Trial - eBook

HEROES FOR T H E

KINGDOM

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Nigel Cameron was brought up in the UK, though he has spent much of his career in the United States and Canada where he has worked in Christian and secular universities. The founding director of Rutherford House in Edinburgh, he became Distinguished Professor of Theology and Culture, as well as Provost, at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago, and later Dean of Charles W. Colson's Wilberforce Forum in Washington, DC. He has written and edited more than 30 books on theology, bioethics, and technology, including Are Christians Human? An Exploration of True Spirituality (Zondervan), The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates (Hodders), How to be a Christian in a Brave New World, co-written with Joni Eareckson Tada (Zondervan), Will Robots Take Your Job? (Polity), and two recently published by CARE: The Robots are Coming, and God and Your Mobile.

Š CARE 2019 All rights reserved Published by CARE ISBN 978-0-905195-25-4

British Library Cataloguing-in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Bible verses are from the New International Version

CARE 52 Romney Street, London SW1P 3RF 020 7233 0455 mail@care.org.uk Charity No: 1066963 Scottish Charity No: SC038911

Design: Dave Potter | david-potter.co.uk

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For River, my latest grandson May he grow up to be a hero

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Foreword Something extraordinary happened to me just before I was chosen to be the MP for Peterborough. I had gone into the cathedral to pray. I was all alone, and it was as if I heard a voice saying to me ‘Parliament is where I want you to be.’ So, whenever I experienced opposition, often from fellow Christians, the reality of that experience was incredibly reassuring. I hope this book inspires you to understand the destiny God has for you and to serve Him wholeheartedly wherever He places you.

Democracy in my view is a gift from God, and at a time when many people have lost faith in politics and politicians, we need to remember the privileges and special responsibilities we have for one another and for our public life. That's a key message in this book by Nigel Cameron.

Perhaps in times past there was a greater awareness among Christians of the role they could play in public life. As the 19th century opened, the campaign against the evil slave trade was on the verge of success and there followed many campaigns to improve the lives of people in great need. The five most significant reformers were evangelical Christians.

William Wilberforce partnered with civil society leaders to end the slave trade. The Earl of Shaftesbury took the lead on half-a-dozen issues from education to child labour. Elizabeth Fry campaigned for prison reform.

Florence Nightingale transformed our hospitals. And William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, spent decades not only preaching the gospel but finding many ways to combat the suffering of poverty.

In our day too, God commissions His people to get involved. Whether that’s in politics, in social enterprises or some other sphere each one of us can hear from God, obey His directions to us and be part of His kingdom coming.

As you read this, I hope you'll think afresh about the challenge to all of us to be Heroes for the Kingdom.

Lord Brian Mawhinney served for over 30 years as a Parliamentarian; 26 years as an MP and in various key Cabinet posts. In 2005 he was elevated to the House of Lords.

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Contents INTRODUCTION X Come, join the conversation! x God becomes one of us x PART 1: REDISCOVERING JESUS – God in Human Form 1. A Human Jesus: Body, Mind, Heart, and Will 2. Made in His Image 3. Creation and Stewardship 4. The Bible’s Heroes: Hebrews 11

X x x x x

PART 2: DEMOCRACY AND RESPONSIBILITY – Our Opportunity 5. Why Politics Matters for Christians 6. The Christian Stake in Public Policy

X x x

PART 3: HEROES OF FAITH – Leaders Who Shaped the Modern World 7. William Wilberforce (1759-1833) – The Fight to End Slavery 8. Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845) – Reforming the Prisons 9. The Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885)

– Conscience of the Industrial Revolution 10. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)

– The ‘Lady with the Lamp’ who founded Modern Nursing 11. William Booth (1829-1912) - The Gospel for the Poor in Darkest England

X x x x

PART 4: SALT AND LIGHT TODAY – Christians in Action 12. The Message for the Young and the Poor (Andy Hawthorne) 13. Tearfund: Global Relief and Development (Ruth Valerio) 14. CARE – for Public Life and Leadership (Lyndon Bowring) 15. Fighting Trafficking (Christian Guy) 16. Freedom from Debt (John Kirkby)

X x x x x x

PART 5: HEROES – God’s Call on our Lives 17. Looking Ahead 18. Ten Things to do Tomorrow 19. Make a Christian Case in Public Euthanasia Cloning

X x x x x x

x x

Resources X Sources X Index X

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INTRODUCTION Come, join the conversation!

You’ll meet some of the world’s most fascinating people in the pages that follow.

Elizabeth Fry, who for more than 25 years visited every single convict ship bound for Australia to plead with its captain to take good care of his prisoners, and handed women a package of sewing materials so they would arrive with quilts to sell and a means to earn a living. She persuaded the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, to introduce a series of bills reforming the prisons, and when the King of Prussia came on a state visit, he insisted on meeting with her – inside the infamous Newgate Prison.

General William Booth, who not only founded the Salvation Army but developed a social program for the poor that rocked Victorian England.

When he died in 1904, 40,000 people attended his funeral in Olympia. At the back quietly sat Queen Mary.

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The Earl of Shaftesbury, who perhaps more than any other individual was responsible for humanising the dire impact of Britain’s industrial revolution on its working people. Shortly after his death, Charles Haddon Spurgeon wrote that ‘In the taking home to himself by our gracious Lord of the Earl of Shaftesbury, we have, in my judgment, lost the best man of the age.' He had many concerns, from the wellbeing of child chimney-sweeps to education (he set up the Ragged Schools). Perhaps closest to his heart was how we treat ‘lunatics’, those with mental health issues who were routinely chained up and hosed down like abused animals.

William Wilberforce, whose humane efforts were not totally taken up with the fight against slavery. He was a doting husband and father, and even found time to establish the RSPCA. Meanwhile dealing a death blow to slavery worldwide by ending the slave trade in the British Empire.

Thirty years after his death, a special squadron of the Royal Navy was still intercepting slave ships and freeing their captives.

And Florence Nightingale, who decided in her teens that God had called her to a special task. She would never marry, but campaign for the reform of nursing and the care of the sick. She spoke several European languages, and was also a brilliant statistician – which she used to deadly effect in the many reports and books she produced. Americans on both sides of the Civil War sought her help in caring for their wounded. Shortly after Edward VII instituted the high honour of the Order of Merit, it was awarded to her. No other woman would receive it for 60 years.

What you may not have been told in school is that each and every one of these extraordinary individuals was an evangelical Christian.

You will also meet some contemporary heroes in these pages – though I’m sure they won’t be pleased I’m calling them that: leaders of our generation who are engaging the culture for Christ. Five more fascinating individuals, whom God has called to be salt and light today.

Andy Hawthorne ‘tried to get into full-time Christian work, but no-one would have me!’ So he was selling fashion wares at a trade show when he and his brother decided to launch Manchester’s largest ever youth crusade. The impact of The Message just keeps growing.

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Ruth Valerio one day read a book that suddenly showed her that God was actually interested in the world we live in as well as its people. Now she writes the books and heads up Tearfund’s global advocacy.

Lyndon Bowring was a young Elim pastor when he realised that laws were being changed in Parliament without Christians paying attention.

He changed track and decided to do something about it – by agreeing to become Chairman of CARE. Christian Guy, after directing a social justice think tank, was called in to be an adviser to the Prime Minister – especially on how we can better help the poor. Now he’s heading up the fight against modern slavery around the globe.

And John Kirkby, after a career in business that included lending to poor people, decided to switch sides and spend his life helping people with debt. Now the big banks come to ask his advice.

Come join me in conversation with each of them.

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A personal note In my teens, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life.

I was planning to become Prime Minister.

I wrote my own 30-page political manifesto at the age of 14. I joined the local Labour Party and was quickly placed on their committee (as the only member under 40!). The monthly committee meetings, the first ‘grown-up’ events I had taken part in, had pretty disappointing agendas for a teenager, all tedious local issues like trains and doctors and roads. I helped out when it was election time. I was learning a lot about politics!

And at age 16, I organised a day-long conference in our home for all the friends and neighbours I could persuade to come along, with my manifesto as the theme.

But meanwhile, I was in the somewhat slow process of becoming a Christian. And then my plans started to change.

I reckoned that since I was a Christian there was something more important for me to do for God than get into politics! What real Christians should do was preach the gospel. So, at "As you get older you the age of 17 I went to see the Headmaster and told him I’d decided to become a ministhink more about ter of the gospel rather than Prime Minister. your early days My university plans switched from Politics, – those few years Philosophy, and Economics at Oxford to Thewhen you make huge ology at Cambridge.

decisions that shape your future. "

Was that a good decision? Is it more important for a Christian to become a minister than get into politics? Was the teenage Nigel smart and faithful to make that choice, or a little naive?

Looking back, I don’t remember anyone challenging me to re-think – by arguing that a career in politics is a fine Christian vocation and that I should stick with it. On the other hand, I’ve never been good at listening to advice, so maybe someone did and I just ignored them.

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As you get older you think more about your early days – those few years when you make huge decisions that shape your future. I’m sharing this personal story because I wish I had read about the heroes we discuss in this book when I was 16. Here’s some advice my teenage self could have used. Maybe you could use it, or your kids, or those you teach.

Yet, God is good and He has a way of taking our mangled, confused choices and making of them something worthwhile. I spent a time in ministry, then became a professor, then spent ten years working in Washington on technology ethics and policy. All along I’ve had one eye on theology and the Bible, and the other on politics and policy and public life. Perhaps I made the right decision to abandon a political vocation in favour of theology and ministry; I don’t know. But it’s pretty clear to me that, even if it was the right decision, it was for the wrong reasons.

This in part is why it’s been a privilege to be involved with CARE’s Leadership Programme, which encourages young graduates to get into public life. As I write this, I’m actually preparing to speak to them tomorrow about leadership. I’ve asked them to write their own obituaries – what they would like to be remembered to have achieved for God!

photo of leadership programme?

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So, what’s this book about?

Let me answer that question in three ways.

First, it’s about Jesus. Jesus the man, as well as the God. Then it’s about discipleship. How we can follow Him today. What He wants for us.

What we are to make of His example.

Second, it’s about some pretty basic theology. About the doctrine of Creation – how God made the world so that we could be its stewards, with ‘dominion’ over it, in science and politics as well as agriculture and fisheries. God made the world and placed His human creatures in charge.

It’s about how He made us ‘in His image’. And then it’s about the doctrine of Incarnation – how in Jesus He took human form and showed us how special humans are; God Himself becomes one of us.

Third, it’s about example. There are such terrific stories of Christian heroes – from William Wilberforce, who spent his life fighting for the abolition of slavery, to Florence Nightingale, who blazed the trail for nursing.

And we have around us a host of contemporary examples of pioneers whose vision of ‘ministry’ engages the culture at every level. I’ve interviewed several of them for this book, and I hope you find their stories as thrilling as I have.

They’re all heroes of faith. And God is calling you and me to be heroes too.

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First, Jesus.

God becomes one of us I once decided to lead a Christmas service in August. That certainly got people’s attention!

Singing those familiar carols and listening to the stories of the angels and the shepherds on a bright summer’s day in Scotland seemed a little bizarre. But it helped focus our attention on the basic fact of Christmas: that God decided to become one of His creatures. Specifically, one of His human creatures. One of us. It’s the most remarkable fact in the entire universe. He created it, and then He stepped into it.

Of course, it’s also a fact we’ve become very familiar with. The greater our familiarity, the less we tend to notice. Yet we need to notice.

"The Incarnation – literally, ‘into a body’ – is the foundation-stone of the Christian faith"

The Incarnation – literally, ‘into a body’ – is the foundation-stone of the Christian faith, and makes it fundamentally different from every other religion. If you think about it, the very idea that a human being could also be God sounds like blasphemy. For Jews and Muslims, whose ideas of God focus especially on His transcendence and ‘otherness’, it sounds scandalous. And of course it’s compounded by the further scandal of the Cross. God did not simply become a man, He died a man.

It also sounds close to nonsense – that God the Creator of the universe could become a person who lived inside it. As C.S. Lewis memorably put it, the author of the play walks onto the stage.

Like much else in Christianity, it’s perfectly possible for a child to grasp the basic idea. Yet it’s also proved a challenge for the greatest thinkers to get their heads around it.

‘Our God contracted to a span’, in Methodist hymn-writer Charles Wesley’s words; ‘Incomprehensibly made man’.

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Huge ideas are most simply expressed in poetry, and the message of Christmas flows effortlessly into the minds of ordinary folk as we sang our carols together that sunny Sunday. Yet at the core that message is about what seems to be a huge contradiction.

As Wesley puts it in Hark! The herald angels sing – ‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the Incarnate Deity!

Please as man with man to dwell, Jesus our Immanuel.’

Immanuel, meaning God with us. He is with us now through His Spirit. But for the 30-odd years of His life two thousand years ago, He was walking and talking as a member of our species, Homo sapiens. And it was as a man that He ascended to heaven and sat down at the right hand of God the Father.

The Reason for the Season While the idea of God-becoming-human is very mysterious, it is not nonsense.

The reason is that we have some idea of what’s going on. Because we human beings were created by God in the first place to be very special beings indeed. As Genesis tells us, we were created ‘in His image, after His likeness’. While we "Because we human beings were don’t know everything that means, we do know it distinguishes us from every other being God created by God in made. Everything God created was ‘very good’, the first place to be but humans were singled out for this special digvery special beings nity. Of the millions of species on the earth, only indeed. " one is made in the ‘image’ of the Creator.

To put it a little differently: in creating humans, God was making creatures who were like Him – models of Himself, in space and time. We are ‘persons’, moral beings, the creatures of a personal, moral God. Of course, we have sinned. Yet the divine image remains.

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And the point is this: having brought into being creatures who were as like God as the limitations of space and time permit, it is not nonsense to suggest that God Himself could decide to take the form of one of us. We’re made in the image of God. Jesus Himself the 'image of the unseen God’ (Colossians 1:15), He’s God taking human form.

"it is not nonsense to suggest that God Himself could decide to take the form of one of us. "

Jesus our Brother Evangelical Christians have tended to focus on the divine side of Jesus – the miracle that He was God as well as human. But the fact that He was also human is fascinating, even if it seems obvious. Who was this Jesus who grew up a boy and a young man and spent three years publicly ‘doing good’ in the Palestine of the first century?

The New Testament gives us four separate accounts of His life and ministry. We can’t be sure why God chose to have it like that, but one reason plainly is that we have a much richer view of who He was than we would have with only one of them – just Matthew, just Mark, just Luke, or just John. All the special emphases of the four evangelists go together to build up our picture of the human life of our Lord.

One reason we have been wary of focusing on the life of Jesus is our focus on the significance of His death, which is the lynchpin of the gospel.

Yet there’s far more to learn from the story of His human life than that it prepared Him to die.

The gospels are rich in narratives – the stories of His birth, His presentation in the Temple, His baptism, His ministry and miracles, His interaction with all kinds of people. And also rich in teaching. The Sermon on the Mount, the parables, His debates with religious leaders …

There are vast treasures to understand if we want to understand Jesus.

The idea of ‘imitating’ Jesus has been more popular in Catholic than evangelical piety, with a focus on Thomas a Kempis’ classic and wonderful little book The Imitation of Christ. But it was Paul the Apostle who

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invited us to imitate him as he in turn imitated Jesus (2 Corinthians 11:1).

And the popularity of ‘What Would Jesus Do’? has re-focused our imaginations on what ‘imitation' actually means in the twenty-first century.

‘What Would Jesus Do?’ isn’t a bad way to express the principles that should govern how we lead our lives. It doesn’t refer to how we dress and wear our hair – or suggest that we should all be engaged in full-time ministry. It does refer to ‘doing good’. How do we do good, like Jesus, today? If He’s our hero-in-chief, how do we follow heroically in His footsteps?

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"‘What Would Jesus Do?’ isn’t a bad way to express the principles that should govern how we lead our lives."

REDISCOVERING JESUS God in Human Form 17

Let’s get more interested in the life of Jesus.

We celebrate the Christmas story – we know He was miraculously conceived by His mother Mary and born in a stable in Bethlehem – but that’s often as far as it goes. Plenty of preachers quickly move on, via one or two miracles and parables, to Good Friday and Easter: the passion and the resurrection. But what about the human Jesus in between?

It’s striking how differently the Bible sees things. For a start, there are four whole books in the New Testament devoted to telling us a great deal about Jesus the man. As we’ve seen, just why God decided to give us four Gospels and not simply one is a mystery. But they certainly shed all sorts of light on Jesus’ life and ministry that a single account might not. While we can tell simple Sunday School stories about Him, the Jesus we meet in this complex four-fold way is a very complex character. We should be spending much "just why God decided to give us more energy and time grappling with who He was – and, in the process, discovering a lot more about four Gospels and who He is.

not simply one is a mystery."

We tend to find the ‘humanness' of Jesus uncomfortable. We want to skip over it and focus on His divinity. Because although we know He became human to accomplish our salvation, we’re impatient to get that out of the way. Salvation is the real point! And anyway, what kind of human can He have become if He was ‘really' God all along?

It’s a very interesting question, and one we’ll never begin to get into unless we focus more seriously on His human nature. If you’ve ever studied theology, you’ll know that for hundreds of years the early Church was fascinated by the task of putting together the human and divine natures of Jesus. Their debates spun off various approaches that they decided were heresies. ‘Adoptionism’, for example, was the idea that at some point in his life God the Father ‘adopted' him. He wasn’t the Son of God from the start. Another heresy is much more likely to trap us in our thinking, and that’s called ‘Docetism’. It comes from the Greek word meaning ‘to seem’. And the core idea: Jesus only seemed to be fully human; he wasn’t really.

