Liz Grier is Centre Lead for St Mellitus College Southwest and is based in Plymouth. She oversees the life of the centre, supporting students, staff, and supervisors, and helping to cultivate a prayerful, hospitable community for those training for ministry. Liz has over twenty years of ministry experience in Devon and has spent her entire career involved in education in various forms.  

Liz trained for ordination at Trinity College, Bristol, where during her Masters she discovered a particular love for the Old Testament. Before ordination, she worked as a professional harpist and co-led Unlimited in Exeter, a church for “young people who don’t do church.” She wrote Beginning Unlimited, which tells the story of that journey. Liz is now studying for a PhD with the University of Aberdeen, exploring the concept of divine forgiveness in the Psalms. 

She lives in Plymouth with her husband James, and together they have recently written Normal, Imperfect Heroes, a book exploring how God does not wait for his leaders to be perfect before calling them into ministry. When she is not working, she is probably either swimming in the sea or crocheting.

• MPhys (Hons), Physics, St Peter’s College, Oxford
• DPhil, Physics, St Peter’s College, Oxford
• MA in Mission and Ministry, Trinity College Bristol

• Exploring Moses’ Initial Characterization in Exodus 3:1–4:17 Using Conversational Analysis, Evangelical Quarterly 96 (2025), 1–17.
• Beginning Unlimited (Instant Apostle, 2018).
• Normal, Imperfect Heroes, James Grier with Liz Grier (SPCK, 2025).
• ‘This must be what family feels like’, chapter in Simply Eat (Instant Apostle, 2019).

• Old Testament Studies
• Youth Ministry
• Mission

My research is entitled ‘Concepts of Forgiveness in the Psalms’. One aspect of this research will be to enhance the Christian understanding of forgiveness. A preliminary hypothesis is that much richness in the Christian understanding of forgiveness has been lost in Western Christianity, where Classical Protestant atonement theology, and notably Anselm’s penal substitution model of atonement, has taught that the ‘justice of God was vindicated, and the wrath of God was satisfied in the work of the Son’. This teaching emphasizing the wrath of God the Father, and the loving, sacrificial actions of Jesus the Son, I believe has led to a common misapprehension of the nature of God, perhaps most famously and extremely articulated by Dawkins in his book ‘The God Delusion’. By researching concepts forgiveness in the Psalms my hope is that it will enlarge our understanding of God’s eternal heart for forgiveness. There has been very little research on how the theology of forgiveness in the Psalms is related to the final shape of the Psalter. As such I hope that this proposed study will be a valuable contribution to the study of the Psalms. I also think that this work is particularly significant within Anglicanism given the centrality of the Psalms to our liturgy and worship.