17th August 2025 

Holiday Reading & Listening: Undivided - Vicky Beeching

It is with more than a little trepidation that I include this very personal memoir from Vicky Beeching in my holiday reading recommendations this summer. I am aware that there will be a whole spectrum of opinions on and responses to the issues her story raises, and that I am knowingly stepping into a potential minefield. Nevertheless, in I go - and I hope that you will appreciate the fact that I'm choosing to do this on the weekend I'm still here so that you can argue with me on Sunday, not in the middle of my holiday!

Vicky Beeching was brought up in a Christian home and started to write worship songs in her teens, with songs such as "Hungry" and "'Yesterday, today and forever" reaching the top of the Christian music charts in the early 2000s. She devoted her life to travelling around big evangelical charismatic Christian conferences, in the US and UK, speaking and leading sung worship. But Vicky had a secret which, if it came out, she feared would blow her life and ministry apart - she was gay.

Keeping her sexuality to herself came at a huge cost - the stress of constantly wearing a mask in public, of not really admitting who she was even to herself in private led to her contracting a serious auto-immune disease. The book records her struggles with illness, and the consequences of her coming out publicly as gay.

Many of us hold many different opinions on the rights and wrongs of, for example, blessing same sex relationships in church. This book will not necessarily change those opinions and, I think, doesn't seek to. However, it would be, I think, impossible to read Vicky Beeching's story and not be saddened, even horrified and ashamed, by the way the Church which she loves treated her. And perhaps this raises a question more important than the vexed and divisive issue of blessing same sex relationships.

For me, the heart of the issue is this: surely it cannot be right that someone like Vicky Beeching - perhaps someone in our own congregation - should feel that she has to conceal who she is, even to the point of making herself seriously ill, because she fears the reaction of the church community of which she is a part. Surely a community of faith and love must also be a community of truth, where we can honestly and openly be ourselves without fear of rejection, and without fear that taking off the mask will blow apart a carefully constructed, but fragile edifice.

Whatever your views on the questions of human sexuality that divide the church, I would encourage you to engage with this deeply personal and deeply challenging story.