For most of his adult life, Scott Gough felt he had no use for God. A self-employed project manager from Swindon, married with six boys, he trusted science, valued evidence, and was convinced that faith and reason could not coexist. He was not in crisis or at rock bottom. He was comfortable. What changed was not a sudden revelation but a slow accumulation: a television series, a conversation about grief beneath the stars, a leather-bound Bible that kept him reading long past midnight, and, finally, the evidence itself, pointing somewhere he had never expected it to lead.
Scott lives in Swindon with his wife Chrissie and six sons. He runs a project management consultancy and is also the author of 'The Unexpected Path to Faith', a book published earlier this year describing his journey from a comfortable life without faith to a life transformed by God.
Comfortable is exactly how he describes his life before finding faith. He says that "if a form asked for my religion, I wrote atheist and did not think twice". Having lived as a contented agnostic atheist for 36 years, Scott was not hostile to religion, finding it interesting in much the same way that ancient history is interesting. Life was built on things that could be tested, and faith seemed like a position a person adopted when they stopped asking questions.
Things began to change in the subtlest and gentlest of ways. Clips from 'The Chosen', a drama about the life of Jesus, began to appear on his TikTok feed. He recalls watching each one to the end, thinking that it seemed worth a watch, before moving on.
One evening, while his wife was working a late shift and the children were asleep, he put the show on with no particular expectations. About twenty minutes in came a scene in which Mary Magdalene, seemingly beyond the help of everyone around her, is met by Jesus. He looks at her and says a single word: her name.
He paused the show and texted his wife, telling her she needed to watch it. Almost immediately, he talked himself out of the idea and went to bed. Yet he couldn't stop thinking about what he had seen, and the next morning he started watching again.
Scott decided to go straight to the source and bought a Bible, read the Gospels, and listened to a harmony of the Gospels through the YouVersion app. He then read Acts and could not get past the fact that the disciples had watched their leader executed and, instead of scattering, Christianity exploded under persecution.
The conclusion that Jesus truly is the Son of God and that the Christian worldview is correct did not come peacefully; instead, it arrived in the form of an internal argument. Questions such as 'How have I been wrong for so long?' took time to work through.
Soon after, he attended a Sunday service at St Philip's in Upper Stratton and heard the words of John 1 that had triggered an avalanche of thoughts in his mind months earlier. The preacher spoke about who Jesus claimed to be and the impossibility of a safe middle ground of belief. It was, in every way, a continuation of the conversation he had been having with himself since watching The Chosen.
Baptism followed for both Scott and Chrissie, who had arrived at the same place by her own path.
Scott has now written a book about his story. One of the main reasons for writing it was, in his words, "The faith story most people know is the rock bottom one. Everything falls apart, and God is the last resort. That is a true story, but it is not mine, and while I believed it was the only shape available, I assumed faith was not for me. I wanted to put a different shape on the shelf, so that somebody comfortable, settled and unconvinced might read it and think, 'you do not have to lose everything first.'"
Since coming to faith, the difference in Scott's life has been gentle, gradual and profound. Scott says, "The occasional short fuse I had before has not vanished. The heat still rises. What changed is that now I catch it and pray, and usually that redirects the whole situation. With one of my children, whose behaviour can be hard for him and for us, the difference is clearest. His behaviour has not changed, but my response to it has. We pray together when it gets difficult, and I sit with him until the storm passes, which previously I did not have the patience to do. My work sits differently too. A colleague once saw the crosses tattooed on my hands during a video call and said, 'That explains why you care so much.'"
Scott's account of his journey from atheism to faith, The Unexpected Path to Faith, is available in paperback and on Kindle. You can find out more by clicking the link below.