is also refreshingly clear on his accomplishments, offering an insight to the many silent battles, often embittered and massive in scale, that he has steadfastly fought on behalf of St. John’s mission. No punches are pulled when it comes to confronting and admonishing the Church of England and her positions that are difficult or untenable. Not unlike the parish Goddard has so brilliantly led, Generous Faith demonstrates an ardent devotion to the questions of the faith and the questions of the community, even and especially when the answers prove evasive or inadequate.
In an elegant march through the church calendar, the book’s narrative structure draws Goddard’s own development into parallel with each liturgical movement. Alongside him, the readers follow a complex and ever-developing Christian vocation: in turn, we abandon God, forsake ourselves, return with empty and powerful longing, doubt the twisting road ahead, commit to a challenging and uncertain future, lean into the understanding and welcome of many. It is a powerful and fast-moving construction that belies the otherwise peripatetic nature of the story, encouraging as it does a slower pace of living, of thinking-- one that allows us to more deeply consider each step we take and the consequences that follow it. An exacting excavation of vicarage, Generous Faith offers a critical, and often unheard, insight into both the challenge and reward of leading a modern congregation. Goddard confronts, in remarkably good faith, the two-body problem of sorts in which the body of the parish is only as strong as the body and heart and mind and conviction of its leader-- a problem compounded, of course, when the very Church he speaks for seems bent on hamstringing, ostracizing, and punishing that body at every opportunity. At the risk of spoiling the plot, I think it’s fair to say that the thriving congregation at St. John’s, the impactful community programming she hosts, and the reputation of welcome and innovation she has built can attest: Goddard has answered the assignment with resounding success, accomplishment, and-- always and essentially-- love.
In Generous Faith you will find a gorgeously wandering portrait of growth, faith, and heart-breaking honesty. If I had my way, it would be presented to the Church and the nation and the Christian people as a case study of resilience, beautiful complexity, dauntless writing, and an advanced understanding of what it means to be a leader and a shepherd. A book sure to inspire and challenge in turn, to expose with loving kindness, to invigorate compassion and ignite an attentive humanity, Goddard takes to task the secrets, disgraces, and doubts that we attempt to keep hidden from ourselves. By heroic example, he demonstrates how it is we can free ourselves, free one another, and free the message of Christ so that our access to the Love that is God can remain as unfettered, as bounteous, and as unsparing as Jesus demands it must be. Reverend Goddard is an honor and a privilege to know, and it will be a joy to celebrate him when Generous Faith is released later this month.
PS You can read my advanced review in the Column Inches, London Waterloo magazine after June 1st :)
Essentials:
The complexity of our lives is real, and immediate, and hurts.
It has been a journey from dissembling to authenticity, from presenting a false self to finding a truer self. I have, gradually, over the years, peeled away skin after skin of protective material, a carapace I had constructed in the misguided belief it would keep me safe. I have had to learn again and again, often painfully, the truth that I can do nothing on my own. The community of people in which I find myself is a community of fellow pilgrims who, given half a chance, pursue the quest for truth with conviction and delight. Through them, I have learned how essential it is that the vulnerabilities and fragilities that I worked so hard to conceal should be allowed to be open to the air and visible.
It felt as though I was locked in a battle between meaning and despair, between love and hate. A cosmic battle between God and the devil, and a personal battle with the demons whose especial task was to undermine me. It seemed to be a battle against shape-shifting enemies. The inertia and destructiveness of tradition. The insidious and overwhelming power of class, race, and privilege. The muddied hopelessness that I saw so often in the faces of people I spoke to.
Some came to find what they could, seeking a way to heal their pain, to deal with the damage of their early lives-- or damage from their treatment by the churches they had grown up in-- or because they had fallen out with God but could not silence the whisper of the Divine in their hearts.
People came to pray and sing and eat morsels of unleavened bread; they came with an ache acknowledged or unacknowledged; they came with hunger, sometimes hunger unknown; they came to seek; they came in fear, they came in hope.
I began to wonder, as I tried to make sense of the place where I had washed up, whether the battle I was locked in was really between love and hate, between God and the devil, or whether it was something more insidious-- a battle between love and indifference.
