Do you feel more at home on the edges of faith than at the centre? Christian life has often been associated with conformity and a culture where people don’t feel able to ask questions. But Dave Tomlinson thinks our spiritual communities can be ‘laboratories of the Spirit’ where we explore issues of faith and spirit with openness, imagination and creativity. Can they be places where doubts and questions are an essential part of faith, and divine revelation can be found in art, science and the natural world as well as religious tradition?

The Revd Dave Tomlinson is the author of the seminal book The Post-Evangelical and more recently How to be a Bad Christian… and a better human being (Hodder 2013) and Black Sheep and Prodigals: An Antidote to Black and White Religion (Hodder 2017). He is the Vicar of St Luke’s Holloway and a regular contributor to RBBC Radio 2’s Pause for Thought.