I grew up in England in the 1980s and early 1990s and it was, as Paul Kingsnorth says, ‘not, shall we say, a spiritually rich environment’. Unlike Paul, I did grow up in a religious family. But as Kingsnorth recounts his attitude towards Christianity during his childhood it resonated with me. I recognised what he saw because I saw it in the attitude of almost every friend I ever had at school. I was a member of a very small and persecuted minority at all my schools because on Sundays, I went to church. That made me stand out and as any kid knows standing out is not a good thing. Unless it happens to be because you’re excellent at sport, that was the only acceptable reason to stand out. Sport, and being at the time half-decent at football, was the key to my survival. That plus the fact that our church ran, on a Friday night, one of the few youth clubs in our town. But we all knew even in the mid-80s that churches of any kind existed only on the margins of what really mattered. Football mattered every day of the week, Jesus barely got a look in even on a Sunday. The unbelieving young Kingsnorth knew this too.

Still, at least my [Muslim] friend’s religion seemed to pulse with some sort of living energy. The same could not be said of the Christianity which, when I was a child, was still at least nominally the national faith. I grew up singing hymns, listening to parables recited by teachers at morning assembly, and performing in Christmas nativity plays with a tea towel tied around my head. I knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart. Whether I liked it or not, I was taught as a child the outline of the Christian story—the story that had shaped my nation for more than a thousand years. I didn’t realize that my nation was surviving on spiritual credit, and that it was coming close to running out.

The blame for this lacklustre state of affairs, as we all knew, lay with the Church of England. I was a child of the evangelical free church and our instincts were to have nothing to do with the fatal compromise of a state church, liberalism and anything too worldly. Which knocked out the Anglicans on all three counts. Why did everyone think Christianity was rubbish? Because the national church was rubbish. I knew it as a non-conformist but most of it all I knew it because we all knew it. And in came in two types of rubbish.

Back then, there were two distinct flavours of Christianity, both of which I tried to avoid. One was the fusty old Church of England variety. You would see this if you had to go to a wedding or a funeral, or when a vicar was invited to give a sermon at school. The vicar would be a slightly Victorian figure, an older man almost dainty in his manners, trying his best to speak in a dying tongue to a generation of kids more interested in their ZX Spectrums. The Victorian vicar would hand out morality lessons from a man who had lived two thousand years ago and whose core imagery might as well have been from Mars: wine presses, fishing boats, vineyards, masters and servants, virgins. The basic pitch seemed best summed up by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I’d rather have been reading than listening to a vicar: “One man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.”

The second flavour was the trendy vicar. Unlike his predecessor, the trendy vicar was plugged into the spirit of the age. He knew that instead of bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist, we were watching The Young Ones and playing Manic Miner, and he was on our side. The trendy vicar had a clipped beard and wore jeans and sang folk songs about how Jesus was our friend, and gave awkward, vernacular sermons in which biblical stories were interspersed with references to EastEnders or Dallas or Michael Jackson songs. Despite his good intentions, the trendy vicar was much worse than the stuffy vicar. At least the Victorian sermons were in some way otherworldly, as religion should be. If it was pop culture we wanted, and we did, we were better off sticking with the real thing, which was to say the thing without any Jesus in it.

So, I had no reason to take any notice of religion in general or Christianity in particular.

That damnation through the faintest of praise affected all us Christians. If the church that was everywhere couldn’t get its act together it just made the rest of us look bad.

I’ve had plenty of arguments with my Church of England friends over the years, as I pressed for disestablishment and boldly stated that few things had done more damage to the cause of Christ in the UK than the dear old C of E. I was baffled why anyone would want to stay in it and, other than some fine architecture, saw nothing worth redeeming. As I grew up a bit and began to be blessed by some stuff coming out of the Church of England (mainly Soul Survivor and Alpha I think), my fiery rhetoric mellowed. But not by much. I simply argued that these contributions were despite and not because of their Anglicanism. They owed more to evangelicalism or charismatic life imported from elsewhere than anything inherently Anglican. But what I really wanted them to acknowledge was the scale of problem, the part of the church in causing it and the sheer poverty of its reply. Their pleas for the status quo or worse the faint hopes of renewal from within, seemed then and seems now, utterly inadequate. Christianity had become irrelevant or embarrassing and it was all the Church of England’s fault, so why couldn’t they admit the obvious?

Not that the church I grew up in really offered anything different. Its protestant religiosity failed to even hint at anything transformative. The evangelical free church that I was most familiar with wasn’t in the slightest bit subversive or challenging. We were odd and boring. We were odd because we believed the Bible. We were boring because the sermons were three quarters of an hour long. We were odd and boring because, back then at least, we kept Sundays special. This meant not playing team sports on a Sunday, not watching much TV or going to restaurants or later on shopping. This could have been subversive but wasn’t because there was nothing in its place worth looking at. While the Anglicans were stuck in either Victorian 1860 or the hippy 1960s, we free churches had got our time machines stuck in the 1950s. Some of them are there still. Faith had indeed connected us to the traditions of the past, but just not a part of the past that needed much connecting with.

When Kingsnorth, many years later, began looking for a spirituality to help him, so inoculated against Christianity was he that he writes, “I wanted something more serious, something with structure, rules, a tradition. It didn’t even occur to me to go and ask the vicars.”

And when, finally, Jesus had pursued Kingsnorth into submission, it still wasn’t to the vicars that he turned. Not that any alternative would have made much of a difference, as he himself admits.

Nothing similar was offered to me, and even if it were, it would have been undercut by the wider cultural narrative. The school may have had mandatory religious education classes, but the age taught another faith: Religion was irrelevant. It was authoritarian, it was superstitious, it was feeble proto-science. It was the theft of our precious free will by authorities who wanted to control us by telling us fairy tales. It repressed women, gay people, atheists, anyone who disobeyed its irrational edicts. It hated science, denied reason, burned witches and heretics by the million. Post-Enlightenment liberal societies had thrown off its shackles, and however hard both species of vicar tried to prevent it, religion was dying a much-needed death at the hands of progress and reason.

But when Kingsnorth realised that while religion might be dead and dying but Christ was neither he began to seek out Christ’s church. However he had seen enough, or perhaps more accurately he had not seen enough. Instead what he remembered was the absence more than the presence of the divine, so he turned eastwards again and found the Orthodox church and the Romanian version at that.

I found a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart—a faith with living saints and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power. I found a faith that, unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template but a mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters. The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story I had never heard at all.

Now this might seem like post in which to bash Anglicans, which I guess in some ways it is. But all these memories has served to deepen my conviction that our core mistake has been to play life by the rules of the world. Not only that but we failed to realise the deeper ways in which they were no longer Christian rules. We looked at the surface and didn’t realise that these surface things were shifting because the underpinnings had shifted.

This is also why, this playing of the game by the world’s rules, so much of Christianity in the UK looks middle-class and so many of the challenges it faces are the challenges of the middle-class. When I grew up the C of E was called the Tory party at prayer which was the party of the middle class. Now it is the Labour party at prayer and Labour are mostly the party of the middle class. Somewhere during the Blair years the Anglicans swapped reading The Telegraph and picked up The Guardian but not much else. Neither of things at either of those times should have been seen as a compliment. For the best part of a century or more we’ve been playing by someone else’s rules and those rules are most happily served by and for the mass in the middle and that group is likely the most resistant to the sort of reinvention we may need.

The church, of any denomination, flavour and form, needs not a new strategy but to radically reinvent the game. We need to reinvent communities and lifestyles from the ground up. Tie them into something deeper and inject them with something viral instead of inoculating the world against something vital.