Episode 22: Martyn Percy

Interview Date: 10 July 2020. Interviewer: Dr Jason Clark. Research and questions by Dr Simon Machin.

The former principal of Ripon College Cuddesdon, and former Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, the Very Revd Professor Martyn Percy is a British theologian with wide-ranging interests across faith, the church, music, culture and the social sciences. He is the subject of Reasonable Radical?: Reading the Writings of Martyn Percy, edited by Ian S Markham and Joshua Daniel. He has been a religious columnist for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Independent and is a member of the BBC’s Standing Committee on Religion and Belief. Martyn Percy is an honorary fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford and former dean of Christ Church, Oxford.

Martyn Percy - Timed Interview Summary

0:00 - 33:46 Family background and childhood

Martyn was born in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1962 in what was known at the time as “a home for naughty girls”, his natural mother being dispatched there by her parents before her pregnancy was obvious.  His adoptive parents had married in their late teens and thought that they were unable to have children, although they went on to have three. At the time the practice was to tell children that they were adopted: “chosen” and “special”. Martyn never felt that his adoption was a disadvantage.  Liverpool in the sixties was still recovering from the Second World War with the results of the bombing still evident. He is a lifelong Everton fan. Somehow Martyn never picked up the accent, much to the surprise of his many aunties, which they found fascinating. For the first ten years, the family attitude to church was characteristically English, attending only on Mothering Sunday, Harvest Festival and Christmas.

However, they move south in the early 1970s and his brother joins a church choir. By his teens, his parents’ friendship network has shifted towards the church. Despite having non-conforming teenage feelings, he is held by the consistency in genuine kindness and goodness. It was a no-fuss, no-frills Protestant form of Anglicanism. Church people were very interested in the potential of the young. Approaching the point of leaving school, careers advice suggests promise in the career paths as a teacher/educator or in the church. Within a fortnight he resolves to do ‘A’ levels, and the teaching is outstanding, leading Martyn to realise at seventeen that if he departs from this “vocational epiphany” his life will be lessened. There are not many books in the house, although his mother takes him to the library. He also reads his way through his parents’ Encyclopedia Britannia.

This intellectual curiosity, a magpie approach, has continued to grow and grow. Martyn thinks this may have a very deep roots in working through adoption. When teaching at Cambridge University he is in charge of setting an exam paper in the study of religion. In the general religious questions section, he always asked what linked the founders of the world religions: Muhammed, the Buddha, Moses and Jesus. The answer that he was really looking for what is that all were, in a sense, adoptees.  In good religions there is a comfort with hybridity. Martyn has a psychological trigger against rejection. It can be good to be intellectually transgressive, getting lost in libraries, and reading generally. After having initially struggled with the transition to education in Hertfordshire, Martyn’s parents move him to a quirky school, where he starts to enjoy learning, and he becomes the first person in his family to go to university.

33:47 – 40:20. University

Martyn decides to read theology which leads to some difficult family conversations about whether this is a useful subject, even though by this time they are card- carrying Christians.  He chooses Bristol, not applying for Oxford or Cambridge because this would have entailed staying on at school for longer. An extraordinary experience. He also experiments with attending a range of different churches. Whilst a student he does a little bit of copywriting and anticipates, after graduating, a career in publishing or marketing.  In his second year he writes to a publisher, enquiring about a graduate scheme. He is invited for lunch and five hours of conversation, and is offered a job after graduation.   

40:21 - 47:19 Publishing

Martyn is grateful for having been given a wide-ranging training in sales, marketing, editing, copywriting, advertising, print ordering and publishing conventions. He is enjoying it, and so he keeps the lid on the idea of ordination but in about 1987 there is a season when he finds himself being asked by many people whether he has considered being ordained. He talks with his vicar who puts him in contact with a director of ordinands who sends him off to a selection conference, whose feedback is positive. Even so his feelings are mixed, but Martyn realizes that he is not in a position to dictate terms. Religion is, in a word, surrender. There is a sense that you did sign a contract with God without being shown what the rest of it will look like.

