In my first two presidential addresses I spoke about Going Deeper into God and Transforming Communities. This morning I want to spend a few minutes talking about Making New Disciples. The phrase has biblical resonances, echoing the words of Jesus Christ at the end of Matthew’s gospel:

‘Go, therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you’.

These words of Christ define what it means to be a disciple

• Someone who is baptised, that is, one who has died to his or her old life and who has been raised into the new life of Christ.
• Second, it is about the way that a person’s life is being shaped and formed by the teaching and example of Jesus Christ. It is not a one off event but a lifelong process of personal transformation. It’s about growing more and more into the likeness of Christ.

With this perspective in mind, let me begin by mentioning four specific things which we know work in terms of making new disciples and growing our churches. None of them will surprise you, but they are worth stating at the outset.

i. Improving the quality of our weekly worship. Most churches which are flourishing have attended to a number of aspects of worship:

• They have really addressed the question of welcome. They realise there is a world of difference between greeting (at which most churches are very good) and welcome (which is a much more complex process, drawing people into the heart of our community).
• They have thought through the whole experience of worship, having good readers, well-led prayers and appropriate music.
• They have ensured that the preaching is first class and that it engages with real life issues – and how it is linked with lifelong learning.
• They have integrated all ages, especially children and young people.
• They have a process to follow people up, not least those who seem to be drifting and are in danger of lapsing altogether.

ii. Second, intentional courses on the Christian faith such as Alpha and Emmaus are excellent and produce a steady stream of new believers. I mention those two because they are the best known, but there are many similar courses. What are the key ingredients?

• Creating a relaxed atmosphere, usually over a meal, with a focus on the good news of Jesus Christ (either by referring to the gospels or the creeds).
• Everyone present is drawn into an open discussion, where no question is too simple or stupid to be asked.
• At some point there is a moment of challenge or decision when people are invited to commit themselves to God.

I am confirming adults on a regular basis who have come to faith through such courses.

iii. Back to Church Sunday is an idea that is still in its infancy but it is already clear that many people have come back to regular worship through it. The year before last research showed that each of the participating churches had on average 19 worshippers extra on the day. Six months later between 12-15% of the returnees were still attending as regular worshippers.

iv. Fresh Expressions of Church. Many of you will have read the report Mission Shaped Church which highlights the importance of going out into our communities, listening to the questions, the hopes and concerns of those we meet, and staying with them as together we explore how the age-old gospel can speak to them as individuals as well as to our culture.

You might want to add some other items to my four. I hope that in the next few years we will continue to work away at these things to lead us into the growth which is God’s will for us. But now I want to shift our focus back one stage. I want to suggest that there are two other fundamental areas we need to attend to if we are going to re-evangelise our nation:

1. First we need to engage in the very real philosophical battle which is raging around us at the moment. Perhaps the person and the book which illustrates this most clearly is Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins has no doubt that we are engaged in a full-scale war of conflicting ideas. He says, ‘If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists by the time they put it down’.¹

Of course, Dawkins’ attack on Christianity is nothing new. We forget that the early centuries of the Christian era were marked by intense philosophical debates. Over the centuries the old arguments have come back time and again, usually with a new twist or insight.² These need addressing. The battles never go away and we need to be as robust as our Christian forebears were in presenting reasons for the Christian faith.

As I have been going around the deaneries I have ended my evening session by talking about the importance of apologetics in the life of the Church. Apologetics is not about trying to give a knock down argument for the existence of God, since there is no such thing (Indeed, if there were such a compelling argument God would have removed one of the distinctive things about humanity; namely, our freedom). In the words of 1 Peter, apologetics is about ‘giving a reason for the [Christian] hope that is in us’. You can be a modern, intelligent Western European man or woman and still believe the good news of Jesus Christ with integrity. Faith and intelligence are not incompatible. Apologetics is about telling the story of Christianity as it actually was and resisting cheap caricatures of our history, giving reasons why belief in God can make sense of our world, and pointing out along the way the massive contribution that the Christian faith has made to the world and to our nation.

