Scott Gough spent the first 36 years of his life as a sceptic. A journey sparked by Clips from 'The Chosen', a drama about the life of Jesus, appearing on his TikTok feed led to his coming to faith and earlier this year he was baptised in his local church. Below is his reflection on his journey after baptism.
Scott’s Reflection
When my wife Chrissie and I were baptised at St Philip the Deacon in Upper Stratton in February, I assumed the story was complete. I had spent 36 years as a sceptic, followed the evidence further than I ever meant to, and gone under the water. The search was over. What I didn't expect was that the harder part was only beginning.
Nobody hands you a map for what comes after. The road to belief has a shape most people recognise: the questions, the search, the surrender. The ground on the other side is less familiar. It is where faith has to learn to live inside an ordinary life, with a full-time job, six boys and a calendar that was already full before God turned up in it.
What surprised me first was how quickly the church made room. I never put myself forward for anything. Within weeks of the baptism our vicar had heard, through a friend, that I was curious about the Exploring Christianity course, and left a workbook waiting for me in the choir vestry. Chrissie and I were invited into a Bible study group that had been running for nearly two years. We were invited onto the electoral roll. Each time, we were treated as people who belonged in the room, even though we had only been in it a matter of months.
So, we kept saying yes. Making sandwiches for the homeless on Thursdays. Helping with the curtain changes. Pancakes for the children. Before I knew it, I was standing at the front of the church giving the congregation an update on the summer fête and asking for volunteers. The project manager in me knew exactly how to do that. The new Christian in me was amazed to be asked.
That, I think, is what belonging looks like from the inside. It is less a feeling than a pattern. Someone notices you, makes room, and then asks about the next thing. Faith stops being only something you receive and becomes something you are trusted to carry for other people.
The questions didn't stop, though. They changed. Before I believed, my questions were about evidence. Is any of this true? Did it happen? Those were hard, but they could be worked through. The questions that came afterwards are harder to put into words.
How do you talk about faith with your children when some of them believe and some don't? One of my sons is the sceptic I used to be, and I recognise every argument he makes because I made them first. I found myself writing a letter to all six boys about science and God, trying to answer the question I had lived inside for most of my life. Science explains how. Faith asks why. I wanted them to see that you don't have to give up one to take the other seriously.
How do you pray honestly when the answer isn't the one you hoped for? How do you hold the things you will never fully understand? I have had to make peace with the limits of what I can know, which is not easy for someone whose working life runs on evidence. What I have found is that the questions don't threaten the faith. They are part of how it grows.
Then there is the strange experience of being known. My first book came out in the summer, and I put eight copies on a stand at the back of the church for anyone to borrow. The people walking past were the people I worship with every week. They had watched me arrive not knowing what I was doing, and now they could read about my marriage, my doubts and my late father, and check the pages against the man. That was more exposing than any stranger reading it, and also more freeing.
If you have come to faith recently, or you're wondering whether a church would have room for someone like you, here is what I would say. The conversion is not the end of the story. It is the end of the first chapter. What comes next is less dramatic and, in many ways, more surprising: ordinary people, ordinary weeks, and a sense of being folded into something far bigger than yourself.
I have written about those months in my second book, ‘The Unexpected Path to Belonging: Faith After the Water’, which is out now. It picks up where the first book left off, at the water's edge, and follows what happened when an ordinary man came up from it and found he had been handed work to do.
Scott Gough worships at St Philip the Deacon, Upper Stratton. His books are available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.