Joel Sinclair is a vicar with a gift for irreverent sermons, a fondness for late-night theological debates, and one very inconvenient problem: he’s begining to doubt God.
What begins as a quiet crisis of faith starts to spill into the pulpit. His honest, unsettling sermons draw laughter, curiosity, and outrage in equal measure. Parishioners shift in their pews. Bishops start taking notes. And Joel finds himself caught between the life he’s built and the truth he can no longer ignore.
As he suspects that Julian, one of his teenage parishioners, is gay, he starts to stuggle with the homophobia boldly printed in his Bible.
As the pressure mounts, unexpected allies emerge: Anna, a fellow priest with a sharp tongue and a generous heart, and Julian, a brilliant queer teenager quietly wrestling with questions of his own. Together, they push Joel to confront what he truly believes, and what kind of man, priest, and friend he wants to be when the certainty runs out.
Witty, moving, and unflinchingly honest, The Church of Joel is The Vicar of Dibley meets The God Delusion—a sharp, big-hearted story about doubt, faith, and the radical power of staying present when the ground beneath you starts to shift.