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I’ve not done a poll, but I suspect a whole lot of Christian folk are actually Docetists in their thinking about Jesus. Of course they don’t know! And I’m sure God will forgive them. But it’s one of the problems of our not taking seriously the human Jesus. We just tend to assume His ‘human’ life wasn’t real, not quite.

I was so concerned about this years back that I wrote a whole book about it. It’s long since out of print now in both the UK and the US, but you can pick it up second- hand if you’re interested. In the US it has the rather cheeky title I picked for it: Are Christians Human? The argument of the book is that because we don’t take the human nature of Jesus seriously enough, we end up not taking our own human nature seriously.

We don’t think He was really human, and as a result we have problems letting ourselves be really human too. The publishers in the UK decided to change the title to Complete in Christ, which they reckoned would sell better. At least they kept the sub-title: Rediscovering Jesus and Ourselves.

And there’s a funny story about why they changed tack. Originally, they had designed a fine cover for the book, with the original title, and passed it out to bookstores in a marketing campaign. The cover was based on the famous Leonardo da Vinci ‘Vitruvian man’ (now much better known than it was then because of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code).

But they scrapped the cover, and at the same time changed the title, at the very last minute. One or two Christian booksellers had told them they would refuse to stock a book with a naked man on the front (even if it was a famous piece of Renaissance art, and anyway the publishers could have covered him up with some clever graphic). Since the whole argument of the book is that evangelical Christians need to take their humanity more seriously, I found this rather funny. Even if it did mean that my book ended up being published with a crummy cover and the wrong title.

(If you’ve ever published a book you will know that, unless you are Dan Brown or some other big star, the author does not get to make the final decisions on things like this.)

Here’s how I set out the problem back then: '…the focus of evangelical interest keeps shifting away from the humanity of Jesus. Where does it rest instead? In a sense

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it moves to His divinity, though, to be more precise, it tends to focus on the supernatural elements in his divine-human person.

[As a result] the tendency is to focus not on Jesus at all, as the historical New Testament figure who is so plainly – indisputably – human; but instead … to devise a mythical figure, whose supernatural character blots out His humanity, and who hovers between earth and heaven.’

This Jesus is a kind of super-hero figure, a Clark Kent who can at any time turn into Superman.

As a result: ‘The mythical Jesus who so … easily surfaces is less difficult to grasp, and more congenial, since He knows less of the divine humiliation which marks the story of incarnation from beginning to end. He is the Jesus whom we cannot imagine to have been ‘really’ hungry, or angry, or ignorant, or in two minds, or tempted, or surprised.’

Let’s take a closer look at the Jesus of the Gospels.

One way of sorting out our human experience is to divide it into what we know (our intellectual life), what we feel (emotional), and what we choose (with our will). The ‘spiritual’ dimension is not another, separate, slice but pervades our minds and our feelings and our wills.

So, the easy bit of the Incarnation to understand is that Jesus had a human body. It gets more challenging as we start looking inside His head and trying to understand what it must have felt like to be Jesus.

Once we decide He wasn’t a pseudo-human super-hero, we start to look at His inner life afresh. It’s pretty clear from the Gospels that He was a lot more like us than many people believe. We know that as a boy He was asking questions of religious teachers. We know that as a man He prayed.

We know that He wrestled repeatedly with temptation. We know that His human spirit shrank from the darkness that lay ahead for Him. He actually prays, in Gethsemane, that if possible the cup might pass from him. In other words, that He might not have to go to the Cross.

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1. A HUMAN JESUS:

BODY, MIND, HEART, AND WILL ‘The supreme ruler of the universe is a perfect man as well as a perfect God.' Charles Hodge, Presbyterian professor at Princeton Seminary and leading American theologian of the nineteenth century

‘I have long believed that we need a rediscovery of Jesus’ humanity, that we not only affirm that Jesus is God as though he were not man but that He is man as though He were not God.’ R. T. Kendall, writer, speaker and former minister of Westminster Chapel in London

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His Body You would need to be a real heretic to deny that Jesus had a real body, but the implications of His Incarnation – enfleshment – need to be followed through. It’s easy to get so taken by the wonder of the Christmas story, and the awful wonder of the passion and death and resurrection, that the 30-some years of maturing and ministry are passed over.

The gospel writers are at pains to situate Jesus in the human family.

Alongside the miracle of His virgin conception we have His family tree spelled out in detail. We don’t know that much about Jesus’ life before His public ministry, but what we do know is extraordinary – mainly, the story of Him in the Temple at the age of twelve. There is so much to see here, from the fact He plainly already had some consciousness of who He was and what He had to do, to His growing intellectual skills, and to His very human neglect of His worried parents.

The limitations that resulted from His being incarnate can be hard to swallow. Could He really have been tired and weary? It’s easy to think He was just pretending, play-acting, just putting on a show of being human.

But to suggest that is like suggesting He didn’t really die, that He just pretended to be dead – so of course there was no need for the resurrection!

"What you see is

what you get. If Jesus said he was tired, or ignorant, or frightened, He really was."

While we can’t claim to understand everything about the Incarnation, this we do know: there was no pretending going on. What you see is what you get. If Jesus said he was tired, or ignorant, or frightened, He really was.

As R.T. Kendall puts it, ‘we not only affirm that Jesus is God as though He were not man but that He is man as though He were not God.’

His Mind We don’t usually think in these terms, but it’s plain that the human Jesus was very smart! He had studied the Scriptures deeply, He’d asked questions of learned teachers when still a boy, and once His public ministry

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began He made stunning use of parables to teach, and He debated vigorously with top religious leaders.

The point is, Jesus made full use of His human mind, and saw no contradiction between ‘faith’ and the use of human ‘reason’.

While we aren’t told how and when His consciousness of His role as Messiah began to form, the story of His debating the teachers in the Temple at the age of 12 suggests it was early on.

"Jesus made full use of His human mind, and saw no contradiction between ‘faith’ and the use of human ‘reason’."

But it was a human mind. Just as when He said He was tired we need to take Him at face value, including when He said He did not know something. To put it differently, He knew everything He needed to know to fulfil His mission. Did He know about nuclear physics, or the future of the Roman Empire, or whether there is life on other planets? I doubt it.

The limitations of His human experience were real at every level. Yet He clearly had supernatural knowledge: about certain people – such as the woman at the well; and of course about key facts – He taught as one with authority; and about His own future, though even then He could pray to ask God to let the cup pass from Him – to find another way to complete His mission without the Cross. If possible.

His Heart The great American theologian Benjamin Warfield wrote a wonderful essay with the title The Emotional Life of Our Lord – drawing attention to the many examples in the gospels of Jesus’ experience of human emotion.

Jesus knew ‘not only joy but exultation, not mere irritated annoyance but raging indignation, not mere passing pity but the deepest movements of compassion and love, not mere surface distress but an exceeding sorrow even unto death’. And then he quotes the Reformer John Calvin: 'the Son of God having clothed Himself with our flesh, of His own accord also clothed Himself with human feelings, so that He did not differ at all from His brethren, sin only excepted.’

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We know He weeps at the tomb of His friend Lazarus. He weeps over Jerusalem. He shows fierce indignation, even anger. He was not always ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’.

The significance of what we read in the gospels about our Lord’s human nature is clarified and stressed in the Letter to the Hebrews.

(People used to think the Apostle Paul wrote it, though it doesn’t actually say He did, and we don’t really know.)

The writer is focused on the priestly role of Jesus as the bridge between fallen humans and God. What’s astonishing is that he is speaking of the elevation of Jesus above every other creature, angels included, when he drills down to discuss the depth of His humanity.

His Will We’ve just referred to Matthew 26:39, where Jesus prays that if possible He might not have to go to the Cross – ‘yet not my will, but thine’.

Taken together with the dramatic narrative of His encounters with the devil, as the devil presents Him with one temptation after another, this suggests that making the right choices was not any simpler for Jesus than it is for us. Since He was not capable of sinning, was it easier for Him? The opposite. Jesus resisted temptation every time. We have no idea how hard that must be, since we keep giving in.

"Jesus resisted temptation every time. We have no idea how hard that must be, since we keep giving in."

The great Congregationalist preacher Arthur John Gossip gave a memorable illustration of Jesus’ resistance to temptation that had a big impact on my understanding when I first read it as a student.

Imagine, he said, the crashing of great Atlantic breakers on the sea-shore. They pull back sand and shingle and throw it higher up the shore as they come in again. Larger stones are not sucked into the ocean but are still shifted and shattered. The sand and shingle and rocks give in to the pressure of the sea. Then imagine a great rock, set deep in the beach. It cannot be caught up by the waves; it always resists the pressure. It doesn’t move

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because it can’t. Just think of the vast pressures on the rock as the breakers come in from the Atlantic and it stands firm. That is how it was with Jesus and temptation.

When we read that the devil left Him after the narrative of the temptations in the desert ‘for a time’, we know he came back. Jesus would be tempted by the devil all through His ministry. He was tempted ‘as we are’.

Let Hebrews speak for itself ‘When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has obtained is more excellent than theirs.’ (1:3, 4) To achieve that purification He had to experience the human condition: ‘Since … the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death.’ (2:14) ‘Therefore he had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest.’ (2:17) His sympathy for our weakness comes from His being ‘one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.’ (4:15) This in turn is the ground on which we may approach him, ‘that we may receive mercy and find grace in time of need’. (4:16) The human experience of Jesus is then graphically summarised: ‘In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear.’ (5:7).

The writer to the Hebrews is affirming exactly what Dr. Kendall said: that Jesus ‘is man as though He were not God’, as well as the other way around.

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The Pioneer plaque, placed on the Pioneer spacecraft depicting humans and our location in the universe.

2. MADE IN HIS IMAGE ‘So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Genesis 1:27, 28 Charles Christians have a clear idea of what it means to be one of us – a member of our special species. We believe that God made us, and that He made us ‘in His image’. But unpacking what Genesis means by in His image is not so simple. Clearly, we aren’t God, so it can’t mean we are exactly the same as He is. But we also aren’t animals, or birds, or fish, or any of the

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other things that make up His creation. We find ourselves somewhere between what they are, and who He is.

Fortunately, there is further light shed in Scripture in Psalm 8, what Genesis means by this phrase.

‘When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?

You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honour.

You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet...’

Our responsibility for the creation and our being made in God’s image go hand in hand. Whatever else being made ‘in His image’ means, it enables us to serve as His stewards in managing the earth.

• Christian thinkers have explored the meaning of our being in the image of God in various ways. What is it that makes us humans unique? There are many dimensions to bearing the image of God – ways in which we are like Him. Let’s summarise them: First there’s a focus on our brains – our ability to reason. But not just reason in the sense of argue. We can think things out, we can reflect, and this becomes the basis for everything else we can do.

• Second, the human brain is also the source of our ability to make choices – we have free will. So we are moral creatures, not just calculators.

• Third, we can also reach beyond ourselves to be ‘creative’ in art and poetry and music. The package of ‘human’ qualities that flows from our brains reflects what God himself is like.

• Fourth, we are called to live on this earth on God’s behalf. We are here as His stewards, and His giving us ‘dominion’ over the earth is all part of our reflecting His rule over the universe.

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• And fifth and finally, we are creatures who have relationships – human relationships, personal relationships – just as God has a relationship with us.

While some thinkers have emphasised one of these more than the others, they fit well together, and together they fill out the picture of us humans as being made like God – but in the limited confines of time and space. God has given us brains that can reason, make moral choices, and also be creative. He has placed us here to rule the earth on his behalf.

And He has made us creatures who thrive in relationships, with each other and with him. These are all strands in our being made ‘in His image’ – space-time models of "God has given God Himself. us brains that

can reason, make moral choices, and also be creative."

Yet the most dramatic claim made by Christians is not that we humans are made in God’s image, it’s that having made us in His image, God then took the extraordinary step of coming down to join us.

Having made the cosmos, He decided to visit our planet and live a life like the lives we live. In the process He gave an almost unbelievably special quality to our human existence. Aside from the fact that we sin and Jesus never did, He led a life just like ours.

Well, not just like. It was a unique life – of teaching, example, and miracles. It seemed to end on the Cross, where He paid the price for sin.

His resurrection brought His first followers face to face with the Jesus they had known and loved, and yet He was also different. And soon after that He ‘ascended’ into heaven – disappearing before their eyes, as He returned to the right hand of God the Father.

Now just to say that is to admit that it is all very mysterious, and the greatest minds in the history of the Church have wrestled with what it really means. How exactly had His body changed when He arose from the dead? It puzzles us that He could pass through doors and yet also eat.

And the marks of His crucifixion were palpable on His body; He invites Doubting Thomas to touch Him and discover for himself (John 20:27).

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And here’s a stunning fact we usually ignore: the Incarnation – the Son of God’s bodily life in Palestine, as Mary’s son also – has not come to an end! In theological terms, the Ascension does not mark the end of the Incarnation any more than the Crucifixion and Resurrection did. The human life that Jesus started has no end. Charles Wesley, the great Methodist hymn-writer, put it like this at the end of Glory be to God on High: ‘Of our flesh and of our bone, Jesus is our brother now.’

"This amazing truth of the Incarnation underlines the specialness of members of the human species in a manner that goes beyond our understanding. "

This amazing truth of the Incarnation underlines the special-ness of members of the human species in a manner that goes beyond our understanding. Humans are so special that the Son of God decided to take human nature back with Him to heaven. How He can be both human and divine at the same time we don’t know. But it’s clear from the Bible that He is. Whatever God making us ‘in His image’ means, it tells us that we were made enough like Him that He could then step into our human shoes.

Let’s take a deeper look at those five key aspects of the image of God. First there’s a focus on our brains – our ability to reason. But not just reason in the sense of argue. The human brain is also where we make decisions, choices, and have free will. Of course, machines can make decisions – but only decisions based on the rules the people who made them programmed them with.

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Humans make choices, which makes us accountable – we humans are responsible people. We can do good, and we can do wrong. So, the second component: We can regret, we can repent, we can apologise. We can forgive – and we can be forgiven. These are all ‘human’ things. Of course, that doesn’t mean only humans have all of these things. Anyone with a dog knows dogs can feel guilty! You get home and pooch slinks away into the corner, and you know she’s done something wrong long before you discover one of "We humans your cushions has been chewed to pieces. are responsible

people. We can do good, and we can do wrong."

Third, our human brains go well beyond ‘rational’ things like arguments and choices, and even moral things like right and wrong and guilt. We humans are also creative – we reach beyond ourselves in art and poetry and music. From our children’s first drawings to Michelangelo’s astonishing painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel we humans can use our brains in all kinds of ways. And this package of human qualities that flows from our brains reflects what God Himself is like – He speaks and argues, but He also creates!

Fourth, we are called to live on this earth on God’s behalf. We image Him as those He has placed in charge, His stewards. He has given us dominion over the earth. It’s our most fundamental job. This is all part of our reflecting His rule over the universe, and of course has led directly to the "We don’t often hear reason for this book.

sermons in church about science and technology, or literature, or farming."

We don’t often hear sermons in church about science and technology, or literature, or farming. Yet these are all equally relevant to our human dominion. So, it was our dominion over the earth that led to our developing digital technology. And in the very top branches of the digital revolution are Artificial Intelligence and the development of Robots. That’s why this discussion is so important. By obeying God’s instructions to work on science and technology we have come up with these amazing inventions. The question is, what do we do with them? If we really are stewards – if the stuff we use (like the silicon that we use to make computer circuits), actually belongs to God, like the

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brains and hands and eyes He has given us to work with that stuff – how are we to employ these gifts?

Finally, we are creatures who are made for relationships. Both human relationships, and also a relationship with God Himself. We aren’t just brains, we aren’t just rulers, we are women and men and boys and girls in families and communities, with friends and relations. Not everyone is very outgoing – some are shy, and find making new friends hard. But it’s often the shy people who value most the friends they do have – and their relatives.

One of the most interesting things about the Bible is that it’s mostly stories. The stories of people, the story of Israel, the story of the ministry of Jesus (and all those parable stories!), the story of the missionary journeys of the Apostle Paul and the expansion of the early Church.

Of course, it’s much more than stories. It’s poems – the Psalms especially, 150 poems stuck right in the middle of the Bible. It’s Proverbs – all those little sayings that catch hold of the details of our lives and offer wisdom in compact nuggets for what someone called the ‘small change’ of life. It’s Letters – some of them focused on complicated arguments – but they are Letters, located in the lives of their readers and of their writer. And that’s true whether we are thinking of the real-life Letters of the Apostle Paul, or the more formal Letters to the Seven Churches that open the Book of Revelation.

What’s so interesting is that it’s when we read and tell stories all these human pieces fall into place: the whole lives of people, their brains, their decisions, their responsibility, their relationships. Because while these are all different aspects to the ‘image of God’ that makes us human, they can’t quite be separated from each other.

It’s also why what the press calls human interest stories are so powerful. Nothing interests us more than people. It’s why we love catching up with friends, and why (even though we may be embarrassed to admit it) we are fascinated by the latest gossip about the lives of celebrities.

It’s why stories – Bible stories and all stories – so quickly grab our imaginations. They get their power from the fact they are about people, and people are images of God. 31

Most of us love curling up with a book. All of us love to sit and watch films, and binge-watch series – which is why Netflix and other on-demand services are so immensely popular. We are fascinated by being drawn into the lives of other people, both those who are real and those who live only in fiction. And while our love of fictional characters may seem odd, it’s pretty much universal. Any strongly-drawn character from a favourite book or film will live on in your life, floating around in your mind together with all the real people and situations you remember – perhaps for the rest of your days. This love of people and their stories is probably the "We are fascinated by single most human thing about us. Just being drawn into the think about the enduring love we have for lives of other people, Jane Austen, for Charles Dickens – and, both those who are real for that matter, Agatha Christie’s Miss and those who live only Marple and Hercule Poirot. And the Good in fiction."

