Roger Abbott on Pastoral Care for the Common Good

Cambridge Papers are published once a quarter and address a wide range of topics, offering ‘Christian reflection on contemporary issues’.

The latest paper is available online here (from where a pdf can be downloaded here):

Roger Abbott, ‘Pastoral care for the common good: How the Church can respond better in the next pandemic’, Cambridge Papers 32, 2 (June 2023).

Here is the summary:

‘Noting that the UK Church’s response to the Covid pandemic was disappointing when compared with her response to disease-related outbreaks of earlier centuries, this paper reflects on the issue of pastoral care by the Church both for congregations and the general public. Requisite pastoral care should have a common grace focus, where carers accept the risks to their own lives, engage collaboratively with the scientific community, yet are also prepared to think and act prophetically. Finally, the paper calls for a way forward that takes seriously the lessons to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic in order to prepare for a more effective response when the next pandemic arrives. The paper closes with an important call for the Christian Church to be at the national policy-making table.’

Jonathan Leeman on How Churches Should Engage Culture

There’s a helpful, brief post here, by Jonathan Leeman, with six points on engaging with culture:

1. Start with faithfulness amidst the everyday.

2. Be, then do.

3. Being a God-imager or transformed humanity requires a church.

4. Take care of your citizenship by checking passports.

5. Seek the good of your neighbors for the sake of love and justice.

6. Realize that churches cannot ‘transform’ or ‘redeem’ anything.

‘To engage the culture is to be a Christian and a church member, living in but not of the world. It involves finding points of commonality with our non-Christian neighbors, particularly where common grace shines like the sun. It also involves cultivating a holy and distinct culture among ourselves. We are to be a chosen race, a holy nation, a royal priesthood, a people belonging to God (1 Peter 2:9). Such engagement is both humane and heaven-directing.’

Theos Report on Doing Good

The latest report from Theos has just been published:

Nick Spencer, Doing Good: A Future for Christianity in the 21st Century (London: Theos, 2016).

Here are some excerpts from the Foreword by Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster:

‘Strange things are happening to Christianity in the United Kingdom.

‘While critics prophesy its imminent demise – as critics have done for several hundred years – Christians across the country are doing what they too, have done for may hundreds of years: worship, pray, witness, serve.

‘There is nothing, of course, strange about this. What is strange – or at least worthy of greater notice than it usually receives – is that the breadth, depth and intensity of this Christian service is deepening. From personal debt advice to marriage counselling, from foodbanks to street pastors, from rehabilitation to reconciliation, the Church and Christian charities across the country are rolling up their sleeves, struggling on behalf of human dignity, pursuing the common good – and doing it all in the name of Jesus Christ.

‘In 2006, our predecessors as Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster, Rowan Williams and Cormac Murphy O’Connor, welcomed the launch of the think tank Theos. We have watched closely and admired its rigorous and thoughtful work over the last ten years, and are delighted to commend this ten year anniversary report.

‘In it, Nick Spencer charts a view of the future for Christianity in the UK, drawing on the wealth of data and evidence that Theos has accumulated in its years of research.

‘That view is one in which service is central, but it is service-as-witness, service that is firmly rooted in, shaped by and unashamed of its faith in Jesus Christ.

‘The report's idea of “Christian social liturgy” expresses how Christians can combine their fidelity to the two greatest commandments – loving God and loving neighbour – in a way that is simultaneously distinctive and inclusive.’

A pdf of the full report is available here.

Jon Thompson on Conscience and the Common Good

The latest Cambridge Paper from the Jubilee Centre is available online, this one by Jon Thompson:

Jon Thompson, ‘“Here I stand”: Conscience and the Common Good’, Cambridge Papers 24, 2 (June 2015).

Here is the summary:

‘The Christian’s conscience is increasingly set in opposition to some of the values and political aims of wider Western culture. This fact is evidenced by an increase in ‘conscience cases’, where Christians are sued or dismissed for acting in accordance with their conscience. This paper outlines a liberal conception of conscience. It then explores a distinctly Christian conception of conscience – as a faculty which involves both emotion and discernment of the requirements of God’s law. It then argues that Christian conscientious objection is similarly distinct from the liberal version of conscientious objection. Finally, it gestures towards justifications for conscience protections in the political sphere.’

