This is just the editorial from the T4CG Newsletter, Christmas-New Year 2024-2025. To view the full version click here
God is with us
Dear Friends
A warm welcome to our Christmas and New Year edition.
The little drawing above is the winning entry in our children’s community Christmas card competition, a response to our invitation to draw or paint something reflecting on “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood”, from John 1:14. This simple image brings it home that our God is not abstract. That Jesus is born into a place. That through the Holy Spirit, God is with us where we are.
Reflecting on the reality of God, I am thinking about a conversation on our Leaving Egypt podcast with Harvey Kwiyani, a Malawian missionary working among Christian communities here in the UK. We were discussing the impact of modernity on how people perceive God. Harvey’s home culture has not yet succumbed to neoliberalism and individualism, and for his community still, the Spirit of God is real. They live with the expectation that God is at work among them, all the time. Harvey says “their interpersonal relations are grounded in the belief that they are serving the Spirit as they serve one another.” By contrast in the UK, he is meeting “many people who say they follow Christ, live as if God does not exist. What we are seeing is a functional atheism.”Our culture has lost its way, and the hunger for meaning is drawing some prominent atheists to explore Christianity. The attraction for some of them is what they perceive of as its role in the defence of Western culture. This is understandable and the loss is real. But Jesus tells us not to be afraid. We are invited to be constructive not defensive, and to restore trust in the reality of the divine nature of Creation. We are called to join in with God’s great participation, with what the Holy Spirit is doing among us in the here and now, in the places where we live and work. This is not a naive or woolly position. Rather, the incarnational story calls us to a covenantal way of living bounded by the commandments, primarily to love God and neighbour. We are called into a story that is both traditional and radical.
The cultural malaise we are in is caused by an operating philosophy that, as John Gray has said, “is exhausted”. He describes it as “a certain kind of neoliberal progressivism, unfitted to the conditions of the world in which we live.” It was based on a false anthropology that assumes human beings can flourish as transacting individuals, and its system of globalisation is geared to prioritise the interests of finance capital. Such a worldview comes from the mistaken assumption that God, place, tradition and relationships are unimportant. This is why we are seeing this widespread unravelling and why we see such human distress.
Amidst all the brokenness, we must live with the expectation that God is at work. Anchored in daily practices of prayer, we can look out for the movements of the Spirit in the mundane, in conversations at the bus stop, in the taxi, in the local shop. Moments of mutual acknowledgement, acts of loving kindness, intentional acts of listening, making eye contact, putting down the smartphone – all these can develop into a shared strength capable of resisting what is dehumanising, and foster a confidence to build further human connection.
Made in the image of God, we are relational beings and by making space to listen to each other and to the Spirit, new forms of local association will emerge. These forms are the beginnings of a constructive alternative to the neoliberal and totalitarian tendencies that have become so dominant.
Grassroots collaborations, whether around local food production and supply, mutual aid, sport, care of the vulnerable, energy, land or housing – there are many forms of local and moral economy – will generate common good spaces which make “provision for each person to have a hand in shaping and benefiting from the material and social conditions under which they live and work.” This is how Luke Bretherton describes the Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain’s vision of Christian humanism. Maritain saw these local democratic forms of association “as a vital means through which humans can realise their true natures as those created in the image of God.”
Each of us is called to join in with this positive energy, becoming attuned to where the Holy Spirit is active in our neighbourhood, joining in and seeing what happens. Church communities have a vital role to play as constructive partners, no matter how vulnerable they may feel. Crucially it must start, not with our own plans, but by discerning what the Spirit is already doing. We need to recognise that God is not abstract, but really and truly among us.
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Featured in this edition Ian Geary tells a personal story about the importance of place, theologically, spiritually and politically, and Maurice Glasman gives an outstanding lecture on the politics of our present moment in which he draws on Catholic Social Thought and the histories of the churches. My colleague Jo Stow updates us on our work with schools and their calling to build common good in the neighbourhood, and there is a short talk by me on immigration from a common good perspective.
Also below you will find a link to a review podcast episode where my co-host Alan Roxburgh and I chat about the fascinating conversations we’ve had with guests over the last twelve months on Leaving Egypt – and we share details of our next online Conversations forum in which we’ll welcome Avril Bagient and Sian Wade to explore practices of listening to the Spirit. There is much else below to explore – recommended books and articles and more.
I hope you enjoy this edition. If you haven’t already, I warmly invite you to read Hope in Uncertain Times, our 2024 Impact Report. Please pray for us, and if you can, lend your support with a monthly donation to help make this work sustainable.
Wishing you and those you love a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Jenny Sinclair, and the Together for the Common Good team
This is just the editorial from the T4CG Newsletter, Christmas-New Year 2024-2025. To view the full version click here