Samaritan, and the Prodigal Son. While some Christians have emphasised one or two of these five image-of-God strands more than the others, all five go very well together.

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God has given us brains that can reason, make moral choices, and also be creative. He has placed us here to rule the earth on His behalf. And He has made us creatures who need relationships, with each other and with Him. These are all strands in our being made in His image. The people whom we most admire, or wish to be, tend to be those in whom all five are obvious "He has made us and strong.

creatures who need relationships, with each other and with Him."

One reason we find human stories so fascinating is that, for all the differences between us as individuals and the stories we are reading, we feel kinship. They are ‘people like us’. This is especially true of celebrity news. It may seem odd, but the reason we find it so fascinating is that the really interesting stories that come out aren’t about their ocean-going yachts or ridiculous salaries or gold-plated aeroplanes, but their relationships. Who doesn’t know that Angelina and Brad have split up? Or that Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet finally got together? Hey, they have relationship issues like the rest of us.

So what’s your story? How is it going? How do you hope it is going to end?

And who are your heroes – after our Greatest Hero, Jesus? Who are the models for your life, the women and men you seek to emulate and live up to?

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3. CREATION AND STEWARDSHIP Genesis 1-3 It’s astonishing how relevant the opening chapters of the Bible are to the key issues of the modern world, all the way from the equality of all humans – which in today’s terms is usually expressed as ‘human rights’ – to our responsibility for the environment.

God made us, male and female, all alike in His image. Every one of us.

Every human being bears His image.

And He handed us humans responsibility for His creation.

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'So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”’ Genesis 1:27, 28 Critics of the Christian faith have sometimes pointed to this text and suggested that Christianity is to be blamed for the way in which people have misused the creation, as if the fact that God handed it into our charge meant that we could use and abuse it as we chose. Of course, this is the exact oppo- "Since God set us site. Since God set us over His creation, we over His creation, are responsible for what we do with it – and we are responsible responsible to Him. for what we do with As we’ve noted, the ‘cultural mandate’, it – and responsible with which humans rule over the earth for God, to Him." goes far beyond a narrow idea of responsibility for farming and fish and bird life. It’s a mandate for every fruitful and productive thing that will ever come from creation. Which means the arts, science and technology, finance, government – the full life of the human mind and its many endeavours. Just as it requires us to ‘farm’ the mind and every gift of humans and the wider world, it does so in fidelity to the God who made it. Just in case there’s any misunderstanding, the story that immediately follows of the Garden of Eden – of disobedience to God and the fall and expulsion from the Garden – makes it utterly clear that while we live in this world it is very far from being ours to do with as we choose. God will hold us accountable.

At the same time, it’s plain that we are to engage in ‘dominion’ of every aspect of the fruitfulness of the creation. There is nothing closed off from our engagement. Yet if that engagement is to remain accountable – if we are here to serve God in His world – we need to make the right choices. The stark account of Eve’s temptation and corruption by the snake, and Adam’s that follows, could not be plainer. We humans cannot

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avoid our responsibility to engage in all the wonders of the world, and to do so always making conscious choices to be true to God the Creator.

There’s nothing in this world that does not belong to God, and that He does not call us to engage for Him.

"There’s nothing in this world that does not belong to God, and that He does not call us to engage for Him."

We’ll take a look later at what this means for our engagement in politics and the wider culture. Everything out there is part of the world for which we have responsibility. As Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper famously said a century back, ‘There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!’ Kuyper practised what he preached: he became Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

Psalm 8 As we have seen, Psalm 8 is remarkable. It’s a kind of commentary on the beginning of the book of Genesis, and it tells us a lot about who we are, and what we are here to do. Its importance is reinforced by its being quoted in Hebrews 2:7, 8.

‘When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?

You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honour.

You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.’ Psalm 8:3-8

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You made them a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honour and put everything under their feet.’ Hebrews 2:7, 8 The Psalm starts by pointing out how small and seemingly insignificant we are in comparison with the heavens. Yet the writer then corrects that impression. Small we may be, but God has created us in a place of high dignity and significance.

Translations differ as to whether in verse five he is saying we are little lower than the angels, or little lower than God himself. Either way, we are up there! We have been ‘crowned with glory and honour’.

That’s what it means to be in the image of God. And then: ‘You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.’

Here we have the dominion mandate from Genesis 1 spelt out in further detail. Humans were made in His image to be ‘rulers over’ the works of the hand of God. It’s a breathtaking concept, and as we keep saying – it needs to be repeated – while the world of the Psalmist was one of wild animals and birds, fish, and farm animals, the works of God’s hand in our day include business and government and the universities and every other flourishing of His creation.

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4. THE BIBLE’S HEROES: HEBREWS 11 Christians – Evangelicals as much as Catholics – have a tendency to see their saints through rose-tinted spectacles. Many evangelical biographies are entirely focused on the good side of their subject, and ignore or gloss over the fact that he or she also made mistakes and had character failings like the rest of us.

"there were key points in His human life that make Him look a lot more like us than we might have imagined. "

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That’s not just dishonest, it’s dumb. If we’re looking for someone to inspire us and encourage us to do what we can for the Lord, to build a life that will have impact, a figure from a stained-glass window is not going to be half as much help as someone we can identify with. Because no-one ever lived a perfect

human life. Except Jesus. And, as we have noted, there were key points in His human life that make Him look a lot more like us than we might have imagined. The narrative of his anguish and indecision in Gethsemane, for example. As Hebrews says so clearly, He was deliberately made to be as like us as possible.

As we’ve noted, the tendency to see Him as super-human isn’t some great show of respect, it’s a denial of what the Bible actually says about Him. And the whole point of having Christian heroes to encourage us on our way is that they are, as it were, half-way houses between us in our sin and Jesus in his sinless perfection. It defeats the object to turn them into super-heroes and write about them in the way that celebrities and business leaders sometimes have public relations firms put together ‘biographies’ to enhance their image.

The critical importance of these hero examples is underlined in the Letter to the Hebrews. It is specifically written to offer encouragement, and the writer knows there is no better way to do that than to point to examples of Christian discipleship from which they can learn.

‘Remember your leaders’, he says, ‘those who spoke to you the word of God; consider the outcome of their life, and imitate their faith.’ (13:7) There is an immediate example in the life and faith of their own church leaders. But he also sets before them two other examples. Consider these examples, he says, and ‘therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet’. (12:12, 13) The examples he presents are Jesus Himself, and a selection of heroes of faith whose stories we read in the Old Testament. He stresses the humanity of Jesus, and stresses the (sinful) humanity of the saints of the Old Testament. He is keenly aware that his readers need to be able to identify with these uplifting examples. We’ve already seen how he speaks of Jesus in startlingly human terms.

Let’s now take a look at how he speaks of the Old Testament saints in chapter 11.

Throbbing through these verses comes a realism that is unsuspected

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– and I suspect for many readers unnoticed! Because they are heroes, but they are also flawed men and women. They are humans who are, as we say, ‘all too human’. He may have deliberately picked people whom we know to be flawed, although that would not have been too difficult as the Bible is generally unsparing in the way it "The Bible is generally presents its characters, ‘warts and all’.

unsparing in the way it presents its characters, ‘warts and all’."

The writer to the Hebrews tells us that, together, they make up a ‘cloud of witnesses’. The image in his mind is of their watching us run our race from the stands, cheering us on in the stadium of life. They are what theologians call members of the ‘Church triumphant’, those who have gone ahead of us and already entered into glory.

Who are they?

‘By faith Abraham,’ we read (11:8). Abraham is the father of the faithful, the great Biblical example of a man God calls who steps out in faith – a faith that God rewards. But as we know, the story of his life – recorded for us at considerable length in the Book of Genesis – includes a number of quite disreputable incidents. There’s the odd story of the time when, out of cowardice, he tries to pass off his wife Sarah as his sister. There’s the matter of Hagar and God’s promise of a son. Sarah despairs of God’s promise and suggests Abraham have a son by her maid Hagar; and Abraham 'harkened to the voice of Sarai’ (Genesis 16:2). He took Hagar as a second wife, and had a son by her – Ishmael. And as we know, it had serious consequences.

In Hebrews 11 the writer puts the most positive spin possible on the situation! ‘By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised.’

(11:11). Yet we all know the fuller story (or at least the Hebrew Christians to whom the letter was written did!). Sarah is eavesdropping when she overheard the Lord himself, who was visiting them incognito with a group of angels, saying to Abraham: ‘I will surely return to you in the spring, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.’ She laughs, and says (to herself, she thinks), ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall we have pleasure?’ But the Lord hears her, and questions her husband:

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‘Why did Sarah laugh? Is anything too hard for the Lord?’ Sarah then makes it worse by lying: ‘I did not laugh.’ But he persists: ‘No, but you did laugh.’

It’s embarrassing to read that story, and it’s remarkable that the writer to the Hebrews nevertheless praises the faith of Sarah. ‘By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive’.

Moses also features prominently on the list, and – just as with Sarah – there’s a specific reference to one of the most embarrassing incidents we know about his life. ‘By faith’, we read, ‘he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king; for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.’

(11:27). Once again, a very generous judgment on the story we know from the Old Testament! In Exodus 2:11 onwards we read of his killing an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave, his hiding the body, and then of his fear when he realises that ‘the thing is known’ and that Pharoah will kill him. So ‘Moses fled from Pharoah, and lived in the land of Midian.’ And we know other facts about Moses that might disqualify him from being listed as a hero of faith – including the final tragedy that prevented his entering the promised land. But the point of the chapter is that, despite these serious failings, Moses is worthy of the status of a hero.

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Then there is Samson, whose name is just listed here. We know a lot about his chequered career from the Old Testament. And, side by side with him, Jephthah. Jephthah must be the most remarkable of all the inclusions in this list, since his unspeakable act (sacrificing his daughter) to fulfil a foolish vow is a dark stain on the history of the nation. Even that dreadful act does not disqualify him from being listed as a hero of faith.

Then we have David! David, the king ‘after God’s own heart’. Yet as we well know, he is probably of all these heroic figures the one with whom fallen, sinful men and women like us can best identify. We know his name is forever associated with a double act of adultery and murder, and the tragedy that followed. What "These heroes encouragement that even that did not disqualify were sinful men him from being a hero!

and women, in some cases spectacularly so."

I’m not trying to diminish these heroes, but to underline the point that the writer of the letter to the Hebrews is making time and again: these heroes were sinful men and women, in some cases spectacularly so.

That’s exactly why we can be excited and encouraged as they cheer us on from the stands. They are heroes but not super-heroes, they are sinners just like us. Yet in spite of their weakness they had faith in God, they attempted great things for Him, and He used them.

In the words of Frederick William Faber’s hymn There's a wideness in God’s Mercy: ‘There is no place where earth’s sorrows Are more felt than up in heaven: There is no place where earth’s failings Have such kindly judgement given.

For the love of God is broader Than the measures of man’s mind; And the heart of the Eternal Is most wonderfully kind….’

What greater comfort, and encouragement, could we find as we consider the heroism to which – like them – we have been called?

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DEMOCRACY AND RESPONSIBILITY 43

For most of history, and in most of the world today, democracy is absent. Most people have lived under kings and dictators and small governing cliques. And in many countries today, even though there is a veneer of democracy, it’s really pretend.

But in countries like the UK and most of Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia and New Zealand and some other lucky places, there really is democracy, and freedom. And, when you think about it, that’s terrifying. Because it means we’re all responsible. None of us is off the hook. While people like blaming ‘the government’, and the ‘system’, and ‘them’, it’s really us.

Let’s take a look at what that means – because we’re here to rule God’s world and show love to our neighbours.

If you like, feel free to skip these two chapters for now, and come back to them after you’ve read the thrilling stories of Christian leadership and engagement that come after – and illustrate what we are saying.

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5. WHY POLITICS MATTERS FOR CHRISTIANS In Biblical times, and up until the recent past, there were few opportunities for Christians to influence governments. But with the rise and spread of democracy the question of Christian social responsibility has become acute. Every citizen is now in the position which was once occupied by only the few: the position of actual political responsibility, and of potential political power.

The Political Imperative Democracy has created a new situation for Christians, and a new response is required. But how do we relate our political circumstances to those of believers in Biblical times, and explore the principles for politics from the Bible?

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There is plainly a fundamental difference between politics in the western democracies and what is typical of a dictatorship, but it’s not a completely black-and-white distinction. The democracies are only imperfectly ‘democratic’, in that such factors as social class, racial origin, wealth and geographical location can all influence the degree to which political power is available to every citizen.

In societies that are not democratic, political power is available only to an elite. This elite may be large or small – it may, indeed, be just one individual, with absolute power! In practice, power normally resides with some minority group within the nation. This group may follow racial or tribal lines, or derive from party membership in a one-party state. However it’s made up, it’s the group with political responsibility – and the possibility of political power.

Whether the future of the world includes the universal spread of democracy, or whether it will soon wither away, we can’t say. As we know, mass democracy – ‘one person, one vote’ – is a very recent development, and almost wholly confined to western Europe and nations whose modern origins lie in European exploration and colonisation. The speed with which so many former European colonies modified or abandoned their democratic independence constitutions is depressing. We can’t be sure that democracy represents the future.

We must recognise that many Christians, like most of the human race, have lived and do live under non-democratic regimes. So we need an understanding of Christian social responsibility that while relevant to democracy also makes sense under other systems.

Of course, the societies of Bible times were not like ours. While ancient Greece had democracy of a sort for a period, it was the exception.

Israel, Babylon, Egypt and Imperial Rome were not democracies at all.

"Some Christians argue that since the Bible says nothing about getting involved in politics, we shouldn’t."

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So, it’s complicated.

Some Christians argue that since the Bible says nothing about getting involved in politics, we shouldn’t. The Bible doesn’t tell us to vote, or join a political party, or to

stand for office, or to take any part in the institutions of the democratic society. So we should not engage in any of these activities. This view, once popular among many evangelicals, is seen as a bit extreme today, but merely to state it draws attention to the inconsistency of many Christians. Few Christians claim we should not vote at all. But you can’t isolate casting a vote from other levels of political activity.

If voting is good, then we’re committed to much more. Christians should consider joining political parties; like-minded Christians should join together to campaign and lobby; and for some, perhaps even stand for public office – from the local council to Parliament.

There are two basic principles in Scripture that set the context for this discussion.

First, stewardship. If God has set us over His creation, we have an obligation to be its stewards. These obligations apply of course to every member of the human race, since it is humankind as a whole that God has set over His world, believer and unbeliever alike are responsible for what they do with God’s world.

Secondly, the principle of ‘doing good’, our fundamental obligation to our fellows. In Old and New Testament alike this basic requirement is made that God’s people should love their neighbours as themselves.

As the parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates so dramatically, there is no limit to our ‘neighbourhood’ or the requirements of ‘neighbourliness’. Even enemies are neighbours. Love which is exclusive and limited in its scope to people like us is but honour among thieves. We are responsible for all our "Our obligations in Christ are precisely neighbours.

those we have not

We can see these two principles as one, fulfilled outside of for they set out what God requires of us both Christ." as human beings, and as believers, along two parallel lines. Of course, that is no coincidence! Our obligations in Christ are precisely those we have not fulfilled outside of Christ. The ‘last Adam’ has come to establish what the ‘first Adam’ could not: the reign of God in His world, through His people.

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In the redemptive concept of neighbour-love, the unlimited obligation which each of us has for the wellbeing of our fellows – a concept which is fundamental to the Bible – we have God’s re-statement of the obligations of Adam and Eve as His stewards.

What, then, of politics? We have creation-redemption twin injunctions – stewardship and neighbour-love – reflecting God’s demand that we live in this world on His behalf, manifesting His own care for the well-being of His creation. They are not limited by the immediate circle of family and friends in which we move. Indeed, it was precisely an attempt to limit it like that (‘Who is my neighbour?’ someone asked) that drew out of Jesus the Samaritan parable.

So it is twice-over incumbent upon us, as men and women and as Christians, to be stewards of the world in God’s place, and to show His own unlimited love toward His creatures. How are we to do it?

"So it is twice-over incumbent upon us, as men and women and as Christians, to be stewards of the world in God’s place."

The simple answer is that we are to do it in every way. Wherever we have opportunity, we have also a corresponding responsibility to shoulder. And it is in this correlation of opportunity and responsibility that drives us to politics. While in the ancient societies of the Old and New Testaments, political responsibility and political power were in the hands of an elite, in a democratic society we all share them – whether we like it or not.

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Of course, in most societies there are half-way houses between the control of political power by a small minority, and the limitation of responsibility and obligation to the circle of family and friends. This is especially so in local government, and also other areas such as the professions and other institutions. Modern totalitarian societies are marked by the monopoly assumption of political power by the ruling group.

By contrast, within democracies such as our own, political responsibility and the opportunity for political power are distributed among all citizens. We tend to think to conceive of this distribution of power in terms of ‘opportunity’ for us to exercise power and influence. People who think Christians should not engage in the political process argue like this.

They think it’s an option not to.

Yet democracy distributes actual power and influence, together with responsibility for its exercise. Responsibility is conferred by democracy itself. Political responsibility goes hand in hand with the political opportunity. The point is: political opportunity confers an obligation.

If we are God’s stewards, and we are called to love our neighbours, we can’t avoid politics.

"If we are God’s stewards, and we are called to love our neighbours, we can’t avoid politics."

The Bible actually illustrates this principle we have outlined with reference to individuals who rather dramatically find themselves among the ruling elite.