In Waterloo, the call of the curlew is silenced. I want to hear it again, whistling softly across the winding marshland paths.
Optimism relies on the march of history, hope is radically discontinuous. The eruptive potential of shared humanity. Something to celebrate.
The prayer did not work. My supposedly disordered desires continued, amid increasing levels of guilt. Was I not praying enough? Was I not good enough? Was I to be condemned to a loveless life by an Act of God?
Jürgen gave me a book to read which I have still: The Art of Loving. He sat outside McDonalds on a sunny afternoon in June and spoke of the ways in which we damage love by fighting for our own corner instead of placing the needs of others at the heart of our desire. But I was not ready to hear that. I was enjoying the new-found freedom to sin with impunity.
What you don’t say rules you. If we fail to call out the things we do that destroy ourselves and others they have disproportionate power. So, during Lent, I try to name my own grief and lament my own failings, as well as the grief and the failings of those around me.
In truth, I could never quite let go. I paddled in that godless sea, afraid of drowning. Resisting the idea that I might be seriously spiritual. Always the fear of not being loveable. Always the fear of not being loved. Always the loneliness. Wandering, wandering, wandering, a pinball. Unwilling to admit the possibility that there may be anyone out there who is listening to me, anything there that might receive the arrow I shoot across the abyss. The drowned child smiling at me, unreachable, across the void.
Why do we do it? Because the story is more than a story. It’s life.
To be a pilgrim. Weeping with is weeping alongside. We walk together across the marsh, surrounded by ditches, by beasts that bite and traps that catch. The wilderness if full of noises. There are shadows beneath the trees. On the marsh it is easy to lose our way.
The service ends, and afterwards people come to sit in the garden, and some of them are tired and tipsy, as I am, and as I watch them and watch the candles burning down and try to pray I am conscious of eyelids closing, and I remember the story, of the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, ‘Could you not wait with me, even so long?’ Of course, they’d had enough to drink, too. No wonder they went to sleep.
Neither here or there do I have any sense of who or what I am, except that I am sure that whatever it is must be something contemptible. On Holy Saturday time stops. Jesus is dead. God’s fatherhood is destroyed by human depravity.
I have labored under the weight of my failures for most of my life. I have apologized and apologized but never believed myself to be adequate, in spite of 20 years of assuring others that they are infinitely loved.
Love is a gift. It can only be offered freely, never extracted. Love is the earthly manifestation of the infinite life force that is named by religious traditions as God. Behind love lies justice. For unless we are equal the gift is at risk of being improperly given and received.
The church has lost much be selling the reality of love short.
I am grateful that blood still runs through my veins and that my heart still keeps beating, unremarked and unthanked.
The greatest risk of all is the one we take with our hearts. If we want to protect ourselves we resist entering into relationships, for relationships entail loss and pain. Grief is the price we pay for love. Yet we take the risk. To trust ourselves to the other. Why? Because without the potential for pain we are also deprived of the potential for joy. Joy is the wage we receive for love.
My time is not your time, my truth is not your truth. My experience of time is different to yours. I am unutterably separate from the world and from the people closest to me. Beyond us and between us is an ocean of invisible matter, dark matter, something no one has either seen or touched and probably never will. We are separated by an abyss, le’ amîme, a nothingness. But we have developed a way of communication that papers over the abyss. With a look of love. With a touch, an embrace, a caress. With a shout of laughter or a cry of pain. With a gift.
I am learning about a world where everyone can touch the hem of the divine, where to live is to be fully alive, where we can all glimpse the light of desire at the end of the tunnel and allow it to draw us towards its source.
Even the smallest steps in this journey have been fiercely resisted. But there is hope. The hope is founded upon the truth that each of us is fully loved, fully loveable, and fully equal before God. This is the truth that lies at the heart of the story of Jesus, and it is the truth I have been trying to articulate in my years as a priest. It is a truth from which the Church cannot escape, and it is the truth that keeps bringing refreshment and renewal to structures that would otherwise become sclerotic.