The reason why this sort of robust intellectual engagement is vital is because some New Atheists and Liberal Humanists are promoting a simplistic, yet popular narrative of history which trivialises and often mocks religion (which they like to portray as necessarily destructive and anti-scientific). There are many variations of this narrative, but essentially the argument runs like this. In the Classical period of the Greeks and the Romans science and free thinking were encouraged. Pagan religions were essentially pluralistic and benign. However, with the rise of Christendom, which it is argued is rooted in irrational faith, we entered the Dark Ages. Science was frowned on, superstition was given free reign and individual conscience was subordinated to an authoritarian church – resulting in a culture of intolerance and the bloody wars of religion. Some of the New Atheists and Liberal Humanists argue that we are now entering a new Age of Reason, an age liberated from the constraints of religion, not based on superstition or revelation but upon science. They like to talk up science as the world’s salvation, something which they claim is focussed on objective facts, and which has resulted in the birth of western democracies, has espoused the cause and language of human rights, and which will, they claim, forge a more generous system of ethics more suited to contemporary society. All this, they suggest, is self-evidently true and is of obvious benefit to mankind.

Even the terms that are customarily used underscore the point. The Dark Ages are contrasted with the Enlightenment – as if everything that happened before the seventeenth century were intellectually shabby. Few reputable scholars today would want to peddle such a simplistic interpretation of the history of ideas. Nevertheless, these protagonists like to picture modern, secular humanity as the ‘enlightened ones’ compared with those who lived in darkness under the shadow of faith.

Now I am deliberately being provocative in the way I am describing this but I do so to make a point. The problem with their narrative, which is rarely challenged and which reappears in various guises in popular history books, is that it is simply wrong. Yet you will regularly find aspects of this version of history in the press, in children’s TV programmes, in science textbooks, and sadly even in some museums.

Now before I move on, let me stress that I am not knocking science. I am overwhelmingly glad for the scientific progress that has been made. I do have, however, questions about the way that some scientific discoveries have been used. I do not want to go back to a time when we did not have CT scans, computers or mobile phones. My quarrel is with those scientists who go beyond their expertise, who claim that science demonstrates that there is no God, and that it leads inexorably to atheism.³ It is interesting that this year’s BBC Reith Lecturer, Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society is quite clear that some ultimate questions ‘lie beyond science’.⁴ Interestingly some scientists are far more critical. Professor Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project talks of the way that Dawkins ‘has abandoned his much-cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism’. ⁵

Let me mention just two areas where the story is being told in a misleading way:

i. It is false to make a simplistic contrast between faith (presented as mindless subservience to dogmas that have been handed down from the past), and reason (which is claimed to be based on logic and empirical facts). All this carefully ignores the extraordinary flowering of philosophical discourse and scientific discoveries made within Christendom.⁶ Indeed, there is an argument to be made that it was precisely the underlying Christian conviction that the world had been created and therefore had a rationality about it that provided the context in which scientific progress could occur.

Or take the recurrent debates over creation and evolution, and the false polarity between science and Biblical faith that many like to rehearse. It may surprise you to know that many of the Church Fathers in the third and fourth centuries argued that Genesis was not a literal, pseudo-scientific account of how creation actually happened.⁷ Furthermore, in the nineteenth century many Christians were deeply involved in the science which led to Darwin’s ground-breaking research. Even the famous debate between Huxley and Wilberforce over evolution in Oxford in 1860 has, at least in part, been high jacked for polemics. Reports that Wilberforce had asked Huxley if he was ashamed of being descended from apes were not reported at the time and accounts only appear many years later. ⁸

ii. Secondly, let me mention a different but equally hot topic. It is simply wrong to suggest that the Christian era was marked by a huge level of war and killing, and that in the modern, enlightened age of reason there has been less violence and bloodshed. Not only is this naïve, there is good reason for suggesting that the opposite is true. This is how the historian Neill Ferguson puts it:
‘Estimates vary widely for the number of deaths in China attributable to Mao’s policies, but they must certainly have run to several tens of millions. The total victims of Stalinism within the Soviet Union may have exceeded 20 million. Mortality rates in excess of 10 per cent have also been estimated for Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia, as well as for the civil wars in Mexico (1910-20) and Equatorial Guinea (1972-79), and the Afghan War that followed the Soviet invasion of 1979. By one estimate, sixteen twentieth-century conflicts – war, civil wars, genocides and sundry mass murders – cost more than a million lives each; and a further six claimed between half a million and a million victims; and fourteen killed between a quarter and a half a million people’. ⁹