We find political responsibility being exercised by two major Biblical figures, Joseph and Daniel, and in a somewhat different fashion by Esther. Each is called to high office in a foreign culture with a calling that can only be described as political. The Bible presents them to us as leading political figures of their day, serving pagan rulers in pagan societies. They accepted their responsibility to be stewards, and to show neighbour-love.

But what about Compromise?

Doesn’t participation in political power inevitably involve Christians in compromise, and associate us with decisions that are against

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our principles? Politics is all about compromise, people say, so while Christians can vote they surely can’t have a political role and keep their integrity.

But what does ‘compromise’ actually mean in this context? Does it mean the same thing that it means in the familiar contexts in which it plainly describes something which is wrong? Is political compromise the same thing as compromising your principles?

If you think about it, you realise it’s different. If someone compromises his principles, he takes some personal action in which he sets his own principles aside, in order to advance other interests and engage in bad behaviour.

Political compromise is something altogether different. It is compromise within a community, and it’s essential for any participation in communal decision-making. It’s as essential in the community of a family or a church as it is in the wider political community.

"Compromise within a community is what enables a family to decide which television channel to watch, and for a congregation which minister to call."

Without it, there can be no communal human life. Compromise within a community is what enables a family to decide which television channel to watch, and for a congregation which minister to call. It is this kind of compromise which is associated with political decision-making. It is nothing to do with an individual selling out his or her own beliefs for private advantage.

Of course, there are many different kinds of issues on which we have to compromise within our communities. How do we improve the audibility of the sermon? By installing a sounding-board, or an amplifier? How do we cut down on litter in public places? By stiffer penalties and policing, or more litter bins?

Many contentious ‘political’ issues are of this type – differences of opinion on how best to achieve goals we all basically agree on. Sometimes we split the difference. Sometimes one side may give way to the other on the understanding, spoken or not, that there will be a trade-off in some

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other matter, or in order to place greater emphasis on a more important issue later. Compromises of this kind are the small change of human affairs. Without them, any kind of life together is impossible.

Yet what about issues with serious ethical implications? Are they different?

Let’s take an especially hard example on which many people have strong views – abortion. Let’s assume there’s quite a liberal law on abortion like that in the UK. Now, assume it’s held to be entirely wrong by one-third of the House of Commons (who wish to ban abortion except to save the mother’s life), too restrictive by another third (who support abortion ‘on demand'), and too liberal by the remainder (who want to make abortion more difficult, but only in a way which will cut the rate by 50 per cent). If you think the first group are in the right, what are they to do?

They face two choices: argue their corner for a ban on abortion (knowing that, because of their minority position, this will have the effect of leaving things as they are), or work with those in the third group to restrict abortion, instituting a new legal framework which will prevent it

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in half the cases and permit it in half of them. The latter course involves them in a typical political compromise on a plain ethical issue.

How do they make up their mind? It would be a mistake to suggest that their choice lies between compromising and not compromising. It’s the opposite! Their choice is between two kinds of compromise: compromise with the status quo (in which, say, 180,000 abortions are carried out each year) in the interests of their conviction that there should be virtually none, and compromise with those who take a middle view (in which case there would be 90,000 abortions a year).

The alternative really lies between responsibility for 90,000 a year and responsibility for twice that number.

By our speech or by our silence we are all contributors to the choices our communities make. Acquiescence in the decisions of others abdicates our responsibility – in other words, it means we’re to blame.

"By our speech or by our silence we are all contributors to the choices our communities make."

By abstaining from participation – from politics – we simply pass up our opportunity to influence its outcome. We can’t emigrate from the world of political and, therefore, moral responsibility. We may argue our case and be over-ruled. Or we may argue our case and be able to force a compromise. Or we may argue our case and win. Whatever the outcome, if we have taken up our responsibilities and done our best to influence the communal decision, our conscience can be clear. This is not ‘guilt by association’, it is the exact opposite: ‘innocence by participation’.

By contrast, if we do nothing – in the belief that it will keep our hands clean – then, in every communal decision which is wrong, we are indeed morally compromised. The idea that by passivity we can seal ourselves into a moral cocoon is an illusion. There is undoubtedly an attraction in the notion that we can wash our hands of responsibility for communal moral decisions. It is no more possible for such handwashing to exempt us from our moral responsibilities than it was for Pontius Pilate. Like him, we may make choices or decline to make them. But our responsibility for what follows remains.

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6. THE CHRISTIAN STAKE IN PUBLIC POLICY So, what principles should guide us in our participation in the political process?

Christian political engagement is required by the distribution of political power among the citizens of a democracy. The opportunity and corresponding responsibility for us to extend our stewardship and our neighbour-love outside of our immediate circle go together. These two principles provide a way to understand our distinctively Christian political concerns.

Plainly, as we become involved in political decision-making we bring into the political arena our distinctive Christian beliefs. The concepts of stewardship and neighbour-love are not empty. Above all, we believe in the dignity and worth of every human life. Above all else, we are responsible

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in stewardship to God for the way in which we exercise power over our fellow-humans, and the extent to which the principle of neighbour-love governs how we do it.

"So, the Christian stake in public policy is supremely evidenced in our concern for the way in which men and women are treated ."

So, the Christian stake in public policy is supremely evidenced in our concern for the way in which men and women are treated.

How adequately does political decision-making reflect a proper understanding of human beings as made in the image of God? That is the touchstone of Christian social responsibility – and politics.

For example, take a look at the agendas of the five nineteenth-century heroes we will soon be discussing – and then those of the contemporary leaders and their organisations. These are fascinating lists.

As you will see, some of the policy implications of stewardship and neighbour-love may be simple and (among Christians) uncontroversial, while others are complex and uncertain.

But what about pluralism?

How can a Christian stake in public policy be compatible with the actual character of our modern democracies? Surely Christians have no right to ‘impose’ certain values upon a society in which people are mostly secular (or Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu).

That’s actually a naïve way of thinking.

This way of thinking overlooks the simple duty of Christians to ‘do good’, and to seize every opportunity to do so. Even if other people don’t agree.

Moreover, it rests on a misunderstanding of the way in which democracy functions. In a democratic society, every citizen has the right to assert his or her convictions, whether about means and ends (how to accomplish something) or ethical disagreements, and to seek to sufficiently convince our fellow-citizens to prevail. This follows from our acceptance of the

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democratic order and the pluralist character of society. It’s actually an abdication of democratic responsibility for a citizen to fail to do so.

The argument is not over whether Christian convictions should be applied at all costs – such that, for example, a coup d’etat would be justified. Nor is this an argument that specifically religious requirements should be laid upon society, such as an obligation of church attendance or a religious qualification for the exercise of public office (both of which, of course, have been elements in our law in the past). Our democracy is frankly pluralist in its approach to religion, despite the continuing establishment of Christianity in the constitutional place of the national churches, the Church of England and the Church of Scotland.

My argument is more limited: in a democratic society, Christian citizens have a twofold obligation to seek to advance our view of how that society ought best to be run. We’ve an obligation to God, and an obligation also to society itself. In fact, these obligations coalesce in our obligation to our fellow-citizens, to seek their good. Christian citizens will hold this principle above all others as we seek to exercise our political

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responsibilities to best serve the people of our nation.

But what of the imposition of Christian ideas upon an unwilling nation? Here again the democratic process is misunderstood.

Legislation, to be successful, must command a certain level of general political support.

"in a democratic society, Christian citizens have a twofold obligation to seek to advance our view of how that society ought best to be run."

Christian ideas can be implemented in a democracy only by precisely the same means as other ideas. They must command political support in the same fashion, and if they are finally successful their success is proof that they have exactly the same right to shape public policy as any other successful political idea.

Many Christians desperately need to recover the confidence that our distinctive ideas are at least as deserving of respect as those with which they disagree! Our widespread deference to secular thinking speaks loudly of a crisis of conviction. We have a clear obligation to contend for Christian ideas in the political arena.

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Homeless men sheltering at Field Lane Refuge.

Founded by missionaries in 1842.

HEROES OF FAITH Leaders who Shaped the Modern World 57

If we need to recover confidence in the Christian view of things, there is no better way than being reminded of the band of Christian heroes of the nineteenth century who essentially shaped the modern world in pioneering social and political movements. They held their focus on loving their neighbours – slaves, the poor, prisoners, child labourers, ‘lunatics’, the sick – and pioneered humane legislation and changed social norms that are now taken for granted in much of the world.

In fact, to review their efforts – even in the short space available in this book – is breathtaking! Driven powerfully by their faith, they turned all their gifts and networks and energies over years and decades to causes that changed the lives of many millions – and set "At the close of the pace for human dignity in the modern world.

the eighteenth century, Britain was in the grip of the world’s first industrial revolution."

At the close of the eighteenth century, Britain was in the grip of the world’s first industrial revolution.

Coal-driven steam power and the invention of clever machines like the Spinning Jenny led to vast social and economic changes that ultimately raised living standards across a nation whose life had been focused mainly on farming. But in the process they produced enormous social upheaval – that included large-scale child labour, disaster for skilled weavers and others whose jobs were taken over by machines, and the rapid growth of cities with widespread poverty.

There was much else wrong with the values of eighteenth-century society that had little to do with industrialisation, although that made it all worse. While there were not many slaves in Britain itself, as the world’s leading naval power this nation had also been its leading slave power – transporting millions of captives from Africa to British colonies in the Caribbean and America. The prisons in Britain, as in the rest of the world of the day, were filthy and cruel. Hospitals were places where disease was rife, and the poor had little access to treatment. ‘Lunatics’, those unfortunates whose lives were blighted by mental diseases, were treated like crazy animals, chained up and hosed down.

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This was the situation into which God raised up a series of utterly remarkable women and men, who committed themselves to spending their lives making things better. Whether by changes in the law or voluntary, charitable activity, or both, they set themselves the enormous challenge of awakening their fellow-countrymen to the evils of the day, and championing "‘Lunatics’, those solutions – changes that would ultimately unfortunates whose make an enormous difference in the lives of lives were blighted by many millions, and that shaped the modern mental diseases, were world as one in which, for all our problems, treated like crazy we value human dignity, human rights, and the well-being of the powerless and the poor. animals, chained up and hosed down."

Of everyone made in God’s image.

Many others worked with them for similar goals. But the five key names were, all of them, evangelical Christians. Whether Methodists or Quakers or Anglicans, their faith in Jesus Christ propelled them to become leaders of social reform, and they were among the most influential figures of nineteenth-century Britain.

Let’s look briefly at their stories.

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William Wilberforce by John Rising, 1790, pictured at the age of 29

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE (1759-1833)

7. The Fight To End Slavery If you’ve seen the film Amazing Grace, you’ll know the story.

Like every great social movement, the campaign to end slavery was complex and involved the efforts of many, many people. But William Wilberforce led the charge in Parliament, in partnership over many decades with campaigner (and Quaker) Thomas Clarkson.

Opposition to slavery had been growing in eighteenth-century Britain, and the movement was given a big boost by a famous legal case in 1772. The judge, Lord Mansfield, held that slavery had no basis in either statute law (Acts of Parliament) or the common law (decisions by judges when there are no specific laws). The case was focused on preventing a particular slave-owner from sending a slave overseas to be sold. But the press and anti-slavery campaigners picked up on its wider implications.

At that time there were around 15,000 slaves in Britain – and many, many more in the British Empire around the world.

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William Wilberforce came from a well-off merchant family, and initially led a life of parties and gambling clubs until in his mid-20s he was converted to Christianity. While he was a student at Cambridge he had become friends with William Pitt, who was soon to become Prime Minister. And Pitt helped to persuade him to enter politics himself. At the age of 21 (and while still a student) he became MP for his hometown of Hull in Yorkshire. He would stay a Member of Parliament for 45 years.

In 1787, soon after his conversion, he had a crucial meeting with Thomas Clarkson, the leading anti-slavery campaigner of the day. Clarkson and his friends founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade that year. Wilberforce formally joined its committee in 1791.

And it was in 1791 that he first introduced a bill into Parliament to abolish the trade. It was defeated 163-88.

It was a bill he would reintroduce year after year until finally it was passed in 1807, by a stunning vote of 283-16.

It’s interesting to observe the tactics of these campaigners. First, they got organised. Clarkson and his friends (many of them Quakers) set up the Society and travelled the country establishing branches and distributing pamphlets and books. (Wilberforce himself wrote one that was 400 pages long!) And second, they made a key strategic decision: they would go after the slave trade first – the vile transporting of men and women from Africa to the Caribbean and United States – rather than seeking to abol"They believed ish slavery in one go. They believed that if the that if the trade trade was ended, slavery itself would start to was ended, slavery die out. And they needed the support of people itself would start who were concerned about the economic and to die out." social disruption that immediate abolition would cause. They were open to a step-bystep approach, and at every stage they were prepared to compromise as long as their cause moved forward. As shown in the film Amazing Grace, one early effort was to require slave ships to give slaves more room in the ghastly ships’ compartments in which they were chained up. Not only did that actually benefit slaves a little, it drew public attention to the awfulness of what was going on, it encouraged people to

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think of them as fellow humans, and it pushed defenders of slavery onto their back foot.

Slavery was hugely profitable, and when it was finally abolished the British Government had to spend a fortune to compensate the slave-owners – part of the deal that got the legislation through Parliament in 1833.

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Just how much did it cost? The sum was 20 million pounds, in 1833 terms. It’s hard to make a direct comparison with today. But here are attempts. That 20 million represented 40 per cent of the annual income of the British Treasury, or five per cent of Gross Domestic Product. Today, that five per cent of GDP would be 100 billion pounds; 40 per cent of Treasury receipts today would be 300 billion. To pay the bill, the Government borrowed three-quarters of it from private banks. Apparently the final payment on the loan was not made until 2015 – according to a recent tweet from the Treasury! So if you were a UK taxpayer four "So if you were a years ago, you were involved in paying off UK taxpayer four the debt that freed the slaves – and compenyears ago, you were sated the slave-holders.

involved in paying off the debt that freed the slaves – and compensated the slave-holders"

It’s striking that Britain didn’t merely ban the slave trade in principle. The nation devoted significant resources over many years to what was known as ‘suppressing’ the trade. The navy established a special command called the West Africa Squadron whose job it was to stop ships and search them for slaves. It’s been estimated that by 1860 they had intercepted more than 1600 slave ships, and freed their captives. There was also a big effort to persuade other nations to permit the Royal Navy to board ships carrying their flags, in case they too were carrying slaves. The passage of Wilberforce’s Bill to end the slave trade turned around the world’s top slave-trading nation into the leading force to end it.

Wilberforce had retired from politics and was dying when the Slavery Abolition Act finally passed its third reading (the key final vote in Parliament). A few days after his death on 29 July, 1833, Queen Victoria gave it the Royal Assent; slavery was over in the British Empire.

While he’s chiefly remembered for his campaign against slavery, Wilberforce was also a devoted family man (with his wife Ann he had six children, and he doted on them), very much a team-player (part of what’s called the Clapham Sect, a group of leading Christian social reformers who used to meet in a vicarage near Clapham Common), and a force for

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wider reform – as we’ve noted, he was a founder of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA).

Here was a man who ran the race set before him to the end – in the service of men and women made in the image of God.

‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses … Let us run the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.’

Hebrews 12:1, 2

"Here was a man who ran the race set before him to the end – in the service of men and women made in the image of God."

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Fry reading to the prisoners in Newgate Prison

ELIZABETH FRY (1780-1845)

8. Reforming the Prisons Summing up her extraordinary life and work, the Elizabeth Fry charity that still bears her name two centuries later has this to say: ‘Whilst Elizabeth Fry is most well known for her prison reform activities, she was also involved in investigating and proposing reforms in mental asylums. For more than 25 years she visited every convict ship leaving for Australia and promoted reform of the convict ship system.

She worked to improve nursing standards and established a nursing school which influenced her distant relative, Florence Nightingale. She worked for the education of working women, for better housing for the poor and was responsible for the establishment of soup kitchens.’ And this, needless to say, at a time when women had few professional opportunities, and when their contribution to public life was widely discounted - which makes her story all the more amazing. When she was prevented from joining the Anti-Slavery Society, because only men could

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"When she was prevented from joining the Anti-Slavery Society, because only men could become members, she helped found an anti-slavery society for women."

become members, she helped found an anti-slavery society for women.

Elizabeth Fry was a Quaker and kept an intimate diary of her spiritual life as well as her charitable efforts. ‘According to her diary’, we read in Wikipedia, ‘Elizabeth was moved by the preaching of Priscilla Hannah Gurney, Deborah Darby and William Savery’ – all campaigners for the abolition of slavery.

Her conscience for prisoners was awakened by a visit to the infamous Newgate Prison in 1813, where she was horrified by the conditions for women prisoners. Eventually she personally funded a prison school for children imprisoned with their mothers. Then she helped found an organisation for women to give women in prison practical help – such as developing new skills, like needlework, that would enable them to support themselves after they were released.

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She then developed a special interest in women who were going to be ‘transported’. Transportation was a criminal sentence that sent women and men to live in Australia and other British colonies. At that time, women prisoners in Newgate who were to be transported were forced to travel across London to their ship in open carts, with their few possessions. Crowds "It’s reported that she would gather and pelt them with rotten visited every single food and other items. She personally persuaded the governor of the prison to end transport ship for more than 20 years and this practice and use closed carriages.

helped start a movement

Then she decided to start visiting the prison ships before they departed and that led to the abolition talk to their captains about the needs of of transportation as a women prisoners (and their children) on punishment." the long journey ahead. She arranged for each woman to be given a Bible and some sewing materials, so she could make quilts and sell them when she arrived. It’s reported that she visited every single transport ship for more than 20 years and helped start a movement that led to the abolition of transportation as a punishment.

