Worship: A safe place for pain - Graham Fender Allison
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In this episode, Gillian Straine is joined by Graham Fender-Allison, a long-standing member of the GoHealth team with a background in facilitation, creative worship, and work with the Church of Scotland. Graham shares his personal faith journey — from a restless teenager in Glasgow encountering God in unexpected places, to finding deep healing through embodied worship and honest community. Together, Gillian and Graham explore what worship really is, how it heals us, where it can go wrong, and why the church can be one of the most profound places for human flourishing.
Graham opens up about coming to faith in his late teens, drawn in by watching his mother change, and by an unexpected encounter with a street preacher and a tract that set something stirring in him he couldn't quite name. He reflects on the formative influence of Renfield St Stephen's Church in Glasgow, with its remarkable breadth of worship styles, and how a diverse community held his many questions without trying to control his answers.
Gillian and Graham dig into the relationship between worship and identity, exploring how liturgy, embodied ritual and community can help us find out who God made and meant us to be. Graham reflects on how a driving anxiety around salvation gradually gave way, not through theological study alone, but through an inward journey toward seeing himself the way God sees him.
The conversation moves into the heart of GoHealth's work: what it means to create worship and training spaces that are genuinely healing — embodied, relational, multivalent, and safe for pain. Graham shares a powerful story from the Church of Scotland's National Youth Assembly, where a simple pilgrimage and stone-laying liturgy brought profound healing to a young couple who had experienced a miscarriage, and touched the lives of over 200 young people in completely different but equally real ways.
They also address the harder question of when healing ministry causes harm — and how good theology, listening, humility, and team-based ministry are essential safeguards.
Key Themes
- How faith begins: unexpected encounters, curious questions, and the gift of community
- Worship as the place where we discover who God made us to be
- Embodied liturgy and symbolic action as pathways to healing
- Why worship must be multivalent — speaking differently to each person present
- The risks of healing ministry done badly, and how to spot the signs
- Worship as a safe place for pain — and for joy
- Sounding like yourself. This self-led online course, drawn from a lecture by Dr Doug Gay, Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow, explores the profound connections between healing and human flourishing.