Seekers and New Christians
How to search for God
If you are reading this page, then you are looking for God. And that, surprisingly, means that God is seeking you, too. It is no easy thing to find God in our culture. Post-modernism means that we are pretty suspicious of “grand narratives” which purport to explain everything. And the particular history of Christianity in Australia means that you have probably had to overcome a fair degree of scepticism about the whole enterprise to get here in the first place.
So, welcome.
You don’t have to start out as God’s ride-or-die. Just being able to entertain the idea, and willing to engage in the conversation is an excellent start. It’s a truism that faith is a journey. It’s a truism - but only because it is true.
We love to accompany seekers and new Christians in their spiritual quests at Northcote Uniting Church. Our basic thought is that, in this era of long-form podcasts, this, the most highly educated generation in history gets that simplistic answers are not always the best answers. That, whatever a Christian is, it has to be something which integrates your heart, mind, and soul.
This page has a few resources which some of our community have found helpful in their journey and we hope that you will find them helpful too.
Discovering Christianity: A Guide for the Curious - Rowan Williams
A short book by a very learned person. Rowan Willams was the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church, is a poet, a theologian, and an all round deep thinker. His short book on explaining Christianity is worth your time.
Religious feeling and perception is based on the sense of human limit, human vulnerability if you will. And it is based on the sense that to be human is not necessarily to be at the centre of things, or to be in control of things, as if I could have a kind of lighthouse vision that, circling about the entire scope of reality, lit up everything with an even light centred in me, my mind or my heart. But what if, after all, I’m not at the centre of everything, but part of a vast and rich interweaving of points of view and kinds of energy mingling and shaping one another?
Williams, Rowan. Discovering Christianity: A guide for the curious.
Don’t Forget that We Are Here Forever, A New Generation's Search for Religion - Lamorna Ash
Published in 2025, this is a beautiful book about a spiritual quest. A young British woman decides to look into Christianity like a journalist - by meeting Christians and seeing what they get up to. It almost reads like a whodunnit as we search with her, through all sorts of different spiritual communities, some of which she finds moving and helpful, and others, frankly, a little naff. Particularly interesting is that, rather than being a conservative Gen Z man, she is definitely, and unapologetically, a woman of the left. I highly recommend it.
Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense, Francis Spufford
A gritty, contemporary work, published in 2014, from a Booker Prize listed writer and writing teacher. It is heartfelt and begins right in the middle of the human condition, a story of God finding you when you are at the absolute bottom of your life, leading to one of my favourite ideas from any Christian book: the human propensity to f*** things up, which feels exactly right.. It’s a beautiful book which has been very well received, and I commend it to you.
In my experience, it’s belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. It’s belief which demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending. Pretending that might as well be systematic, it’s so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.
Spufford, Francis. Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense
The Apostles Creed - Ben Myers
We did a book group focused on this book in 2025. It’s well worth a read as a way of going a little bit deeper into the Christian faith, using the framework of the Apostle’s Creed, a short confession of faith which is common to all Christian denominations.
It is often said that creeds are political documents, the cunning invention of bishops and councils who are trying to enforce their own understanding of orthodoxy. In the case of the Apostles’ Creed, nothing could be further from the truth. It was not created by a council. It was not part of any deliberate theological strategy. It was a grassroots confession of faith. It was an indigenous form of the ancient church’s response to the risen Christ, who commanded his apostles to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19–20).
Myers, Benjamin . The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism
Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
This is the granddaddy of works trying to explain Christianity to a sceptical public. You may know Lews from his Narnia books and the films made from them, but you may not know that he was an Oxford, and later Cambridge, academic, and a very serious scholar in Medieval and Renaissance English - his work The Discarded Image is a classic.
Mere Christianity was originally delivered as a series of radio talks in the depths of the Second World War, which accounts for the examples which sprang to mind for him. He is also a man of his time. But it is still the classic work, sparkling and witty and engaging, if you read it a little generously. It has helped millions of people all over the world for generations, and it might well help you too.