47:20 – 54:03. Involvement in a tragic road accident

He is in Scotland with a work colleague, and has a premonition that it will be a difficult day. He is driving a car, and is not speeding but a cyclist does not see him when turning right, and crosses the carriageway, coming through the windscreen of the car. There is nothing to be done for him. It did lots of things to and for Martyn. It is a struggle to sleep, there are lots of flashbacks and what-if moments. But there is also a sharp turn in Martyn’s theology, setting him on a road to some form of realism. It is also the tipping point that eventually sets off a desire to discover his own origins.   

54:04 - 1:02:26 Emma

Very quickly Martyn and his future wife Emma realise that they are deeply attracted and will marry. They go on a long walk to “clear the air”. Emma encourages him, after they have their first child, to trace his birth mother (as do his adoptive parents). Through a mediator his birth mother does not want to meet (which Martyn understands). However, Martyn’s birth father makes immediate contact.  It is only since his time at Christ Church at Oxford, that they have established closer contact.       

1:02:27 - 1: 07:50 Non-conformism to conformism

The only other denomination that Martyn had briefly experienced at Bristol University was the house church.  Some aspects of its theology he finds haphazard and individually driven – and potentially abusive. There appeared to be no structure behind this and legitimate critics within the house church are easily out-narrated. Talking this through with a wise university chaplain, Martyn is asked to visualize where he would feel at home as a church leader with the question: “what are you wearing?” Martyn replies that he sees himself wearing robes. In the end he realizes that he is a loyal dissenter within a tradition that is conformist.   

1:07:51 - 1:15:57 Martyn’s PhD: Words, Wonder and Power 

It is on the subject of the movement in which Jason Clark is a pastor, the Vineyard Church. After he is recommended for ordination in 1988, Martyn is told that he can complete a higher degree at the Church of England’s expense. His original thought is to do something on C S Lewis, but over lunch with the late Andrew Walker, he is challenged to do something around what his interests are, and Martyn responds: marketing, the persuasiveness of language, claims about church growth. It so happens that the church that Martyn is attending is being “Wimberised” (named for the founder of the Vineyard Church, John Wimber). Martyn very quickly writes a proposal about the church growth movement, and his research includes some ethnography (Martyn attends church conferences and some quite strange healing missions).  He becomes interested in the language of power which soaked its way through Wimber’s discourse. For three years he has a doctoral supervisor who encourages him to read very widely.      

1:15:58 - 1:23:30 Martyn’s interest in the lived practices of the church

Rowan Williams’s insight that all theology begins in the middle of things. Life and lived Christianity are like that: they are not decided or determined by prescriptive ideologies. In the early stages of his doctorate Martyn is getting in touch with his anthropological instincts for the telling anecdote or incident. The Grammar of Assent (to borrow from John Henry Newman) in any church setting is laid out by the assumed nature of the worship, the language that it uses and the aesthetics around that. This could be termed the ideal spiritual weather. Martyn believes that these sentiments drive the theology of any church. But it is important to remember that there are no bad foods, only bad diets.    

1:23:31 - 1:28:31 The Reasonable Radical conference

Martyn’s development of the idea of illustrative fragments. They have to be used carefully because simply using fragments can be eclectic and such anecdotes have to be offered in a spirit of humility. One has to tune in quite deeply to the communities that are being investigated Also, some real work has to be done to ensure that religious communities genuinely concede the accuracy of the supposed insights.  

1:28:32 - 1:34:24 Two illustrative fragments

The Principal of Cuddesdon and the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. During an interview with the college newspaper at Cuddesdon, Martyn is asked what he is trying to do at Cuddesdon (and the same is true of his time at Christ Church). He answers that he is trying to help the ordinands who are there to become good (kind, generous, hopeful, truthful) people. An emphasis on people rather than the acquisition of toolkits. It comes back to the Prologue to St John’s Gospels. The calling of the Anglican clergy is to be as occupied as they can possibly be, with God, his people and his creation.