Elizabeth Fry’s work was not confined to penal reform. She set up a homeless shelter in London. She set up a nursing school, which influenced Florence Nightingale (the 38 nurses Nightingale would later take to the Crimea were from the nursing school Elizabeth Fry had established).

She travelled across Europe, visiting prisons in France and elsewhere.

While some social reformers were very wealthy men and women, it’s striking that Elizabeth Fry persisted through significant challenges to her family’s finances. Even the bankruptcy of her husband did not stop her. She persuaded her brother to step in and fund her work.

The impact of that work was astonishing. The young Princess Victoria was one of her fans, and after she became Queen she helped fund her work. Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, brought in several acts of parliament to improve prison conditions under her influence. When she died in 1845, the Lord Mayor of London raised funding for a hostel for recently freed women prisoners in her memory. Perhaps even more

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"Through her passionate crusade she succeeded in rousing the world’s conscience to the pitiable state of women in prisont."

remarkably, the King of Prussia, who had met with her during a trip she made to the Continent, requested a meeting with her in Newgate Prison during a state visit to Britain.

One of her biographers sums her up like this: ‘Her actual achievement was extraordinary. A portly matron with ten children, she had gatecrashed into public life, into an exclusively male preserve, when the very idea was unthinkable.

Through her passionate crusade she succeeded in rousing the world’s conscience to the pitiable state of women in prison and in creating a glimmer of sympathy for the lunatics and the poor. She also instituted an order of nursing sisters. By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne, Elizabeth Fry had become the figurehead of much of the philanthropic endeavour in the country.’

‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses … Let us run the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. Hebrews’ 12:1, 2

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Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury.

Colour lithograph by Maclure & Macdonald, 1885.

Credit: Wellcome Collection

THE EARL OF SHAFTESBURY (1801-1885)

9. Conscience of the Industrial Revolution The American Episcopal Church commemorates two Christian heroes together every year on 30 July: William Wilberforce and Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. Here is the prayer for the day: ‘Just and eternal God, we offer thanks for the stalwart faith and persistence of thy servants William Wilberforce and Anthony Ashley-Cooper, who, undeterred by opposition and failure, held fast to a vision of justice in which no child of yours might suffer in enforced servitude and misery. Grant that we, drawn by that same Gospel vision, may persevere in serving the common good and caring for those who have been cast down, that they may be raised up through Jesus Christ; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever.’ Amen.

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It would be hard to overstate the impact of the Earl of Shaftesbury on the new world that emerged painfully from the British Industrial Revolution. Both directly within the UK, but then in the example British reforms were to have across the world as it grappled with similar challenges. A modest man, he often worried about the impact of his speeches, and several times in his life he resigned or tried to from various public responsibilities because of conflicting loyalties or the conviction that someone else would do a better job.

Like Wilberforce, he entered politics in his twenties (thanks in part to well-placed friends and family), and his ability and modesty are nicely summed up in this paragraph from Wikipedia: ‘Ashley was elected as the Tory Member of Parliament for Woodstock (a pocket borough controlled by the Duke of Marlborough) in June 1826 and was a strong supporter of the Duke of Wellington. After George Canning replaced Lord Liverpool as Prime Minister, he offered Ashley a place in the new government, despite Ashley having been in the Commons for only five months.

Ashley politely declined, writing in his diary that he believed that serving under Canning would be a betrayal of his allegiance to the Duke of Wellington and that he was not qualified for office.

Before he had completed one year in the Commons, he had been appointed to three parliamentary committees and he received his fourth such appointment in June 1827, when he was appointed to the Select Committee On Pauper Lunatics in the County of Middlesex and on Lunatic Asylums.’

"Shaftesbury was

He would spend a lot of his life on committees – and, in particular, on committees an all-round social dealing with so-called lunatics. Especially reformer with an ‘lunatics’ who were also poor. It’s hard to extraordinary range imagine a group of people with less going for of achievements. " them – and less sympathy from others. It’s interesting, also, that Shaftesbury’s work for these people has attracted less attention than his focus on more plainly sympathetic groups, like the chimney-sweep boys.

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Shaftesbury was an all-round social reformer with an extraordinary range of achievements.

Here’s a summary of his efforts: 1. ‘Lunacy’ and ‘madhouses’ – reform of treatment for mental health, especially for that of the poor. He chaired a parliamentary inquiry and played a major role in at least four separate Acts of Parliament, starting with the County Lunatic Asylums (England) Act 1828 and Madhouses Act 1828.

2. Efforts to limit the working day, especially for children. So, he worked to limit the maximum working day to 12 hours, to ban children under the age of nine from work, and to ensure that children age nine to 13 were restricted to a 48-hour working week, with attendance at school part-time. Especially, the Ten Hours Act 1847.

3. He helped push through legislation that regulated the working conditions of women and children who worked in the mines. All children under ten were to be excluded from coal mine employment, and no woman or child under 15 would be able to work underground. ‘An Act to prohibit the employment of women and girls in mines and collieries, to regulate the employment of boys, and to make other provisions relating to persons working therein’ – the Mines and Collieries Act 1842.

4. He made several attempts to protect children who were employed as chimney sweeps (‘climbing boys’), culminating in the Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act 1863. It raised the minimum age for apprenticeship to 16.

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5. He ‘founded the Ragged Schools Union in 1844 and remained president for 39 years. Ragged schools were charitable organisations that gave free education and care to children of impoverished parents.

Venues for the schools ranged from stables and lofts to railway arches. It’s thought that about 300,000 children were educated free at schools between 1844 and 1881.’

Days after Shaftesbury died in 1885, the great Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon had this to say in Departed Saints Yet Living: ‘In the taking home to Himself by our gracious Lord of the Earl of Shaftesbury, we have, in my judgment, lost the best man of the age. I do not know whom I should place second, but I certainly should put him first—far beyond all other servants of God within my knowledge…’

‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses … Let us run the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.’

Hebrews 12:1, 2

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The Lady with the Lamp. by Henrietta Rae, 1891.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (1820-1910)

10. The ‘Lady with the Lamp’ who Founded Modern Nursing ‘It is such a blessing’, she wrote in her diary, ‘to have been called, however unworthy, to be the handmaid of the Lord.’

Florence Nightingale came from a well-to-do family and was exceptionally well educated – she learned several European languages and became known for her expertise in statistics, as well as nursing. It was in her teens that she decided she would devote her life to nursing. ‘God has spoke to me and called me to His service’, she wrote in February of 1837 at the age of 17.

Nursing at the time was not much of a profession, and her parents were not at all happy with her choice. But Florence Nightingale had an extraordinarily strong will and was utterly determined to respond to God’s call on her life.

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She was a visionary, who pursued her vision with profound dedication, as well as a pungent style! In her Notes on Nursing (1860), she writes: ‘No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this – devoted and obedient. This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.’

She became famous as a result of her pioneering work at the field hospital in Scutari, during the Crimean War which Britain fought against Russia. It’s well known that many, many deaths resulted not from wounds received in battle but from diseases caught in hospital. With a group of 38 other women she persuaded the Secretary for War (whom she knew personally) to allow them to go to Crimea and take over the hospital.

Three things are especially important about her work there.

First, she cleaned the place up and insisted on basic hygiene and saved many lives in the process!

Second, she kept meticulous records of the health of the soldiers, which she presented in statistical reports – using pie charts, which showed how many died, from what causes, month by month.

Third, the press reported on her work. Apparently, women nurses had never before run a field hospital in the British army, so there was a lot of interest. One journalist watched her going from bed to bed to tend to the patients with a lamp in her hand, and described her as ‘the Lady with the Lamp’. It stuck!

The teenager who heard God’s call to nursing ended up founding nursing as a profession – and being known all over the world. She wrote eight major reports on nursing, and no less than 17 books. She was as gifted as she was dedicated.

"The teenager who heard God’s call to nursing ended up founding nursing as a profession. "

‘Then, too, she was gifted with a peculiar genius: She could assimilate information in prodigious quantities, retain it, marshal her facts, and use them effectively. A relative wrote that when Flo was exhausted, the sight of a column of figures was “perfectly reviving to her.”

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As far back as the American Civil War she was being asked for advice on tending to wounded soldiers by both sides. Forty years later, the UK instituted a new and very special royal honour – the Order of Merit (OM).

Just five years later, in 1907, it was awarded to her. It would be nearly 60 years before another woman was deemed worthy of the OM.

‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses … Let us run the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.’

Hebrews 12:1, 2

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WILLIAM BOOTH (1829-1912)

11. The Gospel for the Poor in Darkest England William Booth founded the Salvation Army almost by accident.

As a teenager he had been apprenticed as a pawnbroker but started preaching in his spare time and soon shifted to full-time ministry in the Methodist Church. Booth travelled around preaching. And, frustrated that the Church would not free him from parish responsibilities to operate as an evangelist, he decided to branch out on his own. Then one day in 1878 – the story goes – they were printing evangelistic pamphlets that included the words ‘we are a volunteer army’, when someone suggested Salvation Army instead. And it stuck.

Booth saw himself as a social reformer, but his key goal was to preach the Gospel. He reckoned that reform was necessary so that people would

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hear the message. Social action and Gospel proclamation would go hand in hand.

In 1890 his best-seller In Darkest England, and the Way Out laid out a series of imaginative schemes to improve the lot of the poor. The Encyclopedia Britannica summarises them like this: ‘He proposed to remedy pauperism and vice by means of: homes for the homeless; training centres to prepare emigrants for overseas colonies; rescue homes for fallen women; homes for released prisoners; legal aid for the poor; and practical help for the alcoholic. There was vast public support for the program; money was liberally subscribed, and a large part of the scheme was carried out. The opposition and ridicule with which Booth’s work was for many years received gave way, toward the end of the nineteenth century, to very widespread sympathy as its results were more fully realised.’

But Booth was insistent that he was not interested simply in social reform.

The goal was to preach the Gospel:

" My only hope for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ."

‘I have no intention to depart in the smallest degree from the main principles on which I have acted in the past. My only hope for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ. But in providing for the relief of temporal misery I reckon that I am only making it easy where it is now difficult, and possible where it is now all but impossible, for men and women to find their way to the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

(From the introduction to In Darkest England and the Way Out.) As a result:

‘The active encouragement of King Edward VII, at whose insistence

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in 1902 he was invited officially to be present at the coronation ceremony, marked the completeness of the change; and when, in 1905, General Booth went through England, he was received in state by the mayors and corporations of many towns. The fiery old man had become a great figure in English life.’

On June 24, 1904, at the age of 75, General Booth was officially received by the King and invited to sign his autograph book. Here is what he wrote: ‘Some men’s ambition is art. Some men’s ambition is fame.

Some men’s ambition is gold. My ambition is the souls of men.’

His funeral was held at Olympia, and attended by 40,000 people – including Queen Mary, who sat almost unrecognised at the back.

‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses … Let us run the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.’

Hebrews 12:1, 2

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SALT AND LIGHT TODAY Christians in Action 79

What about today?

Just as He did in the ferment of nineteenth-century industrial Britain, so in today’s society God has raised up devoted Christians with a vision for men and women and children that extends to the whole of their lives.

As we know, some believers tend to see the Gospel as an end in itself.

As someone said to me recently, they see the goal of the Church as to plant other churches. They see the task of believers as to serve God in personal commitment, and to urge others to come to Jesus. They see anything else – like the causes that drove the five heroes we have been discussing, and similar causes today – as a distraction from that task.

What makes the ninetenth-century five so fascinating is in part the simplicity with which their commitment to Christ led them to commitment to the poor and the outcast. For them, God’s love for the world was comprehensive. Yes, we are called to ‘preach the Gospel’. But that Gospel transforms those who hear it – and those who preach it! – into worthy successors to Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, William Wilberforce, the Earl of Shaftesbury and William Booth.

Something else that makes them fascinating is their extraordinary energy and life-long commitment. Year in and year out they were unwavering in their focus on the cause they believed God had called them to serve. They made speeches, they lobbied, they set up organisations, they built powerful networks of friends and colleagues and relatives, they ploughed their own personal resources into the cause, they stuck with their vision "We see the young Queen Victoria meeting with through thick and thin.

Elizabeth Fry, 40 years

And people noticed. People who did her elder, to encourage not necessarily share their faith admired her in her work." their conviction and energy as leaders in the fight against the evils of the day – in other words, their Christian testimony. We see the young Queen Victoria meeting with Elizabeth Fry, 40 years her elder, to encourage her in her work, and years later the King of Prussia getting together with her, actually in Newgate Prison, during

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a state visit to Britain. We see the combatants in the U.S. Civil War – on both sides – reaching out to Florence Nightingale to help them care for their wounded. We see King Edward VII induct her into the Order of Merit, just after this high honour was created and 60 years before another woman would be invited to join. The same King who would personally insist that fiery General William Booth be invited to the Coronation.

But what of today? Who are the leaders today carrying the torch for the Gospel’s impact on society and our public life? On the poor and the sick and the outcast? The leaders who are salt as well as light in the culture?

There are, praise God, quite a number to choose from. I’ve been talking to Andy Hawthorne, John Kirkby, Lyndon Bowring, Ruth Valerio, and Christian Guy about their lives, their work, and their vision.

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ANDY HAWTHORNE 12. The Message for the Young and the Poor ‘Came to Christ with a bang when I was 17. And God gave me the heart of the evangelist at that point.’

Andy Hawthorne’s ministry went public with the World Wide Message Tribe (the name was later shortened to The Tribe), a Christian band based in Manchester. They toured Europe and the United States, and were heard by millions of young people.

But before then, as he explained to me, he’d ‘tried to go into full-time Christian work, but no-one would have me!’

After he’d made various efforts to get into ministry that had not worked out, he went into business with bis brother, making fashion

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accessories. The business did well. But ministry remained his real goal, and after exhibiting at the Harrogate Fashion Fair in 1987 he plunged into The Message 88 – for which he booked, and filled, the largest rock venue in Manchester (the Apollo Theatre), to hear the World Wide Message Tribe.

How did it all happen, I asked?

‘Huge fashion hit in 1987 – millions of orders. So we bought lots of new machinery, and ran out of nice Christians to employ. So we went to the local job centre in the city of Manchester, and told them that we needed to employ lots of people to manufacture these goods. And it was a very interesting season, to say the least. We employed dozens and dozens of young men particularly, from the local estate, and we ended up with violence and vandalism and graffiti all over our factory. And then the break-ins started – cos the news travelled across the inner-city estate that there was all this cool fashion gear on their doorstep. So, we were having break-in after break-in and it was terribly difficult.’

Andy continues: ‘But what really grieved myself and my brother was not just that the behaviour of these lads was chaotic, but that they knew nothing of Christ. So we tried to find churches on our local estate to help reach out to them, and we really couldn’t find any churches in that community that we felt could connect … There were some churches but they "There were some tended to meet behind the barbed wire with churches but they the alarms on to keep these lads out almost! tended to meet behind ‘So one afternoon at the Harrogate the barbed wire with Fashion Festival we were showing our wares the alarms on to keep – and chatting about these lads and how these lads out almost!" crazy it was in the city of Manchester at that time; then we said somebody’s got to do something to reach these kids.

And we came up with a plan to organise Manchester’s biggest ever youth mission. It was all a bit arrogant and naïve really, for two young entrepreneurs. But we decided we were going to book the biggest rock venue in Manchester for a week, write to every church in Manchester, do hundreds of build-up events, and we were going to call it The Message 1988.

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And where did it go from there, I asked?

‘We came home from Harrogate initially full of faith and as soon as we got home every ounce of faith dripped out! I prayed and I said, God, if this really is what you want, would you speak to me through your word?

And my set reading for the day was Isaiah 43, particularly verses 18-21, verses we haven’t left in 32 years. You can see them all over our building now. “See I’m doing a new thing … There’ll be rivers in the desert, streams in the wasteland … ” ‘So the next day we booked the Apollo Theatre for the week, we wrote to every church in Manchester, and God blessed it. Thousands of kids turned up. It did end up as the largest ever youth mission in Manchester. And the churches wanted to do it again in 1989, and then we formed a band called the World Wide Message Tribe to go into the innercity schools. Meantime I’m still in the business, and we’re running this out of a little office. And the World Wide Message Tribe kind of took off, really. We never planned that way, but we got popular all over the world and sold hundreds of thousands of CDs and it was just a crazy season of blessing and seeing thousands of kids come to Christ.

‘And at that point’, Andy continues: ‘I decided that this is what I want to do with my life, I want to give my whole life to reaching the hardest to reach, particularly through the band originally. So I left the business, set up a charity, downscaled my lifestyle, and we started to build the work here in Manchester. We now have regional hubs all over the UK, and in South Africa and Germany and Canada and a bunch of other nations.

So, we do two things basically now. We do that band stuff. We have eight Schools Teams doing that same work. We’ve launched over 60 what we call Eden Teams, people who’ve moved downwardly mobile to live in these deprived communities – over 700 people have made that step, doing the community transformation stuff. The final bit of the jigsaw puzzle is what we call the Message Enterprise Centre, where we provide jobs and homes and support for people out of prison, people coming out of rehab, people who might be called unemployable but we give them a job with lots of support and a home and we see a tiny, tiny percentage of them re-offend.’

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If you want to read more information on the businesses, do visit the website themec.org.uk. They include a coffee house, a hair and beauty salon, and various building/property services.

And go to joineden.org to learn about the extraordinary work of the work of Eden.

Here’s how the site sums it up: • Eden volunteers make their homes in poor neighbourhoods, sharing their lives and the gospel • Aspiration and achievement grow as young people are mentored and become disciples of Jesus • The atmosphere changes, leaders are raised, and communities are changed for good So far, there are 51 teams in place including paid team leaders and hundreds of volunteers.

That’s the broad sweep of the last 32 years of The Message!

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I then asked about those local churches on the estate who were locked down against the locals. Has that been a theme over the years? Is it changing? How do you reflect on that now?

‘Well’, he told me, ‘I think things have changed in Manchester. The Church is growing again, and mainly among young people. There are many, many more churches that are missional and " The Church are engaged in the community. There are also many, is growing many churches that are completely irrelevant to the ordinary folk on the street, so there’s still an awful lot again, and mainly among of work to be done … We may have less people going young people." to church on a Sunday, but we do have a church that is far more engaged … ’

Why has this happened? Is it because the Church has got smaller that people have become more focused?

‘I think so. I think God’s at work and preparing us for growth. So, now, the people who are there tend to want to be there. Alpha has been a massive thing, adding more people to the church than anything else. And it’s word and spirit. People are immersed in the word, and getting God’s heart for the poor and broken. But also getting energized by the Spirit of God. It’s a sure sign that you’re filled with the Spirit not that you have some special experience in your church but that you’re driven out – that’s what happened at Pentecost, it’s what always happens. I’m always positive, I’m wired like that, but I do believe that God’s ready to do something significant again in the UK.’

"Andy’s great grandfather was the first Salvation Army missionary to India."

‘Three things change society,’ he told me: ‘First, prayer – and bringing the churches together to pray. Second, presence – be salt and light; the 700 who have committed to move to needy communities are the latest example from his ministry.

Third, proclamation, ‘without the proclamation bit, you don’t really get the job done!’

When I said this reminded me of William Booth, he chuckled. William Booth is one of his heroes, and there’s a special connection – Andy’s

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great grandfather was the first Salvation Army missionary to India.

‘I honestly believe’, he continued, ‘that without trying we’re reinventing so much of those crazy early days of the Salvation Army. It’s spooky really how much of what we’re doing … the brass bands getting out of the churches – we’re doing that with our bands getting into schools. Booth had businesses, the match "Everything factories and the rest. He had people deliberately we’re doing the moving to live in the slums. And they had a prison Salvation Army gate ministry. And on it goes. Everything we’re did, though they doing the Salvation Army did, though they saw a saw a whole lot whole lot more fruit! I do believe God’s given us a more fruit!" little bit of a mandate to try and re-invent things from those youthful early days. And it was crazily prayer-fuelled and passionate. Come to our building – there’s William Booth quotes all over the place! On my office wall I’m looking now at In Darkest England and the Way Out.’

Other heroes, I asked?

‘My youth leader was Wallace Benn, now a bishop. Under Wallace Benn the youth group I came into became the largest youth group, a real movement of the spirit. He was just an amazing inspiration, particularly in terms of our love for the word of God. He would gather hundreds of young people under the word. Powerful Bible studies. At the heart of all we do has to be the word of God, all of it, not just the bits we like. I think Wallace planted that in me.'

Another hero of Andy’s is Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, who became immensely rich, and has not only begun to give away enormous amounts of money to good causes – especially global health – but has been busily persuading his billionaire friends to sign on to the ‘Giving Pledge’ and agreeing to give away half of their wealth by the time they die.

‘From success to significance.’

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RUTH VALERIO 13. Tearfund: Global Relief And Development ‘I’ve a clear memory of Tearfund way back in 1968, the year it was first founded.

I was a teenager at the time, living in Edinburgh, and one day I got a letter in the post welcoming me as a supporter of this new organisation.

But I had never heard of it! So I asked my mother. “Oh yes,” she said, “I forgot to tell you. I signed you up!”’

Back then it was The Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund Committee – so “TEAR Fund.” Now it’s just Tearfund.

And Tearfund has come a long way in the past half-century. It was originally a spin-off of the Evangelical Alliance, which brings together

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Christians from many denominations. Now it’s now a global organisation with a budget of more than fifty million pounds a year.

Tearfund’s first leader was a Church of England minister called George Hoffman – tragically killed in a road accident back in the 90s. Its first efforts were devoted to relief work in response to disasters around the world, using a powerful model – namely aid being channeled through local churches. And while Tearfund’s work has expanded enormously since those days, it’s stuck with the model of working with church partners wherever possible. Perhaps the biggest change has been the growing focus on long-term development work, which now takes the lion’s share of the budget.

Tearfund was also an early leader in what we now call “social entrepreneurship” – developing businesses that do good. “Tearcraft” was for many years a pioneer effort – Richard Adams, who first led the work at Tearfund, went on to found Traidcraft and lead the Fairtrade movement.

Tearfund defines itself very simply. It’s fighting poverty, and it’s doing it through the local church.

“We're following Jesus where the need is greatest, working through local churches to unlock people's potential and helping them to discover that the answer to poverty is within themselves. When disasters strike, we respond quickly. We won't stop until poverty stops.”

An early Tearfund booster was Cliff Richard, who met George Hoffman back in the late 1960s and gave two fund-raising concerts at the Royal Albert Hall – the start of a long supportive relationship that continues 50 years later.

As Tearfund moved from immediate disaster response to longer-term projects, it also got involved in efforts to influence government policies around the world to help the poor. And to help churches think through the theological implications of poverty and development and threats to the environment.

Ruth Valerio, a theologian by training, now leads this side of Tearfund’s work.

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We discussed the challenge of engaging with evangelicals who tend to understand the Gospel in purely individualistic terms and see engaging with activism and policy as a distraction.

I started off by asking her to tell me about her role at Tearfund.

‘I’m Global Advocacy and Influencing Director … focused on advocacy to global institutions and to governments around issues of poverty and environment … to bring about large-scale, systemic change; then we also work with local communities, helping them to raise their voices and to do their own advocacy. The other side is about envisioning, theological work with churches. We need the local church to understand its role in relation to poverty and the wider environment. So, in a lot of areas where we work, the local church thinks its task is exclusively to “preach the gospel” and plant churches. Both of these things are really important, but our task is to help them develop a more wholistic, integrated, understanding of the gospel. So we do a lot of theological work at Tearfund in order to help our poverty work to be effective and sustainable, and that’s in my department too. And then thinking around issues of lifestyle and

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ethical living and there’s other teams in my group. But really my focus is around those different sides of advocacy, sustainable lifestyle and the theological perspective.

‘My overall effort is to get the church engaged on poverty and the environment – I mean, really, to get the church engaged in God’s creation, recognising that that involves humans as well as the wider world. If you say caring for creation, people automatically default to the environment.

Whereas creation actually is everything, and that’s humans as well!’

Things have been changing in the church over the years. Ruth tells the story of speaking years ago at Keswick, when someone shouted: ‘you’re little more than a social worker’ and walked out! For many, many years it’s felt like pushing water uphill. But that is changing, and has definitely changed in the last 5-10 years. It’s now much more mainstream than it was, but we still have a long way to go.’

Who are her heroes? Here are two of them.

‘Well, a secular hero is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall … Pioneered in the area of self-sufficiency, growing your own, rearing your own, campaigner around food and waste … I live in a house on a council estate, so how do we do that? Well, we have an allotment with friends, and for many years we raised pigs and chickens. He inspired me to do a lot of what I have done with food over the years.’

Then there’s Rosa Parks, a hero of the US civil rights movement.

'She’s a woman of deeply Christian faith, and was prepared to break the law in order to see justice done, with a focus around non-violent direct action. She challenges me: what am I prepared to do?’

More advice for younger leaders?

‘Don’t go along with the culture’s expectations of what life’s going to look like. A generally upwardly mobile life . . . give yourself time to pause and ask yourself questions at every stage. Why am I doing this?

'And be impatient! I know now things will take time, but when you’re younger be impatient! Injustice is happening and it needs to finish now.’

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LYNDON BOWRING 14. CARE – For Public Life and Leadership Lyndon’s start in life came on a housing estate in Wales, where his father had been converted from Communism. He was led into the ministry of the Elim church, and joined the staff of Kensington Temple in London.

CARE – which stands for Christian Action, Research and Education – was just getting off the ground at the time, and he tells me he declined several suggestions that he become its Chairman.

I asked him what happened next?

‘The final straw came in the summer of 1980 when in the closing days of the parliamentary session in the House of Lords, Baroness Barbara Wootton sought to introduce a Private Member's Bill which was intended to legalise 16 of the 20 or so relationships that are forbidden in marriage

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in Leviticus. I telephoned about ten Christian peers, none of whom were able to be in London for the Second Reading and in fact not one of them knew this last-minute bill was being introduced. It duly received a second reading – it was never likely to become law but the fact that none of these Christian peers even knew about the bill – not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Christians who were totally oblivious to what was going on in Parliament. It was a bit of a Damascus Road experience for me as I promised God that I would never allow such a travesty to happen again.

Wheels were put in motion with CARE and the following year I accepted chairmanship.’

CARE traces its roots back to the 1970s, when a huge public demonstration called the Nationwide Festival of Light filled Trafalgar Square in London.

As Lyndon tells it, back then:

"CARE traces its roots back to the 1970s, when a huge public demonstration called the Nationwide Festival of Light filled Trafalgar Square in London."

‘The Church was disengaged from public life. In 1967 when the Abortion Act came through parliament, there was no fasting, no praying … it was a Peer in the House of Lords who said to me: “While Christians were asleep in the 1960s, lights went out in this House that may never be relit again.”

‘A bunch of senior leaders in the Church woke up, and said: “We’ve got to do something – let’s stand.” And the London event remains the largest gathering of Christians in a public place … no one has beaten that record. But they said at the end of it: “We’ve got to do something.” So somebody said: “Let’s set up a charity, and begin to support godly men and women and people of goodwill in both Houses of Parliament, and do Christian campaigning.”’

The Nationwide Festival of Light appointed university lecturer Raymond Johnson as its first director. In 1983 the name of NFoL was changed to CARE. (It was Raymond Johnson who first introduced me to Lyndon Bowring at a massive pro-life march in London in 1984. Sadly, Raymond died the following year.)

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This is how CARE now sees itself, decades later on its website: ‘CARE (Christian Action Research and Education) is a Christian charity seeking to uphold human dignity and to support the most vulnerable people in society, engaging with politicians in the UK Parliaments & Assemblies and promoting Christian community-based initiatives.

‘Supported by individuals and churches throughout the UK, CARE encourages Christians to be informed and to engage positively in public life; addressing issues relating to the sanctity of life, human exploitation, marriage and family and many other areas of advocacy.

‘Our Vision: to see a society that has a greater regard for human dignity and increasingly reflects God’s grace and truth through public policy, media and local practical involvement with vulnerable people.

‘Our Purpose: to be engaged in the UK Parliaments & Assemblies and to equip individual Christians and the churches to act as effective light and salt in the local community and nationally.’

"But CARE has a fuller agenda, is focused on the longer term, and under Lyndon Bowring’s leadership has evolved an irenic and low-key style. "

Over the years, CARE has evolved significantly from old NFoL, which was more of a protest movement. Of course, in areas like euthanasia and trafficking there is still plenty to oppose. But CARE has a fuller agenda, is focused on the longer term, and under Lyndon Bowring’s leadership has evolved an irenic and low-key style.

One core effort over many years has been the Leadership Programme, which enables a group of recent graduates to spend a year studying a Christian vision for public life and working alongside Members of Parliament. Leaders have gone into many walks of life, including Parliament and charity leadership. (Christian Guy, whom we meet in the next chapter, was himself a graduate of the Leadership Programme.)

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CARE’s topics of focus have been constantly under review to keep it on the edge of new issues that raise ethical challenges and need wise guidance. Most recently a special thrust has focused on developing questions in robotics and Artificial Intelligence, with public conferences and private consultations as well as books published on a Christian vision for new technology issues.

Other questions on the agenda include organ donation, gambling, online safety, prostitution, and many aspects of the good of the family – from tax policy to sex education to marriage. Family policy has been a long-standing theme, as has bioethics and the intrinsic value of human life.

A recent interview with Lyndon in Christianity magazine acknowledges this. Writer Sam Hailes puts it like this: ‘… CARE continues to campaign on family issues, but its remit is broader than ever: organ donation, artificial intelligence and gambling have all been dealt with by the charity in recent years.’

Then he continues:

"inside the Christian community, Bowring’s reputation is one of a bridge-builder."

‘Taking a countercultural stand on divisive issues has meant that both the 71-year-old and CARE have been on the receiving end of some negative press. But inside the Christian community, Bowring’s reputation is one of a bridge-builder.

He’s been highly influential when it comes to encouraging unity among evangelicals, and, during our hour-long conversation, he’s

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at his most comfortable when praising and honouring others. His humility left a lasting impression on me.”

Then he quotes Lyndon: ‘Funnily enough, coming up to my 70th birthday, I had a number of health issues which I think were a kick up the backside – wonderfully – and I thank God for them, even though I wouldn’t wish to go through them again. Although I’m slowing down, I don’t think I will ever retire, apart from health reasons.

If I’m well and I have my mental faculties, I might end up simply praying, not feeling able to do much more. Or be an encourager to young people; to assure them of my prayers and take an interest in their ministries. To be not a grumpy old man, but a hope-filled, encouraging old man.’

I asked Lyndon about his heroes (I think you can tell a lot about people by finding out their icons). He gave me several.

First, two nineteenth-century fighters against evil. William Wilberforce, whose portrait has long looked down at him in his office at CARE. And John Newton, the slave-ship captain who became an Anglican clergyman, fierce opponent of slavery, and writer of the hymn Amazing Grace.

Then two ministers of the Gospel – Tim Keller, the Presbyterian whose Redeemer Church in New York City is a beacon of light in a spiritual desert; and Eldin Corsie, who was minister of Kensington Temple back in the 1970s and a major figure in the wider evangelical movement until he recently went to be with the Lord.

Then two former Prime Ministers. Sir Winston Churchill, and Sir Robert Peel.

And finally the saintly James, the brother (some believe half-brother) of Jesus, who was a leader of the church in Jerusalem in the early days – and later died for his faith.

'And be impatient! I know now things will take time, but when you’re younger be impatient! Injustice is happening and it needs to finish now.’

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CHRISTIAN GUY 15. Fighting Trafficking Christian Guy now leads Justice and Care, the leading UK charity fighting human trafficking around the world. It was started by a businessman who aimed to ‘dismantle the business model of slavery’ and played a significant part in the passage of the Modern Slavery Act of 2015. Their work ranges from working on the front line alongside police forces in some countries, to policy leadership in the UK. He told me that he had not done well when he was at school – the 15-year-old Christian would be ‘stunned’ to learn what he had been able to get up to since! Which is why he’s concerned that we should ‘help young people to dream’.

We discussed the state of the Church today, and its engagement in the needs of the wider society. He thinks there has been ‘an awakening of some description that has led people to do more practical work with those on the margins, the most abused people. It’s very often Christians

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who are standing in the gap on issues like debt and homelessness and with ex-offenders.’

What’s interesting is that these "It’s very often Christians Christians are often not acting in who are standing in the Church organisations, but as individuals gap on issues like debt in wider groups, some ‘faith-inspired’, and homelessness and some not – or just on their own. These are Christians who recognise the need with ex-offenders.." for a practical outcome of their faith.

The focus on practicality is crucial. What’s more, governments have increasingly recognised that they can’t do everything themselves. They need civil society groups and are often prepared to support them as they tackle the big ethical challenges of the day.

Here’s how Justice and Care describe themselves on their website:

Our Vision Every captive free. Every perpetrator brought to justice.

Our Mission By bringing together specialists, we work to prevent slavery, to rescue and care for victims, to help police bring traffickers to justice and spark systemic change.

Our Values Collaboration We build powerful partnerships. We work alongside governments, states and agencies around the world. Our vision will only be achieved when we share our experience and offer our support for one another.

Courage We are up to the challenge. We are fearless in the fight against the injustice that exists. We dare to see a different world and are pioneering in our pursuit of justice for criminal networks and freedom for captives.

Expertise We know what we’re doing. We know the work we do changes lives.

We have the best people, the knowledge, the strategic nous and highest

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standards in delivering processes and plans that bring systemic change.

Determined We are steadfast in our goals. We are committed. This is not a short term project, we are in this for the long haul. We are full of hope, celebrating our successes while never losing sight of the next goal.

Modern slavery is a grim business. Justice and Care identify several categories.

Child marriage Child marriage can be used as part of the trafficking process, where children are married and then disappear. It can also be used by men to exploit children, using them as domestic servants and sex slaves with one exploiter.

I was only 10, he was 55. He already had two wives, and as the third I was expected to look after his goats and cows. Nine months later, because I had still not given him a baby, he began tasking me with all the difficult jobs.

Criminal exploitation This is where victims are forced into criminality such as carrying drugs, theft and benefit fraud.

We’d be driven to different street corners to sell cocaine, and one of the guys would stand behind us with a gun, collecting the cash.

Domestic Servitude Where victims are forced to work in people’s homes with little or no money and restricted freedom. They can be used to clean, cook and look after children – often all of these things.

They worked me all day, from sunrise to sunset. They beat and abused me.’

Labour This is when people are forced, coerced or inadequately rewarded for physical work. We often see this happening in factories, agriculture, construction, nail bars and hand carwashes.

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We were forced to work up to 22 hours a day, even when we were sick.

Two of the people I worked with died from exhaustion.

Organ Harvesting Victims are trafficked for their internal organs, sold often to the highest Western bidder.

There were 20 to 25 other persons sitting. I was told to shut up and be quiet and sit there. About 10 minutes later, the agent arrived and said get ready as I was going for a test. They wanted to test my kidney.

Sexual exploitation Victims are forced to perform sexual acts including in brothels, people’s homes and through online abuse.

Men would come in, often smelling of alcohol. They would touch me all over and rape me.’

Before taking on this new challenge, Christian worked in Ten Downing Street as a Special Adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron. He had a particular task to ‘bring together government departments on anti-poverty strategy’, though the effort was sadly cut short by the Brexit referendum and David Cameron’s resignation as Prime Minister.

And before that – Christian directed the Centre for Social Justice, where he had first been as an intern on CARE’s Leadership Programme.

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The Centre was established by former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith MP, and others back in 2004. Here’s how Iain Duncan Smith describes its work: ‘The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) was established as an independent think-tank in 2004 to put social justice at the heart of British politics and make policy recommendations to tackle the root causes of poverty.

As Leader of the Opposition and then Secretary of State for Work & Pensions I spent time in many of the UK’s most disadvantaged communities, with people whose lives were blighted by social breakdown and the poverty it created. I frequently encountered levels of social breakdown which appalled me. In one of the world’s largest economies, too many people lived in dysfunctional homes, trapped on benefits. Too many children were leaving school with no qualifications or skills to enable them to work and prosper. Too many communities were blighted by alcohol and drug addiction, debt and criminality, many of them with stunningly low levels of life expectancy.

Many people I met had given up on politicians because they felt politicians had given up on them. The political process had become irrelevant in their lives; Westminster was failing to play its part in getting to grips with Britain’s deepest social problems.

The CSJ was founded to understand the lives of people living in poverty and develop policies to help these people.’

When I asked him about his time with the CSJ, Christian told me he had learned a lot – not least about how to bring together people from all the main political parties to work together.

When I asked Christian about his heroes, he first talked about Jonathan Aitken whom he met through his work at the Centre for Social Justice. Jonathan Aitken is a former cabinet minister who served time in prison for perjury – and has since committed his life to Christ, and especially to working with prisoners and others at the bottom end of the social order. He has also recently been ordained in the Church of England.

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‘Jonathan taught me more in a year than I had learned in many years before.’

Others? Christian told me he is inspired by people no-one’s ever heard of – people who are solving problems quietly. And also by the great social reformers, especially William Wilberforce, who set such an example of working where he could with political enemies. He also worked right through his life as part of a team. ‘It’s a team that changes the world’, says Christian.

"Christian told me he is inspired by people no-one’s ever heard of – people who are solving problems quietly."

Then I asked Christian if he had any advice for younger leaders?

‘Look for someone you can learn from.’ He said, ‘That’s how you will live a life of impact.’ I suggested that many younger Christians seem not to know much about the great social reformers of the nineteenth-century like Wilberforce, or the fact that the best-known of them all were evangelical Christians. ‘Church and parents need to teach them about the greats … not just Instagrammers!’

And you need to be ‘grounded in the front line’. In government, he tells me, he ‘met so many civil servants who had no such experience’.

(That’s an interesting theme coming through these interviews.)

People lobby that someone should do something about bad things.

But ‘what have you done?’ he asks. What’s realistic?

What’s more, you need also to ‘think creatively' about the future.

What kind of society do we want? ‘We’re losing the ability to think’. says Christian. 'We must unlock our creativity, as we are facing huge questions. We need a generation of problem-solvers.’ Think long-term!

‘If you’re 20, you have 50 years of opportunity ahead! What do you want your eulogy to sound like? Pick a cause and work on it with a group of friends.’

To be practical, he told me: ‘Get good at things. Learn how to write and communicate well. We need to be top quality … you’re competing with incredibly brilliant people. So strive for excellence.’

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JOHN KIRKBY 16. Freedom From Debt ‘At the end of his teens, he began a job as a debt collector and loan salesman for a finance company called Avco Trust. Over the next seven years he worked his way up through the company until he was running several of their branches. After moving on, John set up a number of businesses including a financial services company, a loan brokerage firm and what became the largest sun-bed retailer in the North of England. Through his success he was able to fund a lavish lifestyle including a large home, cars and holidays.’

That’s how the website God and Politics sums up John Kirby’s story – at least, the first part of it! Because he has since turned his high-level money skills to helping people with one of the great scourges of our time: debt.

But in between came a personal crisis, as his businesses got into trouble and he was left with almost nothing. It was a time of turmoil in his

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life, as he had also come to faith in Christ and was wrestling with where he should put his energies – back into the world of finance and lending, or into helping those on the other end of personal finance who had problems with debt? He’d been looking into setting up a Christian building society, but a friend suggested he come up with something he could do without the need to get fresh capital. He knew what that was. Debt counselling.

So, Christians Against Poverty was born, back in the mid-1980s.

Since then it’s grown and grown.

Here’s how it introduces itself on the website: ‘We are on a mission to release thousands of families from grinding poverty through award winning debt counselling and community groups. By equipping and empowering local churches to reach out on their doorsteps, we’re bringing hope to over 21,500 families every year.’

"I asked John to sum up his mission. ‘Serve the poor’, He said. 'Serve the least. With the Church.

Across the nation.'"

I asked John to sum up his mission. ‘Serve the poor’, He said. 'Serve the least. With the Church. Across the nation.’

Is the Church really interested, I asked him? He said he was positive about the Church, but that he had learned to be realistic in his expectations. Things have been changing. He’s now working with upwards of 500 churches across the country, and more than 20,000 volunteers. John sees quite a contrast with the Church back when he first got going. Back then it still wanted to separate evangelism and social action. Only ‘pockets of people were doing it’. Now it’s much more mainstream.

Christians Against Poverty is explicitly Christian! And the Church tie-in is vital.

Back to the profile on the God and Politics website: ‘CAP is always open about the fact that it is a Christian organisation. The lack of state funding does actually mean it can

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be more open about the faith aspect of its "As well as the offer work. CAP will work with clients from all of prayer, every client backgrounds and faiths, but its staff want is given a befriender to give others the opportunity to learn from a local church" about and experience God’s love. With the permission of clients, CAP staff and volunteers talk about Jesus passionately and directly. As well as the offer of prayer, every client is given a befriender from a local church – this person will be with them throughout the often long journey to become debt free.

I asked John who his heroes were.

First, he said, Nehemiah – the Persian Governor of Judea, who was responsible for leading the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. (See the Book of Nehemiah!)

Second, the Apostle Paul.

And third – William Booth. He finds Booth’s achievements astonishing. He’s amazed ‘when I look at what that guy did’. He used the latest technologies to bring about ‘radical social transformation’ – driven by his ‘passionate belief that we’re on this planet to do something’. He sees parallels between his efforts and those of Booth – and notes that Booth began, as he did, in the world of personal finance, lending to the poor.

Booth was a pawnbroker.

John now has just over 340 head office staff (not including 1300 front line staff across the UK), and a budget of millions. CAP runs its own intern programme, through which a third of the team have been recruited. There are sister organisations in Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere, and the big banks consult with CAP to develop better ways of handling vulnerable customers.

I asked what his advice would be to younger believers.

First: at the heart must be your relationship with Christ. Second, be humble. ‘It’s not about you.' Never forget that trials build character. Third, 'Come on – take some chances. You don’t know what you’ve got till you try.’

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HEROES TOMORROW God’s Call on our Lives 106

17. LOOKING AHEAD Our starting points for this book were two of the most remarkable facts in the history of the cosmos, if not the two most remarkable. First, that God made His human creatures ‘in His image’. Second, that ‘He came down to earth from heaven, Who is God and Lord of all.’

Having made us to be like Him, He took human nature, He became one of us.

We’re sinful creatures, utterly undeserving of the amazing grace of God, but that must not let us play down the extraordinary significance He gave to human nature – and therefore to every single human being who has ever lived, however insignificant or wicked they may have been.

As C.S. Lewis has said: ‘There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations – these are

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mortal, and their life is to ours like the life of a gnat. But it is immortals we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit.'

"The radical, extraordinary, dignity of those He made in His image is an explosive idea."

The radical, extraordinary, dignity of those He made in His image is an explosive idea. It helped influence the importance the modern world gives to ideas of human dignity and human rights, though it goes far beyond them.

And this all has two profound implications for us as we look ahead.

First, it means that as stewards of God’s world we are also stewards of His human creatures – billions and billions of them; and as those who have been called by Jesus Christ to love our neighbours as ourselves, the ‘specialness' of every single member of our species is off the charts.

Because it’s the specialness of God. No ordinary people, not at all!

And the second implication: while plainly we are not all called to be Florence Nightingale or William Wilberforce, we’re all called to be heroes for God. Christian Guy said something fascinating when I asked him about his heroes. Alongside Wilberforce, he said he’s been ‘inspired by people no-one’s heard of, people who are solving problems quietly’. You see, we’re all called by God to fight the good fight, to run the race, like the Apostle Paul. We’re surrounded by that great ‘cloud of witnesses’ we read about in Hebrews 12.1.

It’s worth a brief pause to contemplate that potent image, to let it grip our imagination. Whether you are leading an organisation or in other ways out there solving problems in the glare of the public gaze. Or whether you are quietly managing challenges in your family or workplace or local community.

The people we are called to serve are not ‘ordinary people’. But neither are we. And the call of God is always to be a hero. To attempt great things for Him, and to do so knowing that we are being cheered on from the stands even as we strive and sweat and stumble along the course towards the finishing line.

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And just who is cheering us on?

It’s pretty clear from Hebrews 12. The writer has just listed them – or some of them – in the previous chapter.

As we noted in our Chapter 4, the ‘heroes of faith’ were far from perfect people. In fact, pretty much every single one that he lists in Hebrew 11 we know from the Old Testament to have been badly flawed, deeply inconsistent in their claims to a life of faith and faithfulness. Just like us.

You – and me. God knows, and we know, what we’re really like, and it isn’t a pretty sight. The point is: our flaws may be serious, but that does not destroy our half-baked, unreliable, halting faith.

Hebrews 11 may be the single most encouraging "God knows, and chapter in the entire Bible. we know, what But also – it does not let us off the hook! We’re we’re really like, called to be heroes of faith too – every bit as much and it isn’t a as these heroes in Hebrews 11. And if our heroism pretty sight." is of the quiet kind – the hidden, modest, hard-tonotice kind that Christian Guy told me has inspired him – not only will God accept it, but the vast host of those gathered in the stands of the stadium will cheer us on with as full-throated a roar as they did the Hebrew Christians who first read this letter twenty centuries ago.

Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets – they’re all there! And they’re all cheering!

But then Hebrews 11, the hero chapter, after telling us about their great deeds, flips suddenly to a minor key.

Most of us know the first part, but not many have paid much attention to the final verses.

The switch is in verse 35, where we read of the final triumphant victory of the chapter in the major key – that ‘women received back their dead, raised to life again’. ‘Others’, the writer continues, as the sky darkens, ‘Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection.’ Then the next verse: ‘Some faced jeers and

flogging, while still others were chained and in prison.’ Then in verse 37: ‘They were stoned; they were sawn in two; they were put to death by the sword.’ And this: ‘They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted, and mistreated – the world was not worthy of them.’

That is, those who seemed to lose, those who never in this life saw any triumph come from their faith – they are the truest heroes. It’s of them that he says ‘the world was not worthy.’

And they’re in the stands too, their broken bodies and shattered spirits made whole in glory – they too are there to cheer us on.

‘Then learn to scorn the praise of men And learn to lose with God, For Jesus won the world through shame And beckons thee his road.’

Frederick William Faber As we reflect on the heroes of the nineteenth century, we know that while their reforms led to a far more humane industrial society in the UK, in much of today’s world – especially the developing nations – there are very similar conditions to those they encountered. Wilberforce led the fight to "Human beings, made end slavery yet, as Christian Guy reminds in the image of God, us, slavery of many kinds continues around are treated as chattels, the world two hundred years later – human bought and sold, beings, made in the image of God, are subjected to vile abuse treated as chattels, bought and sold, subyear after year, and jected to vile abuse year after year, and left left without hope." without hope.

And not merely in other nations. The recent UK trials of gangs for grooming young girls for abuse reminds us how close we are still to the trade in human beings.

Tragically, the same can be said for many of the evils contested by the nineteenth-century social reformers. We see news stories of child labour and heartless sweatshops in some Asian country – because a journalist discovers they are in the supply chain for a British supermarket

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or clothes store. That makes ‘news’ for a few minutes, and may lead to an improvement in working conditions (unless the store just dumps the supplier).

These are windows on the misery in which much of the world’s people still labours. And if we also know that global poverty is decreasing year by year, and health and life expectancy keep rising, there is still far to go for much of the world to reach even the standards we have in the west.

We’ve looked briefly at the dire social "Under Lyndon conditions of so many – that helped drive Bowring’s leadership, Andy Hawthorne to launch The MesCARE has for a sage and bring hope (and jobs) to young generation been training people. We’ve been reminded by John Kirkby of the challenge of debt, which young believers to for so many poorer people simply com- embrace leadership in pounds their poverty (and leaves them at the public arena." the mercy of predatory lenders). As Ruth Valerio explained, Tearfund’s relief work around the world is partnered with advocacy, as they engage on the front line. Under Lyndon Bowring’s leadership, CARE has for a generation been training young believers to embrace leadership in the public arena, as well as engaging directly cutting-edge issues like euthanasia, gambling, pornography addiction, and the emerging issues of AI/robotics.

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There’s no lack of challenges, and praise God there are Christians in this century – as in the nineteenth – who have jumped in to tackle them.

Our call to be stewards of God’s world, and our call in Christ to love our neighbours, pull us in precisely the same direction. Out of our comfort, out of our complacency, and into fresh action for God and His kingdom.

And, as we’ve been reminded, there are reasons to be encouraged in our task – and to aim high! – on every side.

The deafening roar from the stands of the stadium urges us on, as the heroes who have gone before – the famous ones and the quiet ones alike – challenge us to run the race and to finish it well. What’s more, we’ve been reminded that the ‘heroes’ of Hebrews 11 were flawed men and women like us. That’s a comfort, but it’s also a discomfort. Just because we feel weak and are disappointed with ourselves, we’re not off the hook.

We’ve also been reminded about Jesus. That, as the Gospels make plain and as Hebrews spells out, He really was just like us, in every single respect, apart from sin. He never pretended to be human, and He was no super-hero floating above human nature. A man among men and women, struggling as we have never successfully struggled against enormous temptations, wrestling with what He knew about His mission and what would come next – this is the Jesus whose disciples we are.

And, in a manner that blows my mind, even more than the basic fact of the Incarnation, this human Jesus did not disappear at the end of His life, but sat down at the right hand of the Father. As Charles Hodge put it, ‘The one who sits on the throne "The Jesus to of the universe is both perfect man and perfect God.’ whom you say

your prayers

If we’re seeking sympathy and understanding is still a man." and encouragement from God, how much greater could it be? The Jesus to whom you say your prayers is still a man. And you – as that striking statement from C.S. Lewis that we quoted at the start put it – you are an immortal. There are no ordinary people. We are extraordinary, image-of-God people. And we are called to be heroes, today and tomorrow and every day.

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18. TEN THINGS TO DO TOMORROW 1. Follow-up in your home group: heroes and leaders One reason I decided to feature ten fascinating people and their work was to make the book useful for home groups and book groups and similar get-togethers where you can take things further.

Why not take the five ‘heroes’ from the nineteenth century, and the five Christian leaders of today, and turn that into ten sessions – in which everyone does some more research and you pool your efforts?

2. And again, a task for your home group: the human life of Jesus Why not begin a study of the humanity of Jesus? Start with some of the texts and quotes we’ve used. Maybe one meeting on each of His will, His body, His mind, His emotions?

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3. Celebrate some birthdays!

Find out when the birthdays of these ten brothers and sisters are, and plan to have a little celebration to remember them with your friends/ home group/church/neighbours/family.

4. Find a new cause and join up Pick one. It doesn’t need to be one of those I’ve highlighted, though it could be. There’s a lot of fascinating work going on that’s led by Christians. It needs prayer and funding, and it may need volunteers too. Why not pick one new effort, find out more about it, and consider supporting it from today on?

5. Make a list of heroes If I’d asked you for your heroes, whom would you have listed? Sit down and come up with half-a-dozen – Christians or not – and decide to learn a lot more about them. Then….

"Who are your heroes?

Have you told your kids about them, or your neighbours, or your colleagues at work, or anyone else?"

6. Talk about heroes

One of the themes of the book is how important heroes are. I asked each of the five leaders I interviewed to share some of theirs and got quite a mixed bag! Who are your heroes? Have you told your kids about them, or your neighbours, or your colleagues at work, or anyone else? Enthusing about heroes – in a world in which empty celebrity chat like the latest Kardashian news or the Love Island goings on fills too many people’s heads – is a terrific way to start serious conversations. Even more important, if you have children or teach children or otherwise engage with younger people, make sure they know about people like Wilberforce and Elizabeth Fry. And make sure they know they were Christians, and that their enormous influence came ultimately and explicitly from their faith. I’m sure your children will be fascinated, and horrified, to learn all about child labour here in the UK – and how hard it was to end it! There are various places you can visit, too – such as the Florence Nightingale Museum.

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7. Preach and teach about them Plainly, if you’re a pastor, here’s a ready-made sermon series – whether you want to go through Hebrews 11 and make contemporary applications, or look at aspects of the transformative work of Shaftesbury and co. If you aren’t? Well, lobby your pastor with this great idea!

8. Pray for leaders like those we’ve interviewed I was intrigued to discover that the American Episcopal church links Wilberforce and Shaftesbury for prayer and commemoration on the same day, 30 July (the Church of England remembers them too, but separately). Your church may not have a calendar like that. But you could develop your own and list every influential Christian leader who has engaged the culture for Christ – to give thanks for those who have passed on, and to support those still at it.

9. Pray now!

At the least, join me in praying now – to give thanks to God for the truly extraordinary lives of William Wilberforce, Elizabeth Fry, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Florence Nightingale, and William Booth; and to commend to Him the daily efforts of John Kirkby, Andy Hawthorne, Ruth Valerio, Lyndon Bowring, Christian Guy – and their colleagues. You could even send them a note or email of support!

"At the least, join me in praying now – to give thanks to God for the truly extraordinary lives of William Wilberforce, Elizabeth Fry, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Florence Nightingale, and William Booth"

10. What’s your goal?

Have you been challenged to re-think your own goals, as you’ve heard about the efforts of these believers? I asked a group of young people recently to reflect on their calling and plans in life and write an obituary that they might wish to have written at the end. Why don’t you try that and share it with a friend, or your home group?

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19. MAKING A CHRISTIAN CASE IN PUBLIC Plainly, in twenty-first century Britain plenty of people don’t share a Christian starting-point. This raises two questions.

First, some people (including some Christians) say: what right do people with specific religious beliefs have to impose their view on everyone else? It’s rather an odd thing to say in a democracy, since democracy works by having everyone pitch in with their views, whatever they are, to come up with policies everyone can live with, whether they favour them or not.

Christian views, from this perspective, are no different from Marxist views or Conservative views or Social Democracy or any other political slant. This is more obvious in continental Europe, where there are major parties with Christian connections – the best known being the Christian

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Democrats (CDU) in Germany. It’s less obvious in the UK (and US) political context, where Christian ideas – and active Christians – can be found in various mainstream political parties. (Of course, that’s also true in a country like Germany; not all Christians vote for the ‘Christian’ flagged party.)

It’s not just that Christians have a right to make their point, though that’s true. It’s that democracy actually requires them to. In the UK we don’t make people vote by law (they do that in some other countries, such as Australia and Belgium). But everyone is strongly encouraged to, in the hope that the views that come out on top will be as representative as possible of what people think and want. In turn, that makes it most likely that people will be prepared to live with the outcome, even if their party lost an election or their preferred policy did "So, democracy not make it into the manifesto.

works best if

So, democracy works best if everyone joins in. everyone joins If a specific cause favoured by many Christians is in. " successful, such as legislation to prevent trafficking or female genital mutilation (or, to go back two centuries, to abolish the slave trade), that’s only going to happen because a lot of other people also want it.

But that raises the second question. How are Christians supposed to argue, if a key reason they want something arises from their faith?

Obviously, quoting Bible texts may not be the most effective tactic. Some people accuse Christians of being dishonest if they shape their arguments in secular, public terms. And some Christians feel it’s disingenuous not to share their faith-based reasons.

While we should never hide our faith, we aren’t required to talk about it all the time! More to the point, in a democracy we are all about trying to build as broad a consensus as we can. That happens best when all the various views and parties look for arguments and language with as broad an appeal as possible. It’s not ‘dishonest’ for a trade union leader to point out to companies that if they are good to their workers the workers are likely to be more productive, and also stay around longer (worker turnover is extremely expensive for a company). This is how we seek to build

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consensus, and to show that, in this example, key concerns of the trade union movement may also be valuable for company leaders.

Here are two other examples from article pieces I have just been writing on issues of deep concern to Christians – euthanasia, and cloning.

No need to quote the Bible or discuss theology, or preface what we say with ‘Speaking as a Christian’. Just jump in and make an argument that can persuade – building on facts, as well as beliefs we share with our fellow-citizens.

Is Euthanasia wrong?

‘Every few years, people who believe that doctors should kill patients try another effort at making it legal.

Of course, they don’t call it the “Let Doctors Kill Patients Act.” They call it “Physician-assisted suicide.” Or “Assisted dying”.

And they don’t just campaign in Parliament and the press. They know that medical opinion is important too. That’s why the recent decision by the Royal College of Physicians to take a “neutral” position on the debate has made euthanasia enthusiasts so happy – and caused the rest of us a lot of concern.

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Let’s ask three key questions.

First, what really IS assisted dying’? Second, why does it matter? Third, what’s likely to happen next?

But before that: a bit of perspective. The reason the Royal College shift is so disturbing is that pretty much the entire medical profession for hundreds and hundreds of years – all the way back to Hippocrates, the famous founder of the medical profession back around 400 BC – has been absolutely opposed to “euthanasia” in every form. And remember: until quite recently there was not much that doctors could do when someone was chronically or terminally ill. No real anaesthesia until the mid-nineteenth century. No antibiotics until the twentieth. And pain medications were primitive. The temptation to kill the patient – oops, to “aid” in the patient’s dying – must have been very strong. Yet the docs said no.

Let’s think about that for a minute, and there’s no better way than to go back to Hippocrates himself. No one quite knows if he wrote the famous Hippocratic Oath, or if that was his students. Either way, the Oath put into pithy words some of the great principles of ethical medicine. And one of them was: no “aid in dying” for patients, nor even suggesting that they be “aided” in the process.

You see, Hippocrates wasn’t just a wonderful doctor; he understood something basic about human nature. When people are sick, elderly, injured – when they need the help of a doctor and it’s really serious – you have to draw a bright line. Do everything you can to help patients, said Dr. Hippocrates. But don’t even think about “helping” them by killing them.

Hippocrates refused to cross that line, and there’s no better illustration of how important that has been than in a quote from the anthropologist Margaret Mead. Margaret Mead was one of the most influential thinkers of the first part of the twentieth century, and her approach was “liberal”, “progressive,” and secular. That makes her respect for Hippocrates all the more powerful.

Here’s what she had to say. “For the first time in our tradition there was a complete separation between killing and curing.” Unlike the shamans and others in primitive societies, who could kill as well as cure, “One profession … were to be dedicated completely to life under all circumstances, regardless

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of rank, age, or intellect – the life of a slave, the life of the Emperor, the life of a foreign man, the life of a defective child …” And she goes on: “But society always is attempting to make the physician into a killer – to kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient.” I used it at the start of my book on Hippocrates, The New Medicine, where you can read more about what she said.

Next, our three quick questions.

1. What is “aid in dying” or “assisted dying” or “assisted suicide” all about? These are all clever phrases to avoid the word euthanasia.

And that word – a made-up word from the nineteenth century – is another soft term for a hard thing. The hard thing is killing. For a doctor – or anyone else – to do something intended to bring about a patient’s death (whatever his or her motives, and even if the patient has asked) in most countries is homicide. Let’s call a spade a spade.

We can start by putting quotation marks round “aid in dying” and the other terms being used to market the act of killing patients every time we use them.

2. Why does it matter? If someone wants to die, who are we to stand in their way? Margaret Mead put it like this: “it is the duty of society to protect the physician from such requests.” People in pain, maybe depressed, not wanting to be a burden to their children and carers, will often be tempted to want to die. It’s our responsibility to assure them that they are very much wanted, and to give them the best love and care we can. Not to say, OK gran, let’s get it over with.

What’s more, one you start, where do you stop? Many depressed people who aren’t otherwise ill at all think about dying, and some try to kill themselves. Instead of trying to stop them, should we really be helping them end it all? And of course let’s not forget that killing people who are sick can save an enormous amount of money. Once we start down that path …

3. What’s next? Someone may try and use a Private Member’s Bill in Parliament, or some other strategy – way back the House of Lords had a Select Committee that looked into euthanasia (and decided firmly against). But the debate is moving on, and in our families and

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churches and schools and colleges and workplaces people are talking.

We need to tell them that the answer isn’t killing – it’s better medicine, better care, more love.

If we’re Christians, we know that life is sacred because we’re made in God’s image. But the sanctity of life isn’t just for Christians. Hippocrates wasn’t a Christian, but he was absolutely committed to the life of his patients.

And neither was Margaret Mead! But as she put it, we need to protect our doctors, Hippocrates’ successors, from the pressure to become killers.

Is cloning humans wrong?

If poor Fido gets stricken with cancer, you know just what to do. Grab some doggie DNA before he yelps his last sad yelp, send it off to a cloning lab, and – bingo – you’ve got another Fido. At least, that’s what you do if you’ve got Barbra Streisand’s bank balance.

Her beloved pooch wasn’t actually called Fido, but Samantha. And now Barbra’s the proud possessor of not one but two Samantha clones: Miss Scarlett and Miss Violet, Apparently the going rate for a copycat bow-wow recently halved from a prohititive $100,000. Who wouldn’t pay 50 grand to bring back your four-legged friend? In the gripping movie The Sixth Day pet cloning has become routine. It’s called RePet. But what if it wasn’t Fido who got the terminal diagnosis, but gran? Or what if your 12-year-old was hit by a drunk driver? Barbra thinks it’s wonderful she can RePet her pooch. Wouldn’t it be even more wonderful if you could “RePet” your relatives? Maybe the hospice could add it as an option. We’ve cloned cattle and rabbits and monkeys and cats and all sorts of other animals.

What about relatives? It’ll be pricey, but maybe the NHS will fork out. They already pay for “test-tube baby” treatments, which looked as weird as cloning (and as expensive) when the first in vitro baby Louise Brown was born.

Of course, so far as we know, no-one has yet cloned a human. But some people claim they have. Back in 2002, a weird religious cult called the Raelians (led by a former racing-car driver who calls himself Rael and – of course – wears a flowing white robe) announced they had cloned not one baby but five! Their top scientist, Brigitte Boisellier, took the media by storm.

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Shortly after, I invited her to London to debate their claims. We sat side by side on Sir David Frost’s BBC show Breakfast with Frost. Sir David asked me why I was helping promote the Raelians’ bizarre claims. I told him that while I didn’t believe they had cloned anyone, they were giving us all a great opportunity to debate the huge ethical issues at stake – because down the road there really could be an option to “RePet” the human dead.

It’s hard to remember how big a story it was when we heard Dolly the sheep had been cloned back in 1997. Cloning led the news day after day. Of course, the issue was not: is it OK to clone sheep? (No-one much cares; sheep all look like clones anyway!) It was: if this can be done to sheep, how long before it will be done to people? And will that be OK? Almost everyone – including Ian Wilmut, the scientist who had cloned Dolly – said no! Not OK! And the United Nations passed the Declaration on Human Cloning stating that all forms of human cloning were wrong. But the genie was out of the bottle. The basic techniques involved are not all that complicated for anyone with access to a biology lab. Most scientists didn’t believe the Raelians, or the later Korean claim to have cloned a human embryo, but they accepted that sooner or later it could be done and likely would be.

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How soon?

I was certainly surprised to get a call at my home on a Sunday afternoon back in 1997 from the American newspaper USA Today asking for a quote on the story that Ian Wilmut had cloned Dolly the Sheep.

But I don’t think I’ll be surprised to get a call in 10 years’ time when the world’s first cloned baby has been born. Maybe in China, where scientists seem to be freer to break ethical taboos. Or maybe in the UK! At the moment it’s illegal to clone born babies in the UK. Yet one British philosopher recently argued that Brexit offers a chance to escape European rules and have cloned British babies!

Is “RePet for Relatives” such a good idea?

The problem is, cloning is a trick. It doesn’t really bring gran back from the dead at all. Or dad. Or your 12-year-old Susie who was tragically knocked off her bike by a drunk driver.

That’s the core question. Even Barbra Streisand knows that her RePet pooches aren’t really the same as Samantha. They’re basically Samantha’s identical twins, yet “twins” born years after Samantha. Just as identical twins look the same but develop in different ways, cloned sheep and cloned dogs and cloned people are different from each other.

And there’s a fatal flaw to the idea if your daughter Susie is killed it will be a good move to clone her.

Let’s say you decide to go ahead. You grab the DNA and send it to the lab.

They make a Susie 2 embryo, you carry her to term, and – bingo – Susie is back!

But not really.

Susie, the original Susie, was unique, she was loved for herself, she developed in ways all her own. Susie 2 is a Project: the whole point about her is that she is not unique, and you will try your best to make her turn out like Susie 1. Same clothes, same food, same music lessons and games and same kind of friends. You loved Susie 1. Susie 2 the Project you feel differently about, as you want her to end up the same. Just think what’s going on in this little girl’s mind as she grows up with parents trying to make her into Susie 1.

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This may work with dogs. Barbra says she’s looking forward to seeing whether her cloned pooches resemble dead Samantha as they get older. But for Susie 2, and Susie 2’s mum and dad, it sounds like hell on earth.’

You see, there’s nothing fake going on here. In fact it’s the opposite: these are arguments that reveal how much common ground Christians have with everyone else. Plenty of secular people – as well as Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, with people from all kinds of religious perspectives – agree on a whole lot of things. While we may sometimes use different terms and have different priorities, human dignity matters to us all.

This is how William Wilberforce persuaded Britain to abolish the slave trade, which paved the way for the abolition of slavery itself in the British Empire. It’s how Christian Guy is fighting trafficking today. It’s how God calls us to be salt and light and to fight for the dignity of everyone made in His image.

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RESOURCES Websites for the five leaders’ organisations: The Message: message.org.uk Tearfund: tearfund.org CARE: care.org.uk Justice and Care: justiceandcare.org Christians Against Poverty: capuk.org

Amazing Grace, 2006 film directed by Michael Apted On Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect of Anglican social reformers: Stephen Tomkins, Clapham Sect: How Wilberforce’s Circle Transformed Britain (Lion, 2010)

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SOURCES INTRODUCTION https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/ departed-saints-yet-living#flipbook/

PART 1: REDISCOVERING JESUS – God in Human Form 1. A Human Jesus: Body, Mind, Heart, and Will Quotes: See Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology. The Kendall quote is a blurb for the back cover of the UK editions of my book Complete in Christ.

I discuss the humanity of Jesus more fully in Complete in Christ: Rediscovering Jesus and Ourselves (originally published by Marshall Pickering, then the Paternoster Press). The US edition has the title: Are Christians Human? (Zondervan).

Benjamin B. Warfield’s essay is entitled ‘The Emotional Life of Our Lord.’

Available here: www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/emotionallife.html 2. Made in His Image This chapter is mostly drawn from parts of my book The Robots are Coming: Us, Them, and God (CARE, 2017) 3. Creation and Stewardship Here’s a source for the famous Kuyper quote and a good discussion: https://blog.reformedjournal.com/2013/10/12/ why-im-sick-of-every-square-inch/ 4. The Bible’s Heroes: Hebrews 11 Faber’s hymn begins with this lines: ‘Souls of men, who will ye scatter Like a crowd of frightened sheep….’

PART 2: DEMOCRACY AND RESPONSIBILITY 5. Why Politics Matters for Christians This chapter and the one that follows are based on my booklet The Logic of Christian Political Responsibility, published by CARE. 6. The Christian Stake in Public Policy

PART 3: HEROES OF FAITH 7. William Wilberforce For the Mansfield case, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart

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For the slave-owner compensation issue: https://www.theguardian.com/ news/2018/mar/29/slavery-abolition-compensation-when-will-britain-face-up-toits-crimes-against-humanity 8. Elizabeth Fry Here’s the Elizabeth Fry charity website: http://www.elizabethfry.co.uk/History And here’s a good article about her on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Elizabeth_Fry And for the quote from a biographer: https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/ elizabeth-fry-saint-of-prison-reform/ 9. The Earl of Shaftesbury Here’s the helpful source for the summary of his many efforts: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/100086 Prayer quoted: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/files/bi_080110_full.pdf https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/ livinglearning/19thcentury/overview/coalmines/ 10. Florence Nightingale Some great quotes from her here: https://www.christiantoday.com/article/ god-has-spoken-to-me-and-called-me-to-serve-12-inspiring-florence-nightingalequotes-to-mark-her-birthday/108984.htm More about her life here: https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-25/faith-behind-famous-florence-nightingale-christian-history.html https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/ and, https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/ florence-nightingale-sampler 11. William Booth Nice article on Booth in Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Booth#ref40114 And see: https://www.bartleby.com/essay/The-Salvation-Army-FK4EY6SJFRS5

PART 4: SALT AND LIGHT TODAY The primary sources for these chapters are personal interviews conducted in May, June and July of 2019.

12. The Message for the Young and the Poor (Andy Hawthorne) 13. Tearfund: Global Relief and Development (Ruth Valerio)

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14. CARE – for Public Life and Leadership (Lyndon Bowring) The effort to change the law on the ‘prohibited degrees’ of marriage was partly successful several years later. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Prohibited_degree_of_kinship#England_and_Wales,_and_the_World-wide_ Anglican_Communion Interview in Christianity magazine: https://www.premierchristianity.com/Past-Issues/2019/July-2019/ Lyndon-Bowring-The-founder-of-CARE-reflects-on-a-lifetime-of-campaigning 15. Fighting Trafficking (Christian Guy) The CSJ Story’ by IDS - https://www. centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/about/story 16. Freedom from Debt (John Kirkby) https://godandpoliticsuk.org/2013/10/31/ the-incredible-story-of-john-kirkby-and-christians-against-poverty/

PART 5: HEROES: God’s Call on our Lives Essay by C.S Lewis ‘The Weight of Glory’ - http://www.newcityindy.org/wp-content/ uploads/2012/06/Lewis-Weight-of-Glory.pdf 17. Looking Ahead Faber’s hymn begins with these lines: ‘O blest is he who can divine Where truth and justice lie And dares to take the side that seems Wrong to man’s blinded eye.’

18. Ten Things to do Tomorrow 19. Make a Christian Case in Public The euthanasia article was written for CARE. The cloning article for Metro.

Metro: https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/13/ we-could-clone-humans-within-10-years-but-should-we-9437325/?ito=twitter

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