This was re-read as a bit of a research for a writing project. I initially came across it in 1990 as a very new fifteen-year-old Christian, and it was hugely popular at the time, a key part of the strange cultural underworld of Christian media at the time. Not long after my conversion, I ended up seeing a stage show based on the book in London. A lot of it passed over my head at the time, but the longer I spent in church culture, the more it began to make sense.

Adrian Plass is a well-known Christian writer, speaker and broadcaster in the UK, and the book’s title is an obvious ripoff of the Adrian Mole books, which were hugely popular at the time. The whole “Sacred Diary” began as a column in Christian Family magazine in the mid-eighties, and the book appeared in 1987. It’s entirely fictional, and is intended as a satirical, humorous look at Christian life and culture at the time.

It’s worth noting that if you weren’t around in the British evangelical church scene at the time, about 90% of this book’s contents will fly right over your head. Several real people are mentioned, but not in any great detail. The church and location the story is set in is very much “anytown” in nature, all quite generic, but you can read through the lines enough to work out that the church is perhaps of the Evangelical Free tradition, with some slight inclination towards charismatic things, at least within some of the congregation. There’s quite a varied mixture of people in it, from young to old, with some different ideas on what it means to be a Christian in the modern world, and that’s where much of the humour comes from – differing opinions on what constitutes acceptable behaviour and conduct.

I’ve actually warmed to it a bit more than I did on previous readings. Christian humour tends to err on the very safe side, and is usually extremely unsubtle, unsophisticated and uncontroversial. In places, given the culture that existed in churches at the time, this almost feels a bit subversive and daring. In some places, the exaggeration for comic effect is hopelessly overdone, but in other places, the writing is funny, very well-observed, and quite sophisticated in the observations it makes. Christians of the time did often have some strange ideas, and got confused and upset over some very odd things.

He deals quite well with a number of things, like a young man at Bible college feeling lonely and inadequate, and uncertainty over how to conduct oneself in the workplace and socially. There’s even some hints under the surface of not being entirely convinced he wants to go to Heaven. The cast of supporting characters is a bit cliched and stereotypical in places, but there’s a lot of archetypes of people all of us met in church in here.

Everything finishes up pretty neat and tidy, of course, and there’s no explicit criticism of anything evangelicals believed at the time. Most unfortunately the author feels it necessary to point out that he considers gay sex to be wrong, but it was a very, very brave man who challenged that piece of theological orthodoxy in the mid-80s – it would have been much better if it hadn’t been mentioned at all, though. That and one or two other things feel like they’ve aged like sour milk, but if you look at it through the lens of when it was written, and what it’s describing, that can be forgiven.

Last time I read it was in 2023, when I was still feeling somewhat bitter and angry about the abuse I’d suffered in church, and I struggled to give it anything more than 2 stars. The therapy I’ve had since then, as well as the healing effects of time, have earned it another star, as in places it’s very good writing. While I’d prefer something a bit more critical in places, it’s rare to find Christian comedy that’s even vaguely funny, and in places this genuinely is. It pokes fun in a way that still feels a bit too restrained and respectful to me, as someone who no longer believes any of it, but it’s an interesting dive back into the culture I used to live in, and has given me some ideas for writing about my own experiences.

Fairly typically, other reviews on Goodreads give this an unequivocal five stars, and I do feel there’s a conspiracy to upvote any Christian media in an attempt to get people to read it. It feels like yet another very unsubtle attempt at trying to get unbelievers to engage with it, so they’ll nudge themselves closer to the Kingdom. This book strongly urges readers to share their faith, a habit I now find extremely obnoxious, but hey, it’s a Christian book by a Christian author, aimed at Christian readers. You can’t really expect much else.