A life in letters: Townsend, Dr Anne (b1938)

I first became aware of Dr Anne Townsend when I read her first book Once bitten, which was published in 1970 - an account of her work along with her husband John as  medical missionaries in Thailand with the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. Subsequently, she published a series of books giving an honest take on Christian issues – Prayer without pretending, Marriage without pretending and Families without pretending – which I read as they appeared.

Having returned to the UK Anne Townsend became editor of the Christian magazine Family, and subsequently Director of Care Trust, which co-ordinated practical Christian responses to help people in need. In Faith without pretending (1990) she described how she found a way through the personal crisis she suffered in the 1980s. I read that book when it appeared, but did not have any particular sense of encountering a fellow-traveller.

Anne Townsend was ordained in 1991 as a Non-Stipendiary minister of the Church of England and in the 1990s also trained and worked as a psychotherapist.

In 1998, while studying Gone but not forgotten, a research report into people’s reasons for stopping attending church, I came across a reference to an article Anne Townsend had published in The Tablet on 9 November 1996 describing her painful journey away from her evangelical roots. Her words resonated with me profoundly, and finding her London telephone number in the Medical Directory I phoned her, partly to express my appreciation of what she had written, but largely, I suspect, out of a deep sense of my need for guidance and direction.

Like the good counsellor she is, Anne didn’t tell me what to do, but she did send me copies of three of her books, including Faith without pretending, which I re-read, this time with avid interest.  This volume, and the article in The Tablet describe her growing sense that there was a mismatch between the person she tried to be outwardly as she struggled to conform to evangelical expectations, and the person she actually was. 

She writes about questioning the evangelical position on the inerrancy of the Bible – these questions, once she began to bring them into the open, wouldn’t be silenced. She writes about doubting the goodness of God, particularly in the light of the death in the 1970s of five close friends (three of them carrying full-term babies) and seven of their pre-school children in a tragic accident near Manoram Hospital in Thailand.) She writes about realising that it was not always as easy as she’d thought to make the right choice when facing moral dilemmas. She began to see shades of grey where before there had only been black and white, and describes her growing sense of tension between the line she was expected to take as Director of Care Trust and her own personal convictions.

Pressure at work, the stress of this sense of hypocrisy, the drivenness of trying to do more for God than any one individual possibly could combined with a familial depressive tendency and unresolved issues from the past to bring her to the point where she felt she had been ‘abandoned by the God in whose service [she] had spent [her] life.’ She broke down, and attempted suicide.

Faith without pretending describes the slow process of healing through reading, reflecting and seeking help from a counsellor and a spiritual director to the point where she discovered that God accepted her as she was, and that consequently she did not have to be as other people expected her to be. For the first time, she was enabled to connect with herself, to experience the joy of being God’s one-and-only Anne Townsend. She learned to discard the defective images of God which had scarred her thinking, and to discover in new ways the God who loved and affirmed life, to move beyond the symbols of God to the vast reality which lies beyond them. In the process she found she had to ‘defect’ from the evangelicalism which had hitherto shaped her thinking. In her Tablet article she describes her gratitude at having left ‘the spiritual “playpen” in which I barricaded myself away for a large part of my life.’  She writes

I now realise from many people who have contacted me in recent years that I am but one of hundreds of former evangelical Christians from the more fundamentalist end of evangelicalism who have recently accepted the terror, isolation and guilt of moving away from their former religious pathways. Now we journey through new territory – barren deserts and lush, formerly forbidden green pastures. We have discovered in a deeper way how our Shepherd leads us.

Reading Anne Townsend’s account of her own release from pain was liberating and affirming – her journey seemed in several ways similar to my own, and her experience validated mine. I had two concerns, however. In the first place, in my tentative inner exploration of what it would mean to defect from evangelicalism I had not been able to move beyond the sense of ‘terror, isolation and guilt.’  My second concern is can be illustrated by Anne Townsend’s description of an insight she had when she was beginning to ask questions about the Bible. Sitting on top of a gloriously beautiful Thai mountain she found that

it was not difficult for me to see that my faith did not depend absolutely on my own human mind being able to accept the English….translation of the Bible I owned as being totally and comprehensively flawless: ultimately my faith rested on the massive, rock-solid security of Jesus Christ. I had assumed that it would be necessary for me to prove to myself that the Bible held no contradictions which I could not understand or explain to my own satisfaction. And yet I knew perfectly well that I was not sufficiently trained to be able to do this. Realising that my faith was greater than my ability to use my mind to prove certain things about the Bible suddenly set me free. Yes, I knew that I could and should use my brain to understand my faith but my faith did not depend totally on my own intellectual grasp and understanding of the truth. My faith depended on Jesus Christ, God made man, who to me was a historical personal and not mere myth. 

My concern was this: Anne Townsend’s knowledge of the Jesus Christ in whom she found ‘rock-solid security’ came from the Bible. How, I wondered could she maintain that faith while at the same time beginning to deconstruct the sacred text? It was all very well, I thought, for her to suggest that ultimately our foundation as Christians lies in the perfection of Jesus and not in the perfection of the Bible. But how, other than through the pages of the Bible, do we form an impression of who Jesus is? If you begin to question its unshakable accuracy, how can you be sure that your mental picture of Jesus has any grounding in reality?  How can you be sure that your faith is built on something solid?  How can you know that the Shepherd whose voice you are following is the authentic God?