A man and woman chatting outdoors with a brick building behind them.

Try speaking to strangers to deepen your spirituality

This week, we talk about a powerful yet simple practice – speaking with strangers. 

Principal of St Augustine’s College of Theology, Alan Gregory, shares more about this week’s practice and how to give it a go.

Good luck – and don’t be shy!

Choose a place full of life

On the safety front, avoid dark alleyways and cemeteries after midnight. Chances are you won’t meet anyone, but if you did, you wouldn’t want to. Daylight is good, and somewhere not too busy or too empty. The busy won’t stop, and the space will likely stay that way.

Choose town or city parks, especially the more central ones, and shopping malls, if not too frantic. Wherever folk sit down to rest, in high streets, outside shops, cafés, seafronts, and places that offer something to talk about. Museums, galleries, and libraries all work pretty well. If you have a dog, go where people walk dogs. 

Also, choose somewhere you won’t run into family, friends, or neighbours, because that’s cheating.

Two men chatting. They are indoors, sitting in armchairs in a waiting room or office.

Deepen your spirituality by talking with strangers

You don’t know who you will meet, nor if anyone will talk with you; you might have several conversations or none. That is the point, though. You give yourself over to what might happen or might not. You cannot guarantee that you’ll have the conversations you might hope for, nor can you control who you speak to.

You might meet with the grumpy, the miserable, the earnestly chatty, the curious, the harried mother, a lost child or a park official. Maybe a truant teenager, someone unemployed, exercising, enjoying a walk, praying, grieving, lonely, looking for the cat, eating their sandwiches, or you might get Jehovah’s Witnesses. You don’t know.

Become vulnerable

To this extent, you are vulnerable. To this extent, too, you have allowed yourself into a space shaped like you actually live, unlike how we usually think we live. 

You are not your own; you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. That is the truth and also the truth into which the Holy Spirit draws and remakes us.

We are not in control. Even under normal circumstances, we have less control than we think. Believing in Christ, though, we slowly learn to rejoice in not having the control we thought we did. We let it slip through our fingers and find ourselves the better for our loss. Our scrabbling for mastery of life did us little good anyway.

You are “in Christ,” Paul tells us; the source of your life is outside you. 

Your vitality, if you’ll let this be so, is the Holy Spirit; your worth and good name is Jesus. You don’t know who you’ll speak to or what you’ll say. So bless your uncertainty, and live gladly in uncertainty, because that is God’s freedom for the working of life.

Two women smiling at each other in a park. They are sitting next to each other but on separate benches. It's a sunny day.

Will they take up your invitation?

Don’t think of yourself as “doing good.” You’re not doing this as a ministry or mission. 

Who knows what might happen, but don’t protect yourself in advance by taking up a role, setting an objective, or deciding what you or anybody else should “get out of” your hanging about for conversation.

All that risks shielding us from surprise, buffering us from experience by setting conditions and disguising ourselves in a role. You are not in the ministerial catbird seat here. You may give, you may receive, neither, nor both.

This is important because your practice takes you among strangers. Most of our exchanges, especially with people we don’t know, take a conventional form: polite good mornings, nods of recognition, daily transactions, comments on the weather. Since you have no set purpose here beyond conversation, you’re rather out of place, like a busker on Wall Street.

That is what you bring: a piece of grit or a sudden, small obstruction in the flow of passing by. You want to talk. Many will barely register this, knocking away the pebble as they move on. Some, I hope, will take up your invitation to jump the familiar track, if only for a moment or two.

The disruption of Christ

The early Christian theologians understood that, through Christ, God has interrupted the flow of fallen humanity and derailed it, as it were. 

Like a family who returns to an old home, opening the doors and windows, pulling off the dust sheets, and lighting the fire, God has opened the space of a common life for which the only right of membership is sharing in the same humanity that the Son took to himself.

Neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female. “Satan has broken us up,” said the theologians, and Adam is divided over the whole earth, scattered in pieces. Now, though, “what was divided is made one; what was at odds is at peace.”

The odd conversation with strangers may not seem much, nor seem to lead to much, but in doing it, you show joy in the reconciliation that has gone before you.

A man and woman chatting outdoors with a brick building behind them.

The Christian Spiritual Practice Challenge  – how it works

For three weeks in February, we’ll be sharing one simple spiritual practice each week. Each challenge is designed to help you slow down, pay attention, and make space for God in your everyday life.

There are three challenges, and we’d love for you to join us.

Watch our intro video to learn more

Share your progress

We’d love to see how you’re getting on. Share what you’re noticing on Facebook or Instagram using #StAugSpiritualPractice and help inspire someone else to join in too.

Ready to join?

Keep an eye on our blog page and socials for each week’s challenge, and let’s make February 2026 a really good one.