The Woolf Institute

A friend recently alerted me to the existence of the Woolf Institute. According to its website:

‘The purpose of the Woolf Institute is to serve the public good. The Institute studies how relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims can enhance our understanding of key concepts of public life: community and identity, mutual respect, personal responsibility, and social solidarity. Combining theology with the social sciences and the humanities, the Woolf Institute seeks to strengthen the ethical framework that is needed for our political, economic and social life.’

Among resources it produces is an annual magazine, Perspectives, which includes individual issues devoted to Faith and Narratives, Movement and Migration, Translation and Interpretation, Marginalised Minorities, and Faith and Reason.

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson on (Not) Saving the World

An edited version of this review appeared in the November edition of EG, published by LICC.

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, The World is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good (Downers Grove: IVP, 2013), 222pp., ISBN 9780830836574.

‘We don’t have to be the hero of the story, just the steward of our calling’, writes Tyler Wigg-Stevenson in this timely call for a ‘calibration check’ on what it means to have ‘a faithful commitment to doing good’. Although he has a certain kind of activism in sight, there is persuasive wisdom here for all who want to live out their faith in everyday life.

What makes the discussion particularly powerful is that Wigg-Stevenson writes not as a bystander on the Jericho Road, but as someone who gets his hands dirty. As founder of the Two Futures Project, a movement of Christians for the abolition of nuclear weapons, he can’t be easily accused of not caring about the world. Still, he has some straight challenges to the mindset that engages complex issues like poverty and ecology as if the world is ours to save.

So, part one of the book diagnoses the limits of the activist sensibility in which we paint ourselves as saviours (and there are some insightful pages here on our tendency to read ourselves into the heroes of biblical stories, where we are David defeating Goliath rather than one of the nameless bystanders). In addition is the danger of misdiagnosing the problem of our world, underestimating the brokenness of sin and overestimating our ability to fix things. Then there is the risk of depicting a God who is domesticated to serve our causes, along with being blinded to our own complicity in the pain of the human condition.

Part two – ‘a deeper calling’ – provides an alternative. Wigg-Stevenson offers a rich extended meditation on Micah 4:1-5 with its vision of peace with God, seen in worship, discipleship and evangelism, peace among the nations, involving justice, industry and nonaggression, and peace in community, marked by dignity, prosperity and security. God’s kingdom is a world order which God will bring about rather than which we will build. And it is precisely here that our confidence lies: since it is God’s to bring about, we needn’t worry that the welfare of history ultimately rests on our shoulders, and we can rejoice in the foretastes of the kingdom we see ahead of time. We live in its light, orientated towards the promised new world, where it is not our task to win the victory but to show through our lives that the victory has been won.

So, this is not an exhortation to passivity, still less a retreat from culture. The book concludes by proposing that a faithful and sustainable activism can be seen through the lens of calling. Wigg-Stevenson, who served as a study assistant to John Stott and to whom he dedicates the book, provides a moving tribute here to the man whose ‘apprehension of Christ’s supremacy and singularity led him to model a comprehensive embrace of vocation’. As such, Christian activism is most faithful when it is channeled through our primary calling to follow Jesus in whatever we do.

Michael Gorman on Christians and Politics

Although it’s written out of a US context, much of Michael Gorman’s post on Christians and Politics seems more widely applicable, even in those points where he makes it clear he’s reflecting particularly from a US perspective.

Paul Bickley and Sam Tomlin on Reclaiming Sport for the Common Good

Paul Bickley and Sam Tomlin, Give us our Ball Back: Reclaiming Sport for the Common Good (London: Theos, 2012).

Theos have produced another helpful-looking booklet, this one written by Paul Bickley and Sam Tomlin, on sport.

There is more detail here, it’s available for download here, and here’s the back cover blurb:

‘Sport is everywhere. Yet in spite of its prominence, its position in society is relatively under-analysed.

‘As sport becomes more central, we realise that we don’t just want it for its own sake, but because of what it can do for us. We believe it has the power to make us good, peaceful, prosperous and healthy. Today, there is no such thing as ‘just a game’ – sport is treated as an arena for moral development, a way to resolved deep sectarian and international conflicts, a key plank in government strategies to make us healthier, and it is ‘big business’.

