Radio Shropshire
Pippa White is 29 years old. Like many women her age, she enjoys Taylor Swift’s music, plays rugby and makes TikTok videos in her spare time.
The one difference? She is a vicar in the Shropshire town of Whitchurch, sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses of her unusual life to her thousands of followers on the video-sharing app.
“It’s been really, really positive”, Ms White said of the response from her audience, whether that is her congregation or her tens of thousands of social media followers.
She hopes her TikTok will go some way towards modernising the way her church communicates with the wider world.
Speaking to Radio Shropshire, Ms White said she had not been raised in a religious household when growing up in Norfolk, but she had “always felt comfortable” in her village church.
She recalled that while discussing careers with a friend at university she had joked about becoming a vicar.
“I got this thunderbolt moment of ‘Oh, maybe I should actually look into [that]”, she said. “It just kind of snowballed from there”.
Aside from being a young female vicar, Ms White is also breaking the mould posting on TikTok, where she has amassed millions of views.
Her account, @not_a_priestess, is broadly light-hearted, whether she is poking fun at uncomfortable pews or showing the audience a day in her life.
Ms White, who says she does not earn any money from social media, believes it is important for young people to see themselves reflected in the Church of England.
“Trying to find representation of young women in the church is quite tricky,” she said. “I just had a moment of thinking that if I was sick of not seeing anyone like me out there, why not just do it myself.”
Her congregation, St Alkmund, has reacted well to her social media success, Ms White said.
“You walk down the high street and someone will say ‘oh, I saw your Tik Tok’,” she said.
“[The parish] loves the energy of it because they see a young person in the church reaching out to, mostly, other young people,” Ms White added, noting that many of her older congregation “find hope in that”.
“It’s something new, and it’s keeping the Church of England in the public eye in a new, refreshing way.
“Sometimes I think the Church of England isn’t very good at saying what we’re doing well,” she said, pointing to church programs like food banks and English language lessons.
She added that the representation of young Christians is “often from the more conservative circles”.
“I am very liberal, I’m very inclusive in my theology… so it’s about keeping that perspective in the public sphere.”
