By Graham Tomlin
In the previous few years, an concept has been rising that has the potential to shift the cultural narrative about Christian religion in English-speaking nations. It got here to fruition in September 2022, when the Centre for Cultural Witness was launched. Primarily based in Lambeth Palace, on the invitation of Archbishop Justin Welby, the goal of the centre is to retell the transformational Christian story in public, aiming at a renewal of the general public understanding of Christian religion. This text tells its story up to now.
Western nations are struggling, and so are their church buildings. Now we have a disaster of belief in our political leaders, who by no means appear to match as much as what we anticipate from them. Now we have a disaster of hysteria fueled by tradition wars, a world pandemic, precise battle in Europe, and the specter of what’s occurring to our local weather. Now we have a disaster of relationship, within the loneliness and isolation that fashionable individualism has introduced and a lacking sense of obligation to one another.
In different phrases, we’ve a disaster of religion, hope, and love, qualities about which Christian religion has fairly a bit to say. Now we have a 2,000-year historical past of dwelling, working towards, and nurturing this stuff. A deep-rooted Christian revival might imply constructing the very virtues that our cultures, and the individuals in them, want. And but our church buildings are struggling to make their voice heard, and to search out methods to supply their life-giving message within the noisy chatter of Twenty first-century life.
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A pal lately returned to the UK after a number of years in the US, and I requested him concerning the distinction between the Christian presence in each nations. “In America, you can not keep away from the Church’s voice, for higher or worse,” he mentioned. “Within the U.Okay., you hardly hear it in any respect.”
It could be that our contexts throughout the Atlantic are very totally different, however both method, too usually the Church’s voice is both shrill, silent, or scattered — typically heard, however usually uncoordinated and infrequently introduced collectively.
On the similar time, mainstream theology is dealing with one thing of a disaster. Whereas there’s a clear public position for sociologists, psychologists, geographers, scientists, and specialists in different disciplines, that isn’t true for theologians. Within the phrases of Miroslav Volf and Matt Croasmun of Yale Divinity Faculty, “the variety of individuals within the pew studying educational theology is negligible … [and] the broader public outdoors Christian communities perceives educational theology as so totally irrelevant that it’d as properly not exist” (For the Lifetime of the World: Theology That Makes a Distinction, Brazos Press, 2019). Neither the world nor even the Church, for that matter, appears that desirous about what educational theology has to supply. The underside line is that nobody actually listens to theologians anymore.
All this issues on the parish stage as a result of with out an efficient public witness, the duty of spreading the religion turns into a lot more durable. British priest and creator Peter Owen Jones writes:
Parish clergymen like me function on the coal face: we baptise; we marry; we bury; we console the place we will. That is the work of the Church of England on the micro stage. … The place the Church doesn’t have a compelling presence is on the nationwide stage, the macro stage. It’s right here that there was an entire lack of engagement, of witness, of creativeness. With out efficient nationwide witness, work on the parish stage has been made far more durable.
During the previous seven years, whereas serving as Bishop of Kensington in London, I grew to become more and more conscious of the necessity for this sort of public witness. In 2017, the Grenfell Tower hearth occurred close to one of many parishes in my space, and I discovered myself on the coronary heart of a world 24/7 media storm, showing on nearly very information outlet you possibly can title, all asking for feedback on the tragedy. Within the subsequent months and years, I usually discovered myself asking how I might say one thing distinctly Christian in my two minutes on nationwide radio or TV, somewhat than what any neighborhood chief may say.
So an concept started to hatch. How can we do our public witness higher? Would possibly we be capable to harness the knowledge of Christian scholarship in a extra accessible type for the witness of the Church? Our activity because the Church is to not win arguments, or to attempt to show to folks that God exists or the resurrection occurred. It’s to bear witness to Jesus Christ. But that witness by no means occurs in a vacuum. It at all times occurs inside a specific cultural context. Therefore the title: Cultural Witness. And witness includes each describing what we see once we look into the face of Jesus Christ but additionally what Christ’s gentle illuminates.
Having raised sufficient cash to start out the venture and appoint a small however high-quality workforce, the centre has launched a brand new web site — seenandunseen.com — with the tagline “Christian views on nearly the whole lot.” With new materials showing day-after-day, a lot of it by theologians with a capability to jot down for a wider viewers, the whole lot on the positioning has individuals outdoors the Church in thoughts. The location doesn’t run tales on how you can plant church buildings or run a prayer assembly, however accommodates articles exploring a Christian tackle Synthetic Intelligence, the Russia-Ukraine battle, on why land and place matter, opinions of Oscar-winning movies, why individuals ought to learn Julian of Norwich and Søren Kierkegaard, and why a Christian revival is simply what a post-liberal society wants.
Along with the web site, the centre is concentrated on management — working with others to deepen and develop the voice of those that have a public profile as Christians, whether or not Church leaders, members of Parliament, or neighborhood leaders, in addition to figuring out and nurturing the following technology of public Christian communicators. We additionally interact in analysis tasks, working with theologians and others on subjects that assist make clear and amplify the Church’s witness in public.
Time will inform whether or not the CCW adjustments the narrative about religion: that’s in God’s fingers and never ours. Within the meantime, it’s our activity to bear witness to the outstanding actuality of the brand new world that God has caused in Jesus Christ — and do it the perfect we will.
The Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin is the previous Bishop of Kensington and director of the Centre for Cultural Witness, Lambeth Palace. For extra info on the centre, go to seenandunseen.com or e mail information@culturalwitness.com.
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