In this episode of the GoHealth podcast, Gillian Straine speaks with Rev Canon Timothy Goode, priest, theologian, author, and Canon for Congregational Discipleship and Nurture at York Minster, about disability, ableism, healing, vulnerability, and the church’s imagination.

Drawing on Tim’s personal story of cancer, paralysis, rehabilitation, ordination, and daily prayer with Psalm 139, the conversation explores what it means to be “fearfully and wonderfully made” at every stage and in every condition of life.

Tim challenges the church to move beyond access as a matter of ramps and compliance, and towards a richer theology of agency, belonging, and the risen body of Christ: scarred, storied, limited, and gloriously held in God. Together, Gillian and Tim consider how healing ministry can honour the whole person without trying to erase pain, disability, history, or vulnerability.

In this episode

• Tim’s lived experience of disability, cancer, paralysis, rehabilitation, and ministry
• Why ableism is about more than disability, and how it shapes church culture
• The difference between access as compliance and access as agency
• Why “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” can become a daily act of truth-telling
• How buildings, pulpits, welcome teams, and worship spaces “preach” who is imagined and who is not
• The danger of idealising strength, independence, and the “perfect” body
• Why the risen body of Christ offers a better Christian anthropology: scarred, storied, and imaginative
• How healing ministry can centre consent, dignity, story, and belonging
• Why vulnerability and limits are not failures, but sources of imagination and transformation

Links:
Breaking, Not Broken by Rev Canon Timothy Goode
GoHealth’s Everyday Healing course

A transcript of this episode is available here.

In this special episode, Wendy Lloyd is joined by David Pott, pilgrimage consultant, founder of pilgrimage routes, and one of the Walks4Life Collective, to explore the extraordinary healing potential of pilgrimage, and to introduce GoHealth's exciting new partnership with Walks4Life.

David shares his remarkable journey: from devising the Two Saints Way and six Northern Saints Trails in the northeast of England (two of which featured in the recent BBC Two pilgrimage series), to a personal experience of depression healed through a single day's walk, to a profound and moving encounter that became the catalyst for Walks4Life.

At the heart of the conversation is the story of Joshua, an eighteen-year-old who died by suicide after being blackmailed online, and how his father's grief, and David's walking alongside him, ignited the vision for Walks4Life as a structured, embodied response to the mental health crisis.

David introduces the four Cs that underpin Walks4Life, Creation, Community, Creativity, and Creator, and reflects on how pilgrimage uniquely holds all four together, offering something that a walk alone cannot: intention, meaning, and encounter.

As David prepares to set out on a 135 mile sponsored pilgrimage along the North Wales Pilgrims Way to mark his eightieth birthday, raising funds to get Walks4Life properly underway, this conversation captures both the personal and the prophetic dimensions of what it means to walk with God.

In this episode:

• How David became a pilgrimage consultant (and what one actually does)
• The Northern Saints Trails and the BBC Two pilgrimage series
• Walking as healing: solvitur ambulando — it is solved by walking
• The story of Joshua, and how it catalysed Walks4Life
• The four Cs of mental health and pilgrimage
• The GoHealth and Walks4Life partnership
• David's 138-mile birthday pilgrimage on the North Wales Pilgrims Way

A note before listening: This episode contains David's own story of depression and healing through pilgrimage, and also a story related to suicide. Please take care of yourself as you listen. Timestamps for these sections are included in the episode. There is no suggestion in this conversation that pilgrimage should replace medication or professional medical advice.

BBC Two Pilgrimage programme:https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09w7lc0

To follow David's pilgrimage journey and support Walks4Life, visit https://www.gofundme.com/f/walks4life-pilgrimage

To find out more about GoHealth, visit gohealth.org.uk

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.