Publisher's Synopsis
This charming and deeply insightful book is a real pleasure to read, and has the power to make its readers rethink their most basic beliefs. John Simpson, English foreign correspondent and world affairs editor of BBC News
In this colourful memoir, from 1950’s childhood to the COVID crisis, Brian Mountford describes his life as a priest, which has spanned a period of immense social change and seen the secularisation of Britain to the point where 52% of the population say they have ‘no religion’. Opening with a vibrant account of London in the Sixties, he moves to Cambridge college life in the Seventies, Suburbia in the Eighties, and thirty years as Vicar of the ‘most visited parish church in England’, the University Church, Oxford. Rich in humour and anecdote, he unpacks his liberal theological ideas on the way, addressing questions such as God, the meaning of life, sexual ethics, and the relationship between doubt and faith. A central idea is that the abandonment of organised religion has not eradicated spiritual questioning and, following Philip Larkin’s poem Church Going, from which the book takes its title, people of all ages are forever ‘surprising/A hunger in (themselves) to be more serious.’ Both the story and the essay content will fascinate many, many more people than actually go to church.
Church Going Gone is the work of a man of great goodness, considerable stubbornness, and not a little cunning. How can a person of liberal, humane, and imaginative instincts survive in the modern Church of England? Brian Mountford has not only survived, but for thirty years had the living of St Mary’s, the University Church in Oxford, the site of events of enormous consequence such as the trial of the Oxford Martyrs in 1555, and the centre of a busy and intellectually challenging modern parish. In the course of his life as a priest Mountford aroused enormous admiration not only for his liberal stance but also for his personal qualities of kindness and open-mindedness, and for the imaginative (and occasionally provocative) way in which he welcomed speakers from many different traditions to his church. All his qualities are vividly present in this book, as well as a lively gift for scene-setting and character-drawing. I enjoyed it enormously. Sir Philp Pullman
Brian Mountford senses our deep hunger to have answers to the big questions; part of his deeply liberal, protesting faith is to encourage us all to keep on asking. Sarah Lloyd Managing Director of BBC's QI
Brian Mountford has written a witty and captivating memoir. He brilliantly evokes the utterly different world of the Church of England in the late sixties and, through the story of his own ministry, offers a fascinating - and sobering - perspective on the sea changes that the Church has undergone over the past fifty years. Jane Shaw, Principal of Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford
