A Personal Discovery of the Common Good

In an article for Crucible, an Anglican Christian ethics journal, Jenny Sinclair reflects on the common good as the antidote to the malaise afflicting the West. Tracing the story of Together for the Common Good, and her personal discovery of Catholic social thought, she describes how this tradition equips us as Christians to be ready for the emerging new era.

For some years, I’ve been preoccupied by the relationship between the church and society. And seeing the malaise afflicting our country, I think it’s not unreasonable to entertain the possibility that the church could play a role of reconciliation and healing.

But as Pope Francis has said, we’re living through a change of era. This is a strange period in which the sickness is more visible to some than others. While most leaders across the churches sense the upheaval, few can make sense of it.

Symptoms of the malaise include loneliness, mental health issues and social fragmentation. But also, we see the degradation of human beings, the commodification of creation, vast concentrations of corporate power, and unprecedented inequality generating poverty in all its forms, and the careless globalisation that has led to the discarding of whole communities.

No one can deny the scale of the unravelling any longer. It seems beyond our capacity to address.

The early signs became evident to me when I was experiencing a call of the Holy Spirit on my life. It was in 2011 that I began to see the instability, and I was concerned about the churches’ ability to respond. I saw loss of confidence, division, confusion and mission drift.

Having witnessed the partnership between my late father, Bishop David Sheppard, and the Catholic Archbishop Derek Worlock, I had a residual confidence that the Christian spirit had the potential to play a critical role in civic renewal.

In my mid-twenties, I’d had a conversion experience and was received into the Catholic Church. But it was only in my late forties that I felt this particular call, having hitherto avoided church-related work. Growing up in a clergy household had forged a scepticism that served me well.

I was called to a new curiosity about the civic vocation of the churches. In that first year, others joined me and Together for the Common Good emerged. It was then that I discovered Catholic social thought. I found Rerum Novarum, Centesimus Annus, and Laborem Excercens contained vital wisdom about political economy. This nonpartisan ethical framework rooted in the gospel and anchored in real-world experience answered many of my questions about what was happening to our country.

This tradition helps us see that the centralising of state and corporate power is morphing into what Francis calls a “technocratic paradigm.” Governments increasingly act in the interests of big corporations, insulating them from democratic accountability: a collusion some describe as “the machine.” Such developments are corrosive of civil society and undermine the flourishing of human beings.

But this tradition also helps us see where we have been complicit. We’ve outsourced responsibilities we used to carry, becoming more dependent on products and services than on each other, weakening mutual obligation and local institutional life. Our overemphasis on rights and our neglect of mutual responsibility has led to a cult of self. This assault on relationship has led to the breakdown of trust and the menace of identitarian politics on both the right and left.

Unless the reasons for this are understood, solutions will remain elusive, and the deterioration will progress. This lens has helped me see that the causes stem from variants of liberalism. Its roots date back centuries, but we’ve had an intensification over the past 45 years and an acceleration since the pandemic. We’re now faced with hyper-liberalism in both economic and social forms, whose individualistic and transactional characteristics are dissolving human relationships.

The neoliberal philosophy has been enabled by successive political parties across all countries that have adopted it. Such gross mismanagement is provoking blowback. There is a profound disconnect between the governing and the governed. Dissent is framed as extremist by a political class bent on maintaining power by constraining the range of acceptable opinion.

But Catholic Social Thought doesn’t just enable us to see what is going on. It is also a source of guidance for how to respond, and within this, the common good suggests a compelling story. As Together for the Common Good developed, the more we discovered that the common good provided a distinctive narrative, unlike the market, welfare, and human rights agendas that had become so dominant and divisive.

A language emerged emphasising relationship, mutuality, and reciprocity. It proposed building alliances—not only across ethnicity, gender, and ability but across opinion, class, socio-economic background, sex, age, experience, and education. In matters of statecraft, it sought balance between estranged interests, not least between capital and labour.

