Revd Robert Atkin
I’m a Church of England curate serving in Cheltenham. I was ordained deacon at Gloucester Cathedral in 2024 and priested there in 2025.
My ordination training was at Trinity College Bristol, where I completed an MA in Theology, Ministry and Mission. My dissertation asked the question: What is the relationship between Genesis 1–3 and the tabernacle and temple narratives in the Old Testament? It’s a question that sits at the intersection of creation, worship, and the presence of God — exploring how Israel’s sanctuaries functioned as microcosms of the heavens and earth, saturated with Edenic imagery, and what that means for how Christians understand worship today. That thread — the sacredness of creation, the God who dwells among his people, the shape of new creation — runs through much of my theological thinking.
Before Trinity, I completed a BA in Kingdom Theology at Westminster Theological Centre, accredited by the University of Chester, where I developed a grounding in biblical studies, church history, and systematic theology. Some of the essays I wrote during those years are archived on this site under Resources. They’re older work, written as a student, but they continue to find readers — which tells me the questions they were exploring still resonate.
I’ve spent much of my working life in communications and design, and I’m also a speculative fiction writer — that work lives at rkatkin.com, where theology and science fiction turn out to have more in common than you might expect.
Adventures in Discipleship grew from a conviction that discipleship — genuine, costly, everyday following of Jesus — is the central task of the church, and one that doesn’t always get the careful attention it deserves. Too often it’s treated as either a programme to run or a purely private spiritual matter. I think it’s neither. It’s a communal, theologically serious way of life that the church urgently needs to recover and reimagine.
Much of what I write here grows out of my actual ministry context: house groups, conversations about mission and remissioning, and the daily reality of helping a local church become a more intentional community of disciples. I don’t write as an academic, though I try to think carefully. I write as a practitioner who believes ideas matter.
If something you read here is useful, I’d love to hear from you.
Bible Translation
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The views expressed on this site are my own and do not represent the official position of the Diocese of Gloucester or the Church of England.