About the Compiler:

My Christian journey has passed through different stages, events and experiences. The cartwheel expresses not so much a progression in my history as an ongoing meeting with the God of new beginnings, to the present day. The places, pictures, verse and quotations have all helped to illustrate insights which I have found precious.

I was six years old when I was evacuated to Scotland from the Blitz of London in 1940. The gift of a pocket New Testament then marked the start of a spiritual quest which led on to my conversion and call, first to Christ and then eventually to his service for more than sixty years in the ministry of the Church of England in Liverpool, County Durham and, more recently, the East Midlands.

Recently, I posted online ‘Faith Markers on the Evangelical Anglican Way.’ It is a selection of ‘Statements of Christian Faith: 1375 to the Present Day’, under twelve headings which serve now as headlines for the content of each of the twelve rooms in this collection.

About ‘Faith Shapers’: ‘Faith Shapers’ presents the heartfelt beliefs, mainly but not exclusively of Christian persons, expressed in verse they themselves have composed. Where ‘Faith Markers’ is an earlier collection of ‘statements’, in this anthology the authors are poetic exponents, and in some cases opponents, of an orthodox evangelical and Anglican faith.

Together with a few credible observers and critics, Christians are given their poetic ‘say’ on what they consider to be important, both positively in terms of their core beliefs, but also negatively with regard to the disturbing anomalies, recurring discrepancies and unrecognised flaws which they detect in themselves and others along the way.

To a greater or lesser extent therefore the verse, and quotations, derive from women and men who have enhanced, or in practice sometimes disfigured, the desired Christ-like image to which all Christians aspire.

However, they are all of importance for those who are wanting to find the evangelical Anglican way, and continue to see it as a positive path-finding movement in the Church as it follows the two commandments of Jesus: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind…. And you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 22:37-39).

Ian Bunting

Read more about Ian’s Faith Markers.