Vicky Beeching - Undivided - Coming Out, Becoming Whole, and Living Free From Shame

The Church of England wouldn’t see its first female priests ordained until 1994, when I was fifteen, despite the campaign for this change spanning back to the time of the suffragettes at the turn of the century. The first female bishop wasn’t consecrated until just a couple of years ago, in 2015, when I was thirty-six.

At school, I tried to express my faith passionately, especially as I had dreams of becoming a missionary like my grandparents. I told other children in my class about God, hoping they might get converted. At the age of four, I had a very serious chat with a female classmate about the fact she was going to hell unless she accepted Jesus and became a Christian. All of this happened while playing in the sandbox, an unlikely setting for such severe theology. Several of my friends came to church with me a few times—possibly because of my fire-and-brimstone preaching in the sandbox, or perhaps because the elderly women in our congregation handed out jelly babies and fruit gums to us kids after the meeting.

I was well-meaning at heart. Even in those early years, God had become a genuine presence in my life. He was a constant companion and friend, and I wanted to share that, in my simple childhood way, with everyone I knew so they could experience it too.

When I reached the age of eleven, our family moved from the Pentecostal denomination to a small Anglican church in our village. Our goal was to help revive it, as its numbers were shrinking and many smaller parish churches like this were at risk of closure.

The Church of England congregation was far more moderate in its theology than our previous church, but the longer we were there, the more it started to reflect our charismatic evangelical values. My mother and I started playing guitars and keyboards on Sundays, rather than the traditional pipe organ, and enlisted a drummer and saxophonist when we could find volunteer musicians. My parents hosted small meetings at our home one evening a week, where people studied the Bible, sang songs, prayed for the sick to be healed, spoke in tongues, and prophesied over one another. We also organized trips to conferences so the people in our new church could hear well-known evangelical and Pentecostal speakers.

Alongside all this, I continued to go to local youth events linked to my previous church too. So, despite moving to a more moderate denomination, little changed for me. I retained the beliefs that had been woven into me during my formative years and, rather than growing out of them, I held on to them with even more passion.

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