Introduction
"I've watched this whole situation play out. I've seen my mum get diagnosed, I've watched her suffer, I've cared for her all along. You've been here and you've done nothing." That is how political theologian Dr Selena Stone describes the moment her faith stopped being about whether God exists and became about what kind of God exists. Her mother's death from cancer did not just take away a parent, it took away the story she had been told her whole life, that a kind God intervenes on behalf of God's children. In this episode of Everyday Leadership, Selena, a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University and former community organiser in Brixton, talks through what it costs to rebuild faith from nothing, why she refuses to do unpaid diversity work that organisations use as a substitute for real change, and how she learned to trust her own voice after growing up in a tradition that only wanted her to listen for God's.
Growing up serious in Handsworth
Selena grew up the eldest of four children in Handsworth, Birmingham, a neighbourhood she describes as the equivalent of 1980s Brixton without the gentrification. As the oldest girl, she carried what she now calls an over-developed sense of responsibility from early on: watching every decision, setting an example, staying serious. Church was the one place that felt different. She was baptised young, spoke at church as a teenager, and found her social world entirely inside that community.
But she never wanted to stay inside it. Even as a teenager she was drawn to a version of leadership that existed beyond the church walls, in a world she had been taught to see as dangerous but experienced as interesting.
A father who planted seeds during the sermon
One detail explains a lot about where her instinct for social justice came from. Her father used to take her and her brother out of the long Pentecostal service, mid-sermon, to walk around the local area. As they walked he would ask why the church talked so much about the power of God to transform lives, when nobody outside the building knew what they were doing on a Sunday. Those conversations planted a question that never left her: what good is a faith that only deals with Sunday morning and does not touch the rest of the community.
A turning point came when she was asked to preach at a youth mission service. She remembers being physically sick with nerves beforehand, and then the moment she held the microphone, the nerves disappeared. "This is what I was born to do," she remembers thinking. \[CHECK: Selena states her age at this point as "40", which is very likely an ASR transcription error given the surrounding context of her being a teenager preparing for university — the true age should be verified before publishing.\]
From Bible college to community organising in Brixton
After two years at an Assemblies of God Bible college \[CHECK: an earlier reference in the transcript to a specific theological college name is garbled by the transcription tool and could not be confirmed\], Selena began a master's degree in theology and politics at King's College London. At the same time, a London charity was running a new programme training community organisers alongside a placement in Parliament. Her placement was in Brixton, where she trained with Citizens UK, learned to build teams of local leaders through one-to-one conversations, and ran a campaign against payday lenders targeting the poorest estates in the area.
She describes the work as her first real test of leadership beyond church and family: identifying people with drive and skill from cold conversations with strangers, coaching a first-time speaker to address the local council, and learning to lead as "the invisible glue" holding a campaign together rather than the person at the front.
Learning to trust her own voice
Early on, Selena second-guessed herself constantly, needing outside validation even after successful campaigns. A mentor named David once told her she had "an over-developed sense of responsibility," a comment she calls one of the most insightful anyone has made about her. She now manages it through daily reflection: prayer, a daily walk, and regularly checking in with herself about whether she is taking on too much.
She also credits her family for keeping her grounded. She chose to live with her brother and sister rather than alone specifically so she would not disappear into her own head. "They don't allow me to be Dr Selena Stone," she says. "They just keep me human and normal."
That same grounding shows up in how she describes learning to trust her own voice. Raised in a tradition where the only voice that mattered was God's, as interpreted by pastors and the wider community, she says she had no real sense of her own opinions well into early adulthood. It took a woman at her church telling her that how she was wired was how God wired her, for Selena to choose a university subject, languages, based on what she actually loved rather than what she thought she was supposed to want. Trusting her own voice, she says, has been built through repeated reflection on experience, not given to her.
Setting boundaries against performative diversity work
Selena is direct about what she sees inside organisations responding to demands for racial and social justice. She distinguishes between an urgent, surface-level response, a black square, a diversity day, a tweet, and the slower, harder work of fixing an organisation's actual culture. "The optics will take care of themselves if you deal with the deeper cultural problems," she says.
She is equally direct about her own boundaries. She has sat in meetings where organisations gather Black or Asian staff to discuss diversity purely on the basis of their race, not their expertise in culture change or organisational strategy, and watched the conversation go nowhere because no one with the power to implement change was in the room. She now declines that kind of unpaid, unstructured labour. "I can't be expected to do this additional, quite important work for free, or without having the training to do it," she says. If an organisation is serious, she argues, it brings in people whose actual job is culture change, rather than asking racialised staff to perform concern.
Losing her mother, and losing God
The most personal part of the conversation concerns her mother's death from cancer roughly four to five years before this recording. Selena describes watching her mother's illness progress while holding on to an expectation, shaped by other answered prayers in her family's history, that God would intervene. When that did not happen, she describes months of anger: sometimes going silent on God, more often "angry praying," ranting with no filter because she reasoned God could handle the truth. This lasted around six months.
She reached a breaking point after living, in her words, "as if God didn't exist" for months while grieving. Her sister found her in visible distress and told her plainly that the person she was looking at was not who Selena really was. The next day, in a hotel room in Liverpool for work, Selena opened a Bible for the first time in months and felt what she describes as a wave of peace, and a sense that she was starting again from nothing.
Rebuilding faith from nothing
Selena is careful not to describe this as a tidy return to belief. Her faith, she says, crumbled into dust, and what followed was a slow process of deciding what to put back. She still does not have a settled answer for how prayer works, or what she can expect from God versus what she is responsible for herself. Her advice to anyone coping with unanswered prayer is to tell the truth rather than pretend, to be kind to yourself because unanswered prayer can be devastating to a relationship, a body, a life, and to trust that God can be holding you even when you have no energy left to hold on yourself.
Leadership as enabling others
Asked to define leadership, Selena keeps it simple: living in a way that inspires others and enables them to live out their best selves in the world. She is careful to note this is not about selflessness for its own sake, since a person's best self is invested in both their community and their own growth. It is a definition that runs through everything else she describes in the episode, from the invisible work of a community organiser to the discipline of setting a boundary rather than performing concern.
