There are many reasons why a person might come to faith.
For some, it's a gradual journey that unfolds over time.
For others, it's a result of one dramatic moment.
Today, we hear three very different stories with one common theme.
They speak of transforming lives by finding faith.
Welcome to Songs Of Praise.
On today's programme... We'll give
as much space to the atheists as to the believers.
..it's 40 years since a ground-breaking series
on Christianity first came to our screens,
and we explore the impact it had on vicar
and Christian broadcaster Giles Fraser.
Sea of Faith came along, and I was quite nervous
about the fact that it was actually leading me towards faith.
We hear from one woman who had a real-life
conversion on the road to Damascus...
I just had that revelation, really, that God had a plan
and a purpose, and he'd chosen me.
..and I meet a former star of the hit '90s series Gladiators,
who found faith after the programme came to an end.
I quickly learned the paradox of pleasure.
The more you get of something, the less it satisfies.
And I learned that fame can be fickle,
it can be a real double-edged sword.
My journey to faith began in my teenage years.
Like many Christians,
it was the message that Christ died on the Cross for me, and that
getting to Heaven had nothing to do with my achievements or actions.
So that message of Christ's sacrifice led me
to where I am today.
And it's the theme of our first hymn.
What a way to start our programme, singing the story of our faith.
And through time, that story has
been explored in many different ways, including on television.
This year marks 40 years since the landmark BBC series Sea of Faith.
As a Christian, I want to know in what form,
if any, Christian faith is possible for us today.
Presented by Christian theologian Don Cupitt,
it examined Christianity, questioned the existence of God,
and explored the challenges posed to religion by science and secularism.
The series caused controversy from viewers who felt it appeared
to promote atheism.
Yet, for one man, it had the opposite effect.
As we go on, we'll give as much space to the atheists as to
the believers, because they deserve it.
That man is Giles Fraser, a broadcaster, journalist
and vicar of Saint Anne's in Kew, West London.
Well, Giles, it's lovely to meet you. You're the vicar here...
I am. ..but you haven't always been a Christian.
Take us back to your childhood, paint a picture. Wow!
So my dad was in the Air Force, we moved around all the time.
I went away to posh school. I was trouble,
I was quite a lot of trouble at school.
And, yeah, no-one could ever have spotted this was the way
I was going to go.
And I didn't believe in anything.
And then Sea of Faith came along, which was this programme
and this extraordinary guy called Don Cupitt on the telly.
And this programme was sort of ground-breaking in a way.
Lots of people were annoyed about it, that it
was sort of giving in to atheism, but, actually, he sort of took
seriously all my doubts, but allowed me to bracket out all
the doubts I had about metaphysics or the supernatural and so forth.
For me, it was, like, where does your heart lead you?
And I found it quite...I was quite nervous about the fact
that it was actually leading me towards faith.
Giles, a philosophy student at the time, discovered that the
series was not only leading him towards faith, but one step further.
One night in his university library, after weeks of researching
deeper into the topic, he had a dramatic revelation.
I walked up the stairs to find the dean of the college, who was
a priest, and I said, "So how do you become a priest?"
And I was, like, if he'd have asked me the question, which he
didn't, "How long have you been a Christian?" - I'd have said,
"About three minutes."
In these programmes, we're going to pick out a number of key
turning points and a number of great thinkers.
So what was it about the series that convinced you?
Well, I think there was something building up within me
about faith that was very, very strong.
but there was all sorts of doubts getting in the way,
and I just thought I didn't believe this mumbo jumbo.
What this series did was address those issues and gave me
a reading list to think more carefully about those issues.
Suddenly, it was an exciting adventure.
It may be a trifle crude, but it works.
I think that the adventure of faith is something that we don't
always have as much as we ought to these days,
that faith is also an intellectual adventure,
and that books are exciting, and that TV series can be exciting.
And this sort of stuff can open you up to
a world of intellectual adventure.
Galileo was a great realist.
He thought he could read the book of nature and find in it certain
and final truths, just as the church got them from reading Scripture.
Is there a hymn, a particular hymn, that stands out to you?
How Shall I Sing That Majesty? So it starts with a question,
"How can we sing this?"
And then you've got these beautiful, sweeping cadences
which take you on a journey and leave you...
Leave me sort of battered at the end of it.
That's what makes me want to cry.
And it's in the crying,
and the beauty of the way your heart is lifted, that I find
something that maps quite accurately
what my faith sort of looks like.
Jesus taught that God's love
and forgiveness can be found, no matter what we've done.
Discovering that can be a profound moment in anyone's journey to faith,
and for many, the words of our next song, based on a cherished hymn,
capture it powerfully.
"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me."
One of the most famous stories of coming to faith in the Bible
is that of the Apostle, Paul, who had a dramatic vision of the risen
Jesus while he was travelling to Damascus.
To this day, many people describe a life-changing event as
a road to Damascus moment.
But for one woman in Oxford, it isn't just a metaphor.
She found faith on the actual road to Damascus.
This is Jazz Shaban, an author and disability advocate.
She lives with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone
disease, and uses her story to help others through her Small Voice
Projects initiative and charities, including Through the Roof.
My family moved to the UK
from Jordan around about 1954, before I was born.
So they came here originally because
I had a brother who needed medical help.
He was born with the same condition I have.
Just after I was born, my father died of leukaemia, and my mother
decided to take the other two children, leaving myself and
my eldest brother in the UK because she felt that we would have a better
chance of survival in the UK than we would if she took us back to Jordan.
Jazz, separated from her mum,
was sent to live at a Christian children's home, which is
where she first heard the message of Christianity.
