Sarah, 24, grew up in Abingdon, Oxfordshire where she worshipped with her parents at Christ Church, before later going to the Peachcroft Christian Centre. I first met her as she ran a workshop at the Diocese’s Living Faith Worldwide conference in October. There she had impressively joined Bishop Lawrence from Nandyal and the Rt Revd Andrew Proud, Bishop of Reading, on a panel, addressing issues of faith across the world, to a packed room at St Stephen’s Church, Reading.

She says: “I grew up in a Christian home and continued going to church until I was about 12 or 13, when I started not to go so regularly, until I was in sixth form, and made friends who went to the Peachcroft Christian Centre and I started to go there.
“That led me to take a gap year working for Latin Link and I did an overseas mission trip to Ecuador. It was a really great experience.” She went on to study English at Birmingham University, where she says she became more disillusioned with Christianity and the Church.
“I never gave up on it but I questioned why I was bothering. I forced myself to keep going but I had a lot of friends that weren’t Christians and I didn’t find it that relevant,” she says.

She began volunteering for Oasis, a charity that works across the UK to transform communities. The charity is linked to Oasis Church Waterloo in London, where Sarah now worships.

“I was doing community work in schools and youth clubs and it started to broaden my perspective of what church and being a Christian was about.
“I’ve always known that social action and helping the poor was important, but I’ve never been in a setting where that was the focus, and this was an important period for me.

“I have found living in London there is a lot of materialism among young people and it’s easy to become caught up in a materialistic lifestyle. I enjoyed volunteering for Oasis. I met Christians who were thinking about things in a more deconstructed way and looking at theology in ways I hadn’t been exposed to before.”

She stumbled across Speak while she was looking for work, still going through doubts. She said: “I had preconceptions about hippies and activists and wasn’t sure I wanted to work for a Christian organisation, but a Christian organisation found me and I started working for SPEAK in August 2010.

“It’s continued to challenge my faith and to strengthen it. It’s given me new perspectives in a lot of ways. I hadn’t seen Speak’s ethos of prayer and action together modelled elsewhere. Churches I’d been to had been focused on the inner spiritual life and your personal relationship with God or on social action. They had also been focused on personal salvation and guilt, but not doing a lot about tackling injustice.

“Being part of Speak has helped me re-read the Gospel and see Jesus as a much more radical figure and seeing that the idea of God’s salvation is not just being a personal thing for us but for the whole world and realising again as Christians we have a responsibility to bring about change, not just to ourselves but to the whole world and its systems.

“If we take that seriously we should be at the fore front of campaigning for change and we really need to live our lives with integrity.

“I have seen people in Speak who will live that out with the integrity of a personal faith and living ethically and campaigning to see the bigger structures of oppression changed.

“Speak is ecumenical and draws on a lot of different traditions within the Christian faith. It puts aside the potentially divisive issues which can be problematic in church settings. It’s shown me the richness of the Christian traditions and how we can draw on those in new ways. There isn’t one right way to do worship or to do prayer. It’s exciting that it’s a youth led movement, and it’s trying to engage a younger generation in campaigning and prayer. A lot of young adults are disillusioned and apathetic and are not interested in a church that doesn’t do anything. Speak is is keen to work with people of all ages to empower them to take action against injustice. Representatives are available to talk in churches. For more visit www.speak.org.uk or call 020 898 19441.