In my garage, and perhaps in yours – although my garage (an old school) is probably bigger than your garage – in a dusty box, is a collection of old computers with all the necessary paraphernalia.
Amongst them are a Sinclair ZX81 and a Sinclair Spectrum. And, it’s only recently that I took my old Amstrad to the tip. These relics of my thirties are now icons of the 1980s.
We’ve said before that Sea of Faith was a child of the eighties. In the year the BBC broadcast The Sea of Faith, Margaret Thatcher had been in office for five years. A coking plant in Orgreave was the scene of violent clashes between picketing miners and riot police. David Jenkins was consecrated Bishop of Durham and York Minister was struck by a bolt of lightning. Boy George was the nation’s pop idol. Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s interpretation of Ravel’s Bolero won them an Olympic gold in Sarajevo and Alan Sugar began producing his range of Amstrad computers and word processors.
Sea of Faith Magazine was a child of the nineties, made possible by the rapid growth of home computer technology. Clive Richards, the first editor of the magazine, describes the process in the third issue:
While contributions began to trickle in for the first issue, I was involved in a rapid learning experience as my much loved typewriter was junked in favour of a new personal computer and laser printer together with the requisite wordprocessing and desktop publishing software with which to assemble the new ‘product’.
I’d met Clive Richards at the Loughborough School of Religious Studies. He’d enrolled as a student and despite never having had any kind of religious affiliation had an extensive knowledge of radical theology and a large collection of 1960s popular, paperback theology. He was a politics graduate and house husband. So far as I know, his only job had been as a cinema manager in Birmingham:
For this essential capital expenditure I must thank my partner, Lyn Bulman, to whose successful career I provide full-time domestic support. I am fortunate to be able to organise my time to accommodate the burst of concentrated activity involved in getting something like the magazine together. The first issue was produced against a background of not just unfamiliarity with new technology but also having to divide my time between Loughborough and Bristol, where Lyn had started a new job. The appearance of the first magazine in March (1990) was almost as much of a relief as finally selling our house in the East Midlands after nine tedious months.
For me, Clive was the Peter Mandelson of Sea of Faith. He had a shrewd political mind and behind the scenes was instrumental in helping to give Sea of Faith shape and direction. After organising three conferences, I remember him insisting that the whole conference organising committee resign in order to test that there really was a commitment to the future of the network and the annual conference.
The magazine was launched not long after a policy and task-setting meeting open to all on the SOF mailing list had agreed the founding of the network.
Clive Richards again:
A network was all very well, I thought, but it was like a grid with the power turned off.
People wouldn’t feel linked to it (especially those who for whatever reason couldn’t or didn’t want to attend conferences) unless they received something from it. I also felt very strongly that SOF’s ‘agenda’ was getting perilously academic and removed from concerns such as integrity of church membership, relations with traditional believers and a continuing sense of spirituality that loomed large in conversations I’d had in a SOF context.
I believed some balance could be restored and non-conference members ‘included in’ with the production of a magazine for the network, written by members themselves. I wanted to ‘turn on the current’ and, having volunteered, was elected as Editor .
Clive, like all our editors, worked hard to encourage members to risk putting their thoughts down on paper and spent a lot of time patiently going through their work to improve their arguments. In an attempt to encourage new discussion he suggested some possible topics. Here’s a couple of them:
How can we guard against our radical beliefs becoming elitist and inward-looking and make then relevant to people who suffer – physically, finanially or environmentally?
Does the phenomenon of SOF signify anything? Is it more of an end than a beginning? Or just a means of adapting to a post-Christian posture?
Clive handed on the editor’s baton to David Boulton after ten editions with a plea to keep the scope of Sea of Faith wide.
The Sea of Faith Magazine, or in its latest reincarnation Sofia, will always have a special place within Sea of Faith. But we are now in the second decade of the twenty-first century and while the magazine has been embracing innovations in publishing and printing, technology has made remarkable advances in other directions. The 1990s saw the development of the World Wide Web. Patti Whaley was quick to put Sea of Faith on the web and launched the Sea of Faith website.
Rob Wheeler gave it a radical revision and added to its resources.
Our youngsters grow up social networking, tweeting, and downloading their books on to their Kindle or Ipad. The magazine also has its place on the website but if our discussions are to have a relevance and a future then we have to embrace the relevant technology as well.