Giles Goddard, Generous Faith
At the end of this month the newest book from our wonderful Reverend Goddard will be published. Generous Faith is many things-- beautifully written, complexly structured, wonderfully rich. It is not quite an autobiography, not quite the chronicle of a place, a people, or an institution; it is instead a story that finds a steady, if uncomfortable, rest in its own uncertainties, one that demands an enthusiasm from its questions as much as its answers. It is a fractal memoir of a challenged and challenging priest, an unflinching examination of the life and transformation of a two-hundred year old church in her stalwart pursuit of belonging in the 21st century. But Generous Faith is, most profoundly, a narrative of undeniable, unyielding courage.
As anyone who has met him can attest, Giles is a man so immediately, so obviously, and so widely beloved that it is difficult to imagine the reservation, the doubt, self-sabotage, and utter bewilderment that hounded his early life and career like some particularly disgruntled ghost. Through the chapters, the story of the Goddard family weaves in and out of the Christ story itself, plotted along an axis that curves forward and backward in time, carving out the Reverend’s path toward Waterloo like the slow and ancient drag of the Thames. The St. John’s community, completing this tripartite construction, develops in time, too: the many misgivings, frustrations, and setbacks that have accompanied her many obvious successes brought to light. The changing makeup, convictions, positions, and actions of the church, too, mirroring the development of her space and her advancement into the community. Generous is, indeed, an adequate description of the piece, with rich language that presents layer after layer of this story in enrapturing chiaroscuro, images fleeting and shadowed and interconnected, from the pre-industrial marsh flats of London to the wide, low downs of Goddard’s childhood, to the exacting halls of Lancing College and the long, pondering hours of seminary-- his own theology and spiritual journey are presented with unflinching honesty and admirable courage.
The spiritual development over the course of the book is a remarkable, dynamic thing to witness, delicately analyzed and masterfully described. We are, by nature, tradition, and Creation, codependent. There is nothing we can do alone. And just as our triumphs and prevailings are celebrated by those who made them possible, so, too, are our hurts communal. Goddard here argues for a radical self-recognition that condemns the blindness that is so damaging: a kind of secret-keeping from ourselves that, in concealing our own shortcomings, hurts not only ourselves but those accomplices throughout our lives who continue to pay the price for the faults we cannot acknowledge as our own. While admirable in his humility, Goddard is also refreshingly clear on his accomplishments, offering an insight to the many silent battles, often embittered and massive in scale, that he has steadfastly fought on behalf of St. John’s mission. No punches are pulled when it comes to confronting and admonishing the Church of England and her positions that are difficult or untenable. Not unlike the parish Goddard has so brilliantly led, Generous Faith demonstrates an ardent devotion to the questions of the faith and the questions of the community, even and especially when the answers prove evasive or inadequate.
In an elegant march through the church calendar, the book’s narrative structure draws Goddard’s own development into parallel with each liturgical movement. Alongside him, the readers follow a complex and ever-developing Christian vocation: in turn, we abandon God, forsake ourselves, return with empty and powerful longing, doubt the twisting road ahead, commit to a challenging and uncertain future, lean into the understanding and welcome of many. It is a powerful and fast-moving construction that belies the otherwise peripatetic nature of the story, encouraging as it does a slower pace of living, of thinking-- one that allows us to more deeply consider each step we take and the consequences that follow it. An exacting excavation of vicarage, Generous Faith offers a critical, and often unheard, insight into both the challenge and reward of leading a modern congregation. Goddard confronts, in remarkably good faith, the two-body problem of sorts in which the body of the parish is only as strong as the body and heart and mind and conviction of its leader-- a problem compounded, of course, when the very Church he speaks for seems bent on hamstringing, ostracizing, and punishing that body at every opportunity. At the risk of spoiling the plot, I think it’s fair to say that the thriving congregation at St. John’s, the impactful community programming she hosts, and the reputation of welcome and innovation she has built can attest: Goddard has answered the assignment with resounding success, accomplishment, and-- always and essentially-- love.