‘This report assesses how the claims stack up, and argues that the more governments, inter-governmental organisations, and NGOs pump sport for its social, political and economic benefits, the less it will be able to offer for the common good. Inflated rhetorical claims have distorted our understanding, expectations, and often our political decisions.

‘Sport is just as capable of making us bad as it is of making us good. It is just as likely to promote and excuse conflict as it is to reconcile. Although the sporting economy is growing, the claim that mega-events like the Olympics will contribute substantially to the economy must be carefully scrutinised. Finally, the participation agenda has faltered, raising questions about methodology and strategy for getting people healthy. Again and again, sport has been set up to over-promise and under deliver.

‘The report concludes with a theological appraisal of sport as an unnecessary and playful, yet serious, activity that does not require utilitarian justification. It makes several proposals with a view to sport taking a different but still essential place in society – reclaimed from the social, political and economic agendas of the age for the common good.’

‘Doing Jesus’ in Civic Life

[I contributed this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’ from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. I used it as a vehicle to try to merge a few currents around ongoing debates about religion and secularism, and the place of religion in public life, bringing in de Botton’s book and the intriguingly wonderful article by Matthew Parris in last week’s The Spectator. I’d hoped also to mention the publication of the Clearing the Ground Inquiry, but felt the piece was already collapsing under its own weight, so that got assigned to the links section!]

Late January saw the publication of Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion (Hamish Hamilton, 2012). Far from being an attack on religion of the sort we have come to associate with the New Atheism, de Botton suggests that religion offers valuable resources which – when appropriately cherry-picked – address our need for community and compassion, our yearning for a sense of transcendence and connection. As the publicity blurb for the book put it, ‘even if religion isn’t true, can’t we enjoy the best bits?’

All very well, perhaps, except at some point we come up against the claims of specific religions, not least the one who declared himself to be ‘the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14:6). How do you ‘pick and mix’ Jesus?

Even those who have not read de Botton’s book are unlikely to have escaped the news of some high-profile ‘religion versus secularism’ battles of the last few weeks. Notable, perhaps, has been the bid to ban prayers before the meetings of Bideford Council, a ruling subsequently reversed by the Government, with Eric Pickles arguing that Britain is ‘not strengthened by the secularisation of civil life’.

Even so, the ongoing challenge will be not just to contribute to the common good of civic life – to ‘do God’ in a generic sense – but to do so as Christians, with all that our witness to Christ might entail.

Writing in The Spectator last week, Matthew Parris, a self-confessed unbeliever, seems to recognise something of this in his comment that Jesus ‘did not come to earth to offer the muzzy comforts of weekly ritual, church weddings and the rhythm of public holidays’.

Whilst acknowledging that the church is embedded in the social fabric of the country, Parris wonders whether this sufficiently captures what Jesus requires of his followers. So, he counsels: ‘Beware (I would say to believers) the patronage of unbelievers. They want your religion as a social institution, filleted of true faith... To those who truly believe, the implicit message beneath “never mind if it’s true, religion is good for people” is insulting. To those who really believe, it is because and only because what they believe is true, that it is good... If a faith is true it must have the most profound consequences for a man and for mankind.’

There lies the path of discipleship.

Links

Matthew Parris, Beware – I would say to believers – the patronage of unbelievers (25 February 2012).

Earlier this week, Christians in Parliament, an official All-Party Parliamentary Group, launched Clearing the Ground Inquiry, a preliminary report of the committee’s findings on the marginalisation of Christians in the UK.

• Clearing the Ground Inquiry

• Evangelical Alliance UK, Clearing the Ground Inquiry

• BBC, Equality law ‘should be extended to cover faith’ (27 February 2012)

• Edward Malnick, Britain failing to stand up for Christians, say MPs (26 February 2012)

• Jim Dobbin and Gary Streeter, We need reforms to protect the rights of Christians (26 February 2012)

• Andrew Brown, Are Christians being marginalised? (28 February 2012)

• National Secular Society, Christian discrimination report is just another call for special privileges (28 February 2012)

International Bulletin of Missionary Research 35, 4 (October 2011) on Religions and the Common Good

October 2001’s issue of International Bulletin of Missionary Research (available here, via a free subscription) carries main articles on the theme of ‘religions and common good’, including one by Terry Muck on Christian witness in a multi-religious world, and one by Lamin Sanneh on religious freedom and citizenship.