The great turning point in my life spiritually was somebody else’s baptism. Three years at a left-wing, modern university and a childhood in the Church of England had convinced me entirely of the non-existence of God. So when Marilyn and I had 8lbs of screaming called Sally Anne Archer suddenly placed in our lives there was absolutely no way the kid was being Christened; in fact you wouldn’t get me into church again, unless you paid me. (And, as I worked as a singer, I was frequently paid to sing in church.)
If God had a plan at this point, and my theological understanding now causes me to believe that He did, it was this: as a general rule husbands do what their wives tell them. So not long after declaring that no child of mine was going to be baptised I found myself sitting in a baptism class at my local church surrounded by horrendous smiling people, in atrocious sweaters, serving instant coffee. In a very ordinary, naffly-carpeted room, a pretty unimpressive presentation of the Christian faith was inflicted on all those gathered and then after a final prayer the victims were released back into the wild. Marilyn turned to me at the end and asked me this question: ‘what did you make of that?’ And her atheist husband looked her in the eye and said: ‘well it all seems true to me.’ Mmmm.
In John 3 Jesus says to Nicodemus you don’t see wind. It comes from somewhere, breezes through you, and blows on. And He says so it is with the Spirit of God. Sometimes the Spirit breezes through and leaves holy chaos in the life of an individual—it’s as if they’ve jumped back in the womb and been born again. Suddenly I believed in the virgin birth, the death of Christ on the cross for the salvation of humanity, the resurrection and the ascension. Suddenly I stopped swearing and blaspheming and gave up my life of crime. (Actually, I had no life of crime, but the story is so much more dramatic that way.) And nine years later I was ordained in the Church of England. That was some breeze.
Today is a really good day, people are being baptised at the Abbey. So a warning to you all—God is in the room.
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