The Confession Project
Summary
The Confession Project explores what confession of sin looks like in British churches today — whether practised privately before God or shared with others — and what God offers to those who engage in it. It asks how these practices connect to biblical and theological themes, and where they do not. Beyond the church, the project also examines how confession and the language around it function in wider British society and culture, what resonance and learning there is between church and society around these practices, and how God may be at work in this.
Despite confession being a central feature of Christian life across many traditions, it has received surprisingly little serious academic attention, particularly using empirical methods. At the same time, there is growing evidence that formal confession practices are in decline in many churches, even as confession-related language and behaviour — owning up, making amends, seeking absolution — remain deeply present in wider culture, from social media to public life. Understanding this gap between church and culture, and its missiological significance, feels both timely and important. Furthermore, having recently conducted a small-scale project on confession in UK charismatic network churches, this revealed significant scope for broader and deeper research, which was also explicitly prompted by project participants (see Rogers, 2025).
Objectives
The project can be broken down into a number of interlocking objectives:
- To gain an understanding of the range and shape of confession practices across British denominations and the traditions from which they emerge.
- To generate a ‘lived’ theology of confession in terms of what British Christians see as normative for confession.
- To gather testimonies of confession that speak to the formative and possible deformative power of confession, both within and without the church.
- To examine confession related websites and social media apps that offer insight into online confession practices by both Christian and non-Christian users.
- To explore wider societal attitudes and practices of non-Christians relating to ‘confession’ and ‘sin’.
- To produce and disseminate an accessible report for church and society that captures the findings of the project.
- To produce learning materials for churches (workshops / study groups) to aid theological reflection on confession and its significance for Christian discipleship.
Find out more
The Confession project is funded by the Southlands Methodist Trust through the Susanna Wesley Foundation.
The project is being undertaken by Dr Andrew Rogers and Dr Jonas Kurlberg of the University of Roehampton, with additional support from an advisory group established for the Confession project. The Confession Project Advisory Group consists of:
- Rev. Dr Tania Ap Sion, Reader in Religions, Humanities and Education, Lincoln Bishop University
- Rev. Dr Joanne Cox-Darling, Superintendent, Manchester Methodist Circuit
- Fr. Dragos Herescu, Principal, Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies
- Rev. Dr Caleb Nyanni, Principal, Waverley Abbey College
- Rev. Canon Dr Gale Richards, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Baptist Studies, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford
- Prof. Clare Watkins, Professor to the Conversations, Culture and Communion Project, Durham University
- Rev. Prof. Philip Ziegler, Professor of Christian Dogmatics, University of Aberdeen
For enquiries about the project please contact the project team:
Dr. Andrew Rogers, Associate Professor of Practical Theology, andrew.rogers@roehampton.ac.uk
Dr. Jonas Kurlberg, Research Fellow,
jonas.kurlberg@roehampton.ac.uk
