This is Jenny Sinclair’s editorial from our 2025 Christmas-New Year Newsletter. For the full edition and to join our network, click here. Scroll down for links to our latest resources.
The Waiting
Dear Friends,
This waiting in late Advent is bittersweet. The tensions of our time interweave and demand our attention.
I was on Bondi Beach four months ago, on a cold and blustery August afternoon. It was smaller than I’d imagined – intimate, well-loved, familiar. Soft sand beneath a darkening sky. Surfers riding waves in the fading light. A family in wetsuits packing up, happy and tired. A place of unspoken trust.
Now that trust is shattered. People said ‘never again’, yet here was another Islamist pogrom – this time at Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights. Men, women and children brutally murdered. Our Jewish brothers and sisters are once again forced to bear the unbearable. This violence is rightly named antisemitic, but the terror is aimed at us all.
How do we comprehend such darkness?
“When Jesus came near and saw the city, he wept over it.”
At home, the UK is in the midst of a deep crisis. Trust in the State is collapsing; people are angry and communities are fragmented. A profound disconnect has developed between the political class and the demos. After decades of moral relativism, belief systems are contested and confused. The renewal of our dear country now requires decisive action – spiritual as much as political.
Our lost society needs Christ. The deep resources of our spiritual and intellectual traditions are urgently needed. Yet too much of the Christian family has lost confidence and drifted from its mission. Too many people have unknowingly internalised secular assumptions or have been misled, some by the progressive left and others by the nationalist right.
The prayer of St John Paul II speaks powerfully into this moment:
“Lord, restore your church on earth with the gifts of penance and reconciliation.”
This call for the restoration of the ‘church’ is not limited to institutions – it’s an invitation for God’s people to come home. Penance is an invitation to recognise how far we have strayed.
There is also a disconnect between parts of the church and the country. Too many Christian institutions have failed to engage with the issues of greatest concern – especially to poorer communities: the offshoring of jobs and loss of livelihoods, the erosion of cultural inheritance, the gross mismanagement of mass migration, and the lack of moral leadership regarding the mass rape of young girls.
Instead, the churches’ response, though well-meaning, has mostly been narrowly focused on welfare expansion and the creation of a vast food-bank network. Conceived through the lens of poverty-alleviation rather than to empower economic independence, these efforts have inadvertently propped up the neoliberal high-welfare, low-wage economy and encouraged dependency, alienating the very communities they sought to help.
“If you, even you, had only recognised on this day the things that make for peace.”
This has been a tragic story of estrangement. But we can, and we must, tell a better story – a covenantal story of love, solidarity, justice, reciprocity, the dignity of work, good citizenship and meaning. Such a story begins with repentance, followed by humble listening, and then action – action that must be both spiritual and political.
Politically, decisive steps are needed to restore public trust. A devout Muslim, the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has courageously declared that it is her “moral mission to fix this broken [immigration] system so that it stops creating division.” Clear that this is not a matter of religious prejudice, racism or xenophobia, she is “not scared of calling out Islamism.” She knows that avoiding the truth about this dangerous ideology harms everyone – not least ordinary Muslims and refugees.
Spiritually, action is already underway. A great shaking is taking place. The movements of the Holy Spirit are mysterious, but we know they often begin at the peripheries. The first public witnesses to the incarnation were shepherds.
“But now it is hidden from your eyes.”
There has been some excitement across the churches about a so-called ‘quiet revival’. Yet some grassroots expressions – particularly those explicitly linked with concerns around Islamism and identity – have been condemned by establishment church leaders. But as Jason Clark observes, “revivals have always been dirty – never hygienic.”
It is too early to judge. But the call to penance must follow the way of Jesus, who welcomes sinners and eats with them. The incarnational God ‘touches grass’ he enters history vulnerably; he deliberately risks rejection to be with those on the outside. If we do not question our assumptions, if we never touch grass, we may miss what God is doing.
For decades, life in the UK, along with all of the West, has been shaped by an elite-driven, technocratic political settlement rooted in a cult of individualism. This settlement amounts to a rejection of our shared spiritual inheritance. Its transactional logic infected the whole culture, including our churches. Managerial approaches exhausted too many of our church leaders, turned believers into consumers, and reduced neighbours in need from friends to recipients.
Jesus himself is peace (Eph 2:14)
The restoration of trust requires spiritual as well as social and political interventions. As God’s people we are called to be the handmaid of the Lord, not of the State. This is the time to live out a generous and capacious story, one that is grounded in an authentic Christian anthropology.
As Andrew Willard Jones writes in The Church Against the State, we must now “cultivate and expand structures of friendship that still exist…. Ultimately, the only solution to our political problems is Christian love of neighbour and love of God…”
This is the vision of the common good which T4CG is promoting. Its outward facing, relational instinct is to join with God to re-weave the bonds of family and community. Rooted in the gospel and Catholic Social Thought, its pillars are solidarity, subsidiarity, and the transcendent nature of the human person. It balances rights with responsibilities, calls for contribution at every level of society and accommodates people of all faiths and none. It brings light into darkness, can tell right from wrong, and speaks the truth in love.
We have strayed far.
In this pregnant moment, we are being called home.
We may be waiting for Christ; but in truth, he is waiting for us.
*
Wishing you the peace of Christ this Christmas
Jenny Sinclair and all the team at Together for the Common Good
In this edition
- Jean Flood Neighbourhood Nativity
- Andrew Willard Jones Church Against the State
- Leaving Egypt podcast latest episodes
- Angie Allgood If I disappeared, would anyone care?
- Matthew Sanders The Church’s Mission in the Age of AI
- Jo Stow Common Good Schools – Advent Update
- Susannah Black Roberts Staying Human: Being Human in the Age of AI
- Dan Hitchens Staying Human: Useful Lives
- Signs of the Times – our latest collection of articlesfrom across the media – in this edition, under the headings Humanity, Bondi Beach/Islamism/Antisemitism, Changing Church [including blogs on revival and Christian nationalism), UK news and International news. You will also find a list of Recommended Books.
Discover all these pieces and more via the full edition here
This work happens thanks to a small number of wonderful supporters. To continue, we need to grow that number. Could you lend a hand by becoming a paid subscriber? From only £5 a month you can play an important role in enabling this work to continue and grow.
Join our network and subscribe here