In Generous Faith you will find a gorgeously wandering portrait of growth, faith, and heart-breaking honesty. If I had my way, it would be presented to the Church and the nation and the Christian people as a case study of resilience, beautiful complexity, dauntless writing, and an advanced understanding of what it means to be a leader and a shepherd. A book sure to inspire and challenge in turn, to expose with loving kindness, to invigorate compassion and ignite an attentive humanity, Goddard takes to task the secrets, disgraces, and doubts that we attempt to keep hidden from ourselves. By heroic example, he demonstrates how it is we can free ourselves, free one another, and free the message of Christ so that our access to the Love that is God can remain as unfettered, as bounteous, and as unsparing as Jesus demands it must be. Reverend Goddard is an honor and a privilege to know, and it will be a joy to celebrate him when Generous Faith is released later this month.
PS You can read my advanced review in the Column Inches, London Waterloo magazine after June 1st :)
Essentials:
The complexity of our lives is real, and immediate, and hurts.
It has been a journey from dissembling to authenticity, from presenting a false self to finding a truer self. I have, gradually, over the years, peeled away skin after skin of protective material, a carapace I had constructed in the misguided belief it would keep me safe. I have had to learn again and again, often painfully, the truth that I can do nothing on my own. The community of people in which I find myself is a community of fellow pilgrims who, given half a chance, pursue the quest for truth with conviction and delight. Through them, I have learned how essential it is that the vulnerabilities and fragilities that I worked so hard to conceal should be allowed to be open to the air and visible.
It felt as though I was locked in a battle between meaning and despair, between love and hate. A cosmic battle between God and the devil, and a personal battle with the demons whose especial task was to undermine me. It seemed to be a battle against shape-shifting enemies. The inertia and destructiveness of tradition. The insidious and overwhelming power of class, race, and privilege. The muddied hopelessness that I saw so often in the faces of people I spoke to.
Some came to find what they could, seeking a way to heal their pain, to deal with the damage of their early lives-- or damage from their treatment by the churches they had grown up in-- or because they had fallen out with God but could not silence the whisper of the Divine in their hearts.
People came to pray and sing and eat morsels of unleavened bread; they came with an ache acknowledged or unacknowledged; they came with hunger, sometimes hunger unknown; they came to seek; they came in fear, they came in hope.
I began to wonder, as I tried to make sense of the place where I had washed up, whether the battle I was locked in was really between love and hate, between God and the devil, or whether it was something more insidious-- a battle between love and indifference.
In Waterloo, the call of the curlew is silenced. I want to hear it again, whistling softly across the winding marshland paths.
Optimism relies on the march of history, hope is radically discontinuous. The eruptive potential of shared humanity. Something to celebrate.
The prayer did not work. My supposedly disordered desires continued, amid increasing levels of guilt. Was I not praying enough? Was I not good enough? Was I to be condemned to a loveless life by an Act of God?
Jürgen gave me a book to read which I have still: The Art of Loving. He sat outside McDonalds on a sunny afternoon in June and spoke of the ways in which we damage love by fighting for our own corner instead of placing the needs of others at the heart of our desire. But I was not ready to hear that. I was enjoying the new-found freedom to sin with impunity.
What you don’t say rules you. If we fail to call out the things we do that destroy ourselves and others they have disproportionate power. So, during Lent, I try to name my own grief and lament my own failings, as well as the grief and the failings of those around me.
In truth, I could never quite let go. I paddled in that godless sea, afraid of drowning. Resisting the idea that I might be seriously spiritual. Always the fear of not being loveable. Always the fear of not being loved. Always the loneliness. Wandering, wandering, wandering, a pinball. Unwilling to admit the possibility that there may be anyone out there who is listening to me, anything there that might receive the arrow I shoot across the abyss. The drowned child smiling at me, unreachable, across the void.
Why do we do it? Because the story is more than a story. It’s life.
To be a pilgrim. Weeping with is weeping alongside. We walk together across the marsh, surrounded by ditches, by beasts that bite and traps that catch. The wilderness if full of noises. There are shadows beneath the trees. On the marsh it is easy to lose our way.
