#100 Cultural Witness - with Graham Tomlin & Belle Tindall-Riley

So could you just talk through how this whole idea got started? What led you to want to found the Center for Cultural Witness and what you thought needed to be done and what cultural witnesses is how cultural witness fits that space?

yeah thanks bonnie and um i guess it comes out of out of a i suppose the story of my i guess like life and faith and ministry so far i've spent most of my ministry and academic life um teaching theology both in oxford And in London.

And so there's different strands that have led up to this.

And one of those strands was the realization one day that those of us who are theologians, we write our long books on different aspects of theology.

you know, the Christology of Theodore of Mopsuestia or wherever it might be.

And basically nobody reads them.

Well, a few other theologians read them.

Some people in the church reads them, but virtually no one outside the church reads theology.

Whereas there is a lot of, there's a kind of audience for pretty well every academic discipline, whether that's immunology or biology or psychology or social studies or whatever it might be.

There's a kind of application.

There's a way in which that body of research finds its way into public life.

It's kind of hard to see where theology finds its way into public life.

And it struck me that the obvious place for that, for the discipline of theology, the fruit of theological work to find its way into public life was in was in the public witness of the church.

And yet so often there seemed to be a disconnect between what theology was doing and the church's public witness.

And I suppose, so that was one strand, that kind of observation on the nature of theology.

And I remember talking to Miroslav Volf and others about this quite a bit, and he's written a little bit on this as well, you know, how theology needs to find a vocation for itself in public.

Another strand, I think, was my life as a bishop.

I was a bishop in the—well, I still am a bishop in the Church of England.

I was a kind of working bishop, jobbing bishop for seven years.

I was very conscious of churches in London who were doing their best to share the Christian faith and the love of Christ in practical ways, in verbal ways, doing their— social action, their evangelism, their, you know, whatever it might be.

But very often in contexts like England, maybe in America as well, it felt like that the attempts to share the faith were falling on rather stony ground.

And I'd often think about the parable of the sower and the way the sower goes out to sow the seed and, you know, some falls a different kind, you know, but some falls are quite stony ground where it's hard to get much of a purchase.

It struck me it was a little bit like that.

And so I began to think maybe we need to not just do more and more sowing of the seed, you know, more and more Alpha courses and more and more, you know, communications and that kind of thing.

But we kind of need to plow up the ground a little more to prepare the ground for the receiving and the hearing of the Christian gospel.