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?