The service ends, and afterwards people come to sit in the garden, and some of them are tired and tipsy, as I am, and as I watch them and watch the candles burning down and try to pray I am conscious of eyelids closing, and I remember the story, of the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, ‘Could you not wait with me, even so long?’ Of course, they’d had enough to drink, too. No wonder they went to sleep.
Neither here or there do I have any sense of who or what I am, except that I am sure that whatever it is must be something contemptible. On Holy Saturday time stops. Jesus is dead. God’s fatherhood is destroyed by human depravity.
I have labored under the weight of my failures for most of my life. I have apologized and apologized but never believed myself to be adequate, in spite of 20 years of assuring others that they are infinitely loved.
Love is a gift. It can only be offered freely, never extracted. Love is the earthly manifestation of the infinite life force that is named by religious traditions as God. Behind love lies justice. For unless we are equal the gift is at risk of being improperly given and received.
The church has lost much be selling the reality of love short.
I am grateful that blood still runs through my veins and that my heart still keeps beating, unremarked and unthanked.
The greatest risk of all is the one we take with our hearts. If we want to protect ourselves we resist entering into relationships, for relationships entail loss and pain. Grief is the price we pay for love. Yet we take the risk. To trust ourselves to the other. Why? Because without the potential for pain we are also deprived of the potential for joy. Joy is the wage we receive for love.
My time is not your time, my truth is not your truth. My experience of time is different to yours. I am unutterably separate from the world and from the people closest to me. Beyond us and between us is an ocean of invisible matter, dark matter, something no one has either seen or touched and probably never will. We are separated by an abyss, le’ amîme, a nothingness. But we have developed a way of communication that papers over the abyss. With a look of love. With a touch, an embrace, a caress. With a shout of laughter or a cry of pain. With a gift.
I am learning about a world where everyone can touch the hem of the divine, where to live is to be fully alive, where we can all glimpse the light of desire at the end of the tunnel and allow it to draw us towards its source.
July 22, 2024
Generous Faith gives us a glimpse into how religion could and should be if we allow it to break free from historical prejudices- welcoming all from whatever gender, sexuality, race or religion. Giles Goddard details the struggles and successes encountered in making his central-London church inclusive to all while facing professional and personal attack.
I really enjoyed the way Goddard weaves together so many different elements into the book- reflections on the history of Waterloo and the Church, meditations on nature, personal memories from his own journey and snippets from the lives of the congregation. Ultimately, we are all connected and only love- from God who is love and who can’t not love us- can get us through it all.
If you are curious to see a fresh side to religion, whatever stage of the spiritual journey you are at- this book is for you!
I really enjoyed the way Goddard weaves together so many different elements into the book- reflections on the history of Waterloo and the Church, meditations on nature, personal memories from his own journey and snippets from the lives of the congregation. Ultimately, we are all connected and only love- from God who is love and who can’t not love us- can get us through it all.
If you are curious to see a fresh side to religion, whatever stage of the spiritual journey you are at- this book is for you!
August 11, 2024
Generous Faith weaves multiple personal and political stories into a cogent account of how one man's faith, family and community shaped the vibrant and inclusive congregation at St John's Cathedral in Waterloo, London. The stories Goddard shares are both deeply personal and yet radically political. At every step of the way, Goddard demonstrates what it means to have faith, sharing his and his church's struggles and successes with vulnerability and courage. By doing so, Generous Faith makes clear that faith isn't just about one's relationship to the Almighty. It is about one's relationship and commitment to community and connection. In doing so, this book shows what is possible when faith is lived out so generously. An inspirational book that will speak to and inspire both believers and non-believers.
August 21, 2024
Giles takes the reader to the very heart of St John’s Parish at Waterloo and seamlessly intertwines the sinews of his own biography into the beating whole. This book is not to be simplified as your average “spiritual commentary”, but rather it’s an attempt to further widen the discourse surrounding the ways in which we all can find connection. Generous Faith is thrumming with hope!
October 18, 2024
Lovely book, moved by Gile's deeply personal account of building a vibrant faith community.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews