Every year Passion Plays tell the story of Easter and draw the largest outdoor audiences of live theatre in the UK. They give people an opportunity to experience the Gospel story unhampered by centuries of religious traditions, but they are more than one-off performances. Every year Passion Plays are the focus of sustained work that equips and invests in local communities across the UK and promotes understanding between Christianity and the other principal faith traditions.

Passion Plays contribute to significant change and transformation for not only individuals but also wider social structures and we are keen to harness and replicate their beneficial impact. With the help of a generous grant from the M.B. Reckitt Trust we will develop an action research project to measure the impact of professional partnerships and community volunteers with the aim of developing online resources and running training events for wider dissemination. We will focus on the insights of volunteer-led communities created by a common endeavour in which people share knowledge, skills and experience, and on the potential of arts communities to tell the Easter story in a way that promotes religious literacy in a multifaith world.

You can find out more about the Passion Trust on our website here: www.passiontrust.org and read the research report here: https://passiontrust.org/research_passion_plays/

The Church and Social Justice, at a time of economic crisis and environmental catastrophe.

A day conference at Canterbury Cathedral Lodge, the Precincts, Canterbury CT1 2EH, Saturday 18 May, 2024

The gravity of the current economic and environmental crisis requires a new and energetic response through the Church’s teachings on social justice and the harmony of creation. Many are concluding that global interconnectedness coupled with uneven development has now reached a stage where human exploitation of nature has reached a tipping point.

This unprecedented historic discontinuity will require radical adaptation in politics and social organisation in the years to come, and calls for increased collaboration between theologians, historians, and researchers in the natural and social sciences. Anglican social thought in the twentieth century largely followed the incarnational theology of Maurice, Headlam, Scott-Holland and Gore, finding its fullest expression in William Temple’s conception of an ethical state. Following on from our 2022 conference on Temple’s Christianity and Social Order (1942), speakers at our 2024 event will consider the relevance and adequacy of this tradition in the light of today’s global challenges.

Programme and Registration details can be found here:-

Conference Programme: https://research.kent.ac.uk/anglican-history-theology/wp-content/uploads/sites/2427/2024/03/Conference-Programme.pdf
Conference Booking: https://store.kent.ac.uk/product-catalogue/division-of-arts-humanities/school-of-history/events/caht-social-justice-conference

Centre for Anglican History and Theology - Research at Kent

Postgraduate Scholarships at the Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies Oxford

Discussions between Christians and Muslims gain value if they are friendly, respectful yet rigorous, and motivated by a genuine desire to learn and question. Creating settings for such discussions is part of the DNA of The Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies Oxford.

The M B Reckitt Trust is supporting the funding of two postgraduate scholarships at CMCS Oxford, one each for a Christian and a Muslim. In addition to presenting a research seminar on their work, the students collaborate in co-leading a monthly Qur’an and Bible study group. Through this collaboration we have seen scholarship holders grow in confidence in working together and facilitating discussion around scriptures in a way which is sensitive yet probing. The scholarship holders gain experience of a practical dimension of Christian-Muslim relations alongside their studies in this very relevant area. For more on the work of the Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies Oxford see www.cmcsoxford.org.uk

In the next phase of our Church on the Margins programme, we wish to build on the positive stories of hope that have been identified through participatory research –
creating space for people experiencing poverty and marginalisation to reclaim dignity, agency and power within their own congregations and communities, and at a wider level within institutional church. The programme will seek to enable transformational change to take place in multiple local communities across the UK, facilitated and funded by the URC, in which local people, communities and churches are enabled to reclaim dignity, agency and power together. This will contribute to wider thinking with the churches as to the role that institutional Christian bodies (nationally and locally) can play in investing a long-term social movement building, in which people and communities experiencing poverty and marginalisation are able to exercise leadership and agency.

The banking system underpins the global economy. Banks make loans and investments, and the way this money is used has consequences. Our current system doesn’t enable people and planet to flourish. 

JustMoney Movement’s Money Makes Change (MMC) programme educates and equips Christians and local churches to live out their faith and witness to shape a fairer, more sustainable economy, through how they bank, save, invest and spend money. With the support of MB Reckitt we will be able to develop the diversity of the programme, in particular to expand the reach and depth of our ethical finance education and action work with Black Majority Churches in the UK. This will enable more Christians from Black communities, many of whom are more financially marginalised than other ethnic groups, to know how their financial decisions can contribute to a fairer, more sustainable world, and to become aware of more inclusive, ethical actors in the finance sector such as credit unions. 

Working with and under the guidance of a group of Black Majority Church leaders, we will create tailored MMC resources in terms of language, cultural appropriateness, theological relevance, and practical specificity, and test these with local MMC ‘Champions’ who will be identified and supported to use such resources with their congregations and communities.
https://justmoney.org.uk/

Faith communities that provide inclusive and affirming spiritual homes for LGBTQ+ people are critical.  The Faithful Allies Programme will build the knowledge, skills, and confidence of diverse faith leaders to make positive change for LGBTQ+ inclusion in their communities through a series of educational dialogue and peer support sessions. This pilot programme will support one cohort of 12 leaders, and will include the production of a report outlining a replicable model for others to use to make change.
https://faithbeliefforum.org/

Peacebuilders Programme

While inter faith work in the UK is abundant and overwhelmingly positive, the issue of the Middle East and, in particular, Israel/Palestine can threaten to derail good relations and cause divisions between and within faith communities. As part of our ongoing work, the Peacebuilders project will train and equip Christians to lead and promote positive and informed dialogue among Jews, Christians and Muslims, and those of other faiths or none.

Working with our trained facilitators, course students will engage with the issues through online and in-person sessions, using a range of voices from communities here and in the Middle East. Not only will this enable participants to gain a fuller picture of the region, but it will also provide them with skills and opportunities to be peace-builders and to help mend broken relationships between and within communities here. http://www.fodip.org.uk/

For most people, pilgrimage is associated with remote, rural, ancient or ‘thin’ places like Iona or Lindisfarne. Whilst these very much have their place, they do not help with the task of discovering holiness, transformation or encountering God in more modern, urban, everyday environments. If we journey with forgotten, economically marginalised communities, can they become sites of pilgrimage, encounter, hope and transformation? 

To mark Church Action on Poverty’s 40^th anniversary in 2022, we are organising a series of Pilgrimage at the Margins events in different locations across the UK, each hosted by a local partner church or community organisation. We will listen to and amplify the truths revealed by people and communities on the margins of British society, sharing their vision of the kind of future they want to see for themselves and the neighbourhoods, and standing in solidarity with them in speaking truth to power about the wider changes that are needed to help bring this about.

Who Is Your Neighbour? (WIYN) holds conversations in which people are able to speak openly about issues like immigration, ethnicity, and people who are ‘not like us’. Most of these are in white communities where there isn’t a lot of day to day contact with people who are ‘not like us’ but where there might be worry about unsettling change.

In these conversations, people are taken seriously and their experience is valued which allows for openness, curiosity about others and questioning consensuses.

Our group of dialogue facilitators all have many years’ experience of working with conversations about hard things.  The facilitators share and pool their learning and experience and this develops and builds how we work.

WIYN was set up in 2010 in South Yorkshire, where most of our work has taken place.  We have developed our learning and experience during the last ten years and are keen to share it in ways that are useful.  To increase the impact of our work, we will begin working in partnership in 2022 with three national organisations, the Local Government Association, the Housing Diversity Network and Methodist Church Regional Learning Networks to embed our learning in their work and that of their member or partner organisations.

You can contact us on: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

In an average year, 5.5% of adults in the UK experience domestic abuse. Sadly, the figures are almost identical within the UK church, in every denomination. In church as in the general population, financial, psychological, and family factors may combine to trap people in abusive situations. However, when domestic abuse occurs in a church setting, there are additional complexities which can prevent resolution of the situation.  Some abusers use the Bible to manipulate their partners into complying or submitting. Churches sometimes unwittingly exacerbate the problem by giving unhelpful teaching about forgiveness, divorce and submission.

With generous financial assistance from the MR Reckitt Foundation we will be creating a set of six videos for use by church small groups, to help participants become allies in situations of domestic abuse. This is phase two of a three-phase project seeking to address the weaponization of the Bible in situations of domestic abuse. By using these studies, churches will become aware of and resistant to the weaponization of the Bible by abusers. The videos will be  based upon the successful book The Bible Doesn’t Tell Me So by Helen Paynter, and presented by the  author, and others. For more information please visit the centre's website.

(Up-date Dec 2022) The videos and course notes can be accessed at https://www.csbvbristol.org.uk/study-videos/ where a trailer can be seen.