You know, it’s a pity I’m going to miss this meeting, it’s the sort of thing I’d like to go to, evangelicalism is fascinating both to insiders and outsiders.

It’s a sub-culture which has been central to my own life and faith and one which reassures and frustrates in equal measure.

You say that the question at the heart of your book is ‘why do people from the same religious community choose such different paths?’ Interesting that. I have in more recent years thought of this, my community, not as a great single community with a common vision, but rather a disparate people, a loosely stitched patchwork of people and organisations and denominations, identified not by what we have in common but by how we distinguish ourselves from one another.

In a way it seems as if it is these differences, the little nuances of belief and practise, by which we identify ourselves more closely with God than another. There’s always someone, somewhere offering, as a hymn writer says, a ‘closer walk with God’.

Perhaps these are the different roads; perhaps, beyond a commonality of language we are not the same community; perhaps evangelicals are… communities. Communities in search of… what shall I say, an identity, a home, which is odd, given that it is we evangelicals who emphasise so much new birth. It’s as if, though ‘born again’, we still don’t know who we are.

Then again, maybe that’s just me!!