I knew well my Bible stories,
but I can't say I necessarily had a relationship with Jesus,
or what part he was really going to play in my life.
As Jazz entered adulthood,
she developed a deeper interest in Christianity.
Around this time, also, she reconnected with her
mother in Jordan, and began making trips to see her.
On one such occasion, the two went to visit
relatives in the Syrian city of Damascus and had a big falling out
on the way.
So one day Mum and I were having this conversation about, well,
her pregnancy, really, with me,
and she was saying how desperate she was about the fact she
was having a baby so soon after having my brother,
and during the conversation,
she said that she'd actually planned to have an abortion.
She said that, "When you were born and I saw how you were,
"I wish I had gone through with the abortion."
And she ended up throwing me out of the car and into the Damascus road.
Jazz, abandoned once again, found refuge with a relative nearby.
Seeking wisdom and understanding,
she went searching for answers in a Bible she had packed with her.
The Bible fell open to Psalm 139,
I think it's verse 13, which said,
"I knew you in your mother's womb before you were born."
I'd never seen this verse before,
and at that moment, something just hit me
as I looked at that, and this voice as clear as a bell said to me,
"She might not have wanted you, but I did."
At that moment, on that day, I just had that revelation, really,
that God had a plan and a purpose, and he'd chosen me
before I was even born.
For Jazz, this marked a crucial turning point in her
journey of faith, an experience which she later wrote about.
I think my journey to faith was a bit of a slow burn, but it was on
that road to Damascus that I could
feel that change was in the air.
And then finding that verse in Psalms,
Jesus really did make himself known to me by reminding me
that I had been chosen,
and that whatever life
I was going to have from here on in
was going to be a good one.
Today, I'm exploring the stories of people who came to
Christianity in surprising ways.
For some, faith is found after a long search for meaning
and fulfilment in other things.
It's often said that fame
and fortune are the ultimate measures of success.
But what happens when you have it all and it still isn't enough?
This is Warren Furman,
a former body-builder who shot to fame in the '90s as the
character Ace in Gladiators, one of the biggest TV shows of the decade.
I've come to meet him at his local gym.
Well, Warren, it's great to meet a real-life Gladiator,
and see you train as well.
Tell me, what was that period of your life like?
Getting on Gladiators was like a proper rags-to-riches story.
I went from being just this obscure lad to suddenly
being on the biggest show on television.
But then I quickly learnt the paradox of pleasure -
the more you get of something, the less it satisfies.
And I learnt that fame can be fickle,
it can be a real double-edged sword. And there was no true joy in that.
And I started to realise...I thought that if I got fame
and riches that that would bring me
freedom, but, actually, it did the opposite.
As much as it looked all sparkly and great on the outside, on the inside
I was aware that I was spiritually empty and probably morally bankrupt,
actually, Sean.
Warren came from humble beginnings. Following a family tragedy,
he was discouraged from exploring faith as a young man.
My brother died when he was a baby, and when he did,
Mum stopped saying "Goodnight and God bless" to me.
And I'd say, "Why are you not saying God bless you any more?"
She said, "There is no God.
"If there was a God, your brother wouldn't have died."
And so if you're told that from your parents,
the biggest influence in your life, that there is no God,
you start asking, well, I certainly did, "What's it all about, then?"
And I grew up in a celebrity culture, so I was like,
Well, I don't want to be a roofer like my dad.
If you get one life, you want to live rich.
And the biggest star on the telly at that time was Arnold Schwarzenegger,
and Sylvester Stallone, highest-paid movie stars in history.
So I'm, like, I want to be like them guys.
After eight years on air, Gladiators came to an end in January 2000.
For Warren, it was the final curtain on his pursuit of fame,
and the beginning of his spiritual journey.
So Gladiators finished, and then Ace finished,
so there's no Ace Gladiator any more, so, actually, who am I?
But I'd realised by then that fame
and fortune doesn't bring happiness.
Spiritually, I knew I was empty,
so I think that's when I went
on an intense spiritual search.
I discounted the Bible,
I discounted Jesus because I thought Jesus, I didn't know he was life,
I thought he was death, weakness, nailed to a cross,
and so I searched everywhere except the Bible.
So it took somebody to invite me on an Alpha course for me
to hear the Gospel clearly communicated for the first time.
And to be told that God created me and that God loves me,
I thought, that's good news.
Dionne, Warren's wife, came to faith also during her husband's
conversion, but it didn't stop there for the pair.
This year, they were ordained as ministers in the Church of England.
What's it been like to see your husband
transform from a Gladiator
into an ordained minister?
It's been an absolute gift,
because none of our lives before,
any of the stuff, none of it's been wasted,
it's been used to be able to help spread the Gospel,
because there's a story, a clear story,
of before and after.
So I feel immensely grateful that we have that story to tell.
Now, is there a hymn that particularly chimes for you
that you really like?
Yes. One of our favourite worship songs is In Christ Alone.
I love the lyrics, "In Christ alone my strength is found.
"He is my light, my strength and my song."
And now a prayer from some of those we've met today.
Dear Lord, may we ever be curious, never afraid to keep
on questioning, challenging and deepening our understanding of you.
Help us to find you in all things.
And give us the courage to lead others to you,
holding the hand of those most in need of your love. Amen.
Next week, I'll be at Britannia Royal Naval College for a special
programme on remembrance.
I hope, like me, you've taken great
encouragement from our stories of finding faith today.
We end, appropriately, with a triumphant hymn that gives
all the glory to God. Goodbye.