St Faithful’s, Havnot, is a loyal, traditional parish church: faithful congregation, careful liturgy, dependable volunteers, and a quiet suspicion of anything described as “vision-led strategic renewal.”The Diocese has other ideas.Just up the road is St Paddy’s, a thriving Resource Church: energetic, confident, and convinced it knows how the future of the Church should look. When the Diocese proposes a partnership between the two churches, the plan seems straightforward. Ex...

The Crack in the WallA St Faithful’s StorySt Faithful’s, Havnot, is a loyal, traditional parish church: faithful congregation, careful liturgy, dependable volunteers, and a quiet suspicion of anything described as “vision-led strategic renewal.”The Diocese has other ideas.Just up the road is St Paddy’s, a thriving Resource Church: energetic, confident, and convinced it knows how the future of the Church should look. When the Diocese...

St Faithful’s, Havnot, is an entirely ordinary parish.The boiler misbehaves.The WhatsApp group overreacts.The biscuits run out at critical theological moments.And yet, beneath the gentle chaos, something deeper stirs.In this third volume of The Parish Life, the fictional community of St Faithful’s dares to step into harder conversations. Identity. Power. Law. Shame. Suffering. The things polite church meetings prefer to postpone.What...

Parish life is not tidy.It is not efficient.It is not always dignified.It involves dogs in the Lady Chapel, theological debates in pubs, risk assessments for forest holidays, and at least one war memorial that has seen more drama than it bargained for.In The Parish Life – Volume 2, we return to St Faithful’s, Havnot — a fictional English parish that looks suspiciously like the real thing. Here, the PCC is vigilant, the verger sees everything, the cu...

This book began, as many modern parish initiatives do, with reluctance.For some time, the idea had been gently but persistently suggested that the life of the parish might benefit from a Facebook presence. Not a website, you understand — that was beyond our competence entirely — but something more immediate, more conversational, more “engaging”. Something, in short, that might reassure the wider community that the church was still here, still alive, and still capable of forming com...

How do you keep faith when the world keeps changing?In this new volume of The Parish Life, St Faithful’s Havnot is still very much itself—English countryside, tea in the vestry, PCC statements gently moving from chaos to paperwork.But it has become harder to ignore everything that gets talked about in the news.The climate. Conflicts. Questions of identity and belonging. Whether anyone actually understands how TikTok works.And so—with the time-honour...

Welcome back to St Faithful’s, Havnot.A place where the kettle is never quite where it should be, the notices are always slightly out of date, and the conversations have a habit of wandering from biscuits to the nature of God without anyone quite noticing.In this fifth volume of The Parish Life, Tom Kennar returns to the much-loved fictional parish where faith is rarely neat, doubt is never unwelcome, and turning up counts for more than getting everything right.