Our Story

The well-worn adage attributed to the Christian Anarchist, Elbert Hubbard, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, tartly suggests that even adversity can be turned to something productive. This recent experiment in recording the life histories of self-defining Christians in the public square and making them freely available on YouTube, a dedicated website, (ExtraECC.com), and as podcasts through Spotify and iTunes has proved that even during the Covid pandemic, human conversation can thrive in new ways.

In fact, the technological revolution that all social and friendship groups have benefited from during the pandemic – with the result that many now find themselves working from home some days – has broadened the range of online communication.  For those of us affected by this change, whether willingly or not, it has added the term “hybrid” to our vocabulary – the realization that both physical and virtual communication with friends, family and colleagues is the new social norm. And all social and friendship groups, are of course forced to consider the positives and negatives of this changed paradigm, and then respond to them.

Ironically, although it was not intended to coincide with the pandemic, our ExtraECC experiment was one of the few community projects that in retrospect can be seen to have benefited from lockdown. It was conceived as an antidote to the breaking down of the public square into self-reinforcing echo chambers (one of the admitted downsides of birds of a feather flocking together). The aim had simply been to foster wider understanding by concentrating on the lived experience of several prominent individuals across a range of religious groups.

However, after the first two recordings on location in London and then in Nottinghamshire, the pandemic intervened dramatically on the morning of a planned visit to Oxford in March 2020 for the third in the series. Oxford was literally closed down, although the session would probably not have gone ahead as two of the members of the travelling team went down with suspicious symptoms. All subsequent recordings have been conducted online. And given the logistical difficulty of coordinating diaries, arranging suitable venues and travelling the long distances (with a couple of the interviews being transatlantic!), it is probable that many would not have taken place at all. It is also likely that our collective transition to this new way of online communicating, at a time when many of us had time on their hands, speeded up interview production. As the creator, producer and researcher of the series, although not the interviewer, it was gratifying that such a high percentage of those contacted accepted our invitation and went on to be featured.    

The ExtraECC website carries a quotation from the American novelist, Eudora Welty: “The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order... The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.” As producer of the series, I have sometimes wondered whether the disordering of time which was the inevitable product of lockdown has intensified the intimacy and introspection of the interviews. Each was conducted seamlessly in one take with no subsequent editing. In some of them there is a sense of self-discovery.  Several of the contributors have alluded to the pandemic as an opportunity to regroup and gain a new level of intimacy and authenticity in personal relationships. If it has taken Zoom in a time of Covid to teach this perhaps bittersweet lesson, let us hope that those hard-won benefits are not lost as we emerge again into the sunlight of free association.  

Our project title needs some explaining. It was prompted by the tattoo on the arm of our main interviewer, Dr Jason Clark: Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, meaning There is no health or salvation outside the Church. Jason had a very tough upbringing in Luton with parents who were hostile to Christianity, and it was only after being invited to a meeting at a Baptist church that he came into the Church and then spent many years running one in Sutton. Therefore, the whole idea of the decisions that we make, which might also be seen as a form of prevenient grace in the intervention of God, was something worth exploring. For example, the Church of England would have looked very different if the teenaged Rowan Williams, who is also featured in the series, had not decided to see what was happening at the Anglo-Catholic church up the road in The Mumbles, Swansea, where he was living. 

In concordance with this principle of grace, the ExtraECC interview archive is run out of a non-profit and on a totally voluntary basis. Our guests have given their time freely and spoken with great authenticity. We hope that you will draw inspiration from their experience.

Simon Machin on behalf of the Separate Star CIC team