Growing up in Mudgee, Tom Tilley's childhood was typical of most country kids. Motorbike riding, swimming in the river, playing footy on the weekend and making their own fun in the free-wheeling lifestyle that a country town affords.
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The Tilley family was also part of a Pentecostal Christian congregation that strictly enforced a set of rules including a looming ultimatum: if Tom didn't speak in tongues, he'd go to hell and be outcast from his close-knit, devout community.
That group was the Revival Centres, a fundamentalist church born in Melbourne in the 1950s. Tom's father was a pastor of the Mudgee branch after the family moved to the area from Dubbo when Tom was a child.
Tom spoke with the Mudgee Guardian about his new book, 'Speaking In Tongues' which chronicles his time in the church and his eventual departure.
Tilley, best known today a successful journalist and former bassist for Client Liaison, said growing up in the church was all he knew. He had his first experience speaking in tongues when he was 10-years-old, but it wasn't the transformative experience he expected.
"We're one of the very few churches in the world that believe that you had to have this experience in order to be saved. That meant it was very distinct from all the other churches in Mudgee and pretty much in Australia," Tom said.
"I thought I had that experience at 10. So I asked my dad to check if he thought my speaking in tongues sounded legitimate and he said it did.
"By the time I got to the baptism tank a week or two later I was already questioning whether the experience I had was the real deal. That doubt stayed with me for years and years. In fact, it never went away. But I didn't dare speak about it out loud... I kept it to myself until I was 20."
Throughout the rest of Tom's childhood in Mudgee the doubts lingered, but he remained faithful to the church and his family. The two were inextricably linked, which made leaving an impossible proposition.
Read more: How Greek cafés shaped Mudgee in the 1930s
Tom never intended to leave Mudgee, it was only a fortuitous rejection from a job at the Ulan Coal mine that altered his trajectory. "I had my sights set on new motorbikes and maybe a nice ute, that was what I was aiming for. But I ended up going to uni. And then towards the end of my degree, I decided to do a six-week backpacking trip, because I won some money in a competition," he said.
"And then I just met these amazing people who on the outside should have been bad people according to my church. But actually they were beautiful people, generous, warm, accepting people."
Tom said the experience showed him a new way of living, outside of the strictly binary heaven and hell terms of his church. "In a way that felt like a more natural fit with who I was, and actually felt more of a natural fit with the person my parents had raised me to be. What the church was teaching me and what they more implicitly, rather than explicitly taught me about life and the kind of person they brought me up to be actually conflicted with the church."
For the first time, Tom let himself consider leaving the church. Later when he finally decided to leave, he explained that it left him with an overwhelming sadness. "I expected to spend my whole life in that church. For pretty much all my teenage years I still wanted that. So when I left, I completely expected it would be me on my own without my family for the rest of my life. And that was a heavy feeling," Tom said.
"For anyone around Mudgee that knew us they would know that we were a tight, happy family. It was a pretty sad time for me. I had this strange physical pain in my heart for about a year or so..."
Over time Tom learned to fight for his confidence and find himself after being 'dislodged' from the community that he had known his whole life. But slowly, one by one, other members of his family began to exit the church as well and Tom, once a pariah, was now a source of stability for his family who were dealing with their own struggles.
The book has been out since early May and Tom said he's already heard from people who have seen themselves in the story. "The reaction from people who've grown up in a similar way has been huge," he said.
"The reaction is so strong. These people are saying that by having someone else tell this story in this high level of detail that resonates for them seems to be giving them some kind of emotional release. A lot of them said that they had exactly the same doubts, exactly the same challenges.
"Some of them thought they were alone, right up until they they read my book."
Tom has since moved away from Mudgee, but he said it remains a constant in his life.
"Mudgee is my reference point for everything. I have such good memories and Mudgee is kind of like a guiding light for me on what a good community can be," he said.
"Sometimes it can feel claustrophobic when you're young. But ultimately, it's a really nice thing. I've tried to recreate what I had in Mudgee in Sydney, and around the world of good friends and people from different backgrounds and experiences and create this big country town in the city.
"It took years and years to feel that sense of connection and eventually in my 30s, and now and into my 40s, I feel like I've got that sense of home here in Sydney."