But outside a small number of experts, this story was not widely known. The term was frequently misunderstood or got stuck in the academy. In addition, Catholic social thought itself was subject to misappropriation, oversimplification or abstraction. To make it more accessible while honouring its integrity, we developed a set of common good principles. We also forged this definition:

“The common good is the shared life of a society in which everyone can flourish as we act together in different ways that all contribute towards that goal, enabled by social conditions that mean every single person can participate. We pursue this goal by working together across our differences, each of us taking responsibility according to our calling and ability.”

This “common good thinking” went down well with Christians of different traditions. We emphasised its distinctively Christian anthropology, framing our identity in God as relational beings. Promoting balance between rights and responsibilities, and emphasising free participation, the common good then becomes the antidote to identitarian rights-based trends and the coercive utopias of totalitarian tendencies.

Lacking a theological training was at first a source of embarrassment for me. But in my efforts to respond to God’s call, I found my weakness became a blessing. I found I could interpret the spirit of the tradition to others. Having been fortunate to learn from many of the leading thinkers firsthand, and despite never having spoken in public before 2014, I now regularly give talks and sessions for many groups of Christian leaders and organisations.

These groups want help in reading the signs of the times to discern how to respond to the challenges they face. They value how the framework of Catholic social thought helps them navigate political and ideological confusion. They want to discuss this time of profound change in the church and its implications for leadership. They want to engage with common good perspectives on justice, poverty, economy, charity, and social cohesion. They welcome how this way of thinking integrates social concerns within discipleship, mission, and holistic evangelisation.

There is also significant interest around how this tradition understands political economy. So I have provided platforms for theologians, politicians, and practitioners through published pieces on our website as well as through public debates. Most recently, I’ve invited speakers to deliver public talks, addressing the dignity of work, economy, civic participation, social peace, people and planet, the response to identity politics, Christian social action, what it means to be human and much more. I also convene private in-person round table conversations with our expert speakers, providing senior clergy, charity CEOs, diocesan personnel, journalists, and business leaders with the rare opportunity of deliberating together across denomination and opinion.

To bring common good thinking alive at parish level, we have run various experiments, some of which have been adopted and adapted by others. Our latest local church resource is currently being tested and reviewed, having been successfully trialled pre-pandemic. Common Good Journey helps members of congregations to become more outward facing, discern their unique vocational responsibility, and build solidarity with poor communities.

Young people are especially vulnerable to the malign culture and need help facing an uncertain future. Following demand from teachers we have developed Common Good Schools, a programme consisting of lessons, assemblies, and community engagement. We train teachers to position their school as a force for the common good in the neighbourhood and help young people learn the importance of responsibility, relationships, and reciprocity.

Just over a year ago, we launched our first podcast, Leaving Egypt, which is attracting a growing international audience. My co-host Alan Roxburgh and I explore the signs of the times and what it means to be God’s people in times of unravelling. In conversation with guests across the Christian traditions, we do two things: with leading thinkers, we examine the causes of the malaise, and with grassroots Christians, we discover stories of how the Holy Spirit is reweaving new life.

Thirteen years ago, I had no idea what Together for the Common Good would become, or that thousands of people would be touched by this work. I also have no idea where it’s going. But I do know that we are not meant to be doing any of this on our own.

We are entering a place we’ve never been before. If our societies are to hold onto the human spirit in the new era, then the church—in all its forms—must build a common good with neighbours and join with God in the reweaving of our common life. We are sceptical about the endless managerial attempts across the churches to fix the problem of decline – the times are calling for a new, yet ancient, Christian imagination.

Jenny Sinclair

Founder and Director, Together for the Common Good

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This article was first published in the January 2025 edition of Crucible: The Journal of Christian Social Ethics.

This was featured in the 2025 Lent edition of the T4CG Newsletter.

Like what you are reading? More inspirational content from Jenny Sinclair can be found here