In other words, the genocides of the last century are unparalleled in human history, virtually of it perpetrated by people, such as Mao, Stalin and Hitler who rejected Christianity. So much for the glories of atheism and the myth of human progress.

I said at the outset of my address that there were two fundamental areas we need to attend to if we are going to re-evangelise our nation. I have spoken extensively of the importance of apologetics.

2. I now want to move onto a second challenge: ‘How is the reality of God going to be seen today? How is God going to be made incarnate in our time?’

The answer to this question is actually the same in every generation - through us. That’s how God’s presence was first seen after Pentecost, when ordinary Christians started to share their lives (read Acts 2. 42-47 and Acts 4. 32-37).

There has been some fascinating research undertaken by an American academic, Rodney Stark, into the way that Christianity took the ancient world by storm. He wrote:

"The power of Christianity lay not in its promise of other-worldly compensations for suffering in this life, as has so often been proposed. No, the crucial change that took place in the third century was the rapidly spreading awareness of a faith that delivered potent antidotes to life’s miseries here and now! The truly revolutionary aspect of Christianity lay in moral imperatives such as ‘Love one’s neighbour as oneself’, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, It is more blessed to give than to receive’, and ‘when you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it unto me’. These were not just slogans. Members did nurse the sick, even during epidemics; they did support orphans, widows, the elderly, and the poor; they did concern themselves with the lot of slave. In short, Christians created a miniature welfare state in an empire which for the most part lacked social services". ¹⁰

His research shows that when plagues hit cities most of the pagan population would flee to the countryside, leaving sufferers who did not succumb of the plague to die of starvation. The Christians tended to stay and nurse the sick. Sometimes they lost their own lives, but often they survived along with those who had been ill. Such costly love was not only impressive but also profoundly evangelistic.

Well, of course, we have plenty of opportunities to make a difference today. Last year’s Diocesan Harvest Appeal gave away more that £70000 – so thank you for all your generosity and hard work. On Tuesday I launched this year’s appeal. Working alongside the Anglican Church in Teso in Uganda we are going to help farmers and families grow crops that can cope with the changing climatic conditions. Could we give away even more this year to help a needy world?

Can the good news of Jesus be seen in our Christian communities – our parishes, church schools and chaplaincies? As a nation we are facing a time of uncertainty. With a new government having to make draconian cuts in spending, there is much talk from the Prime Minister about the Big Society – which is partly about the role of charities and churches in filling the gap left by the State. Depending on how big the cuts turn out to be, there is a real possibility that we are going to see more unemployed people, more homeless people, more mentally ill people on our streets. It is a huge challenge but also a huge opportunity. Not just an opportunity to grow the Church through generosity, but an opportunity for us to rediscover the gospel principle that it really is more blessed to give than to receive.

¹Dawkins R (2006) The God Delusion, London: Bantam, p5

² eg David Hume in the 18th century, Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century and Bertrand Russell in the 20th century.

³ For example Sam Harris's The End of Faith; Religion, Terror and the future of Reason, New York: Norton 2004 and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, New York, Viking, 2006.

⁴Rees, M. (2001) Our Cosmic Habitat, Princetown University Press.

⁵On the back cover of A Mac Grath, A. (2007) The Dawkins Delusion, London: SPCK.

⁶Hart, D.B. (2009) Atheist Delusions, p73ff.

⁷For example, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine.

⁸See http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/legend.html

⁹Ferguson, N (2006) The War of the World, Allen Lane, p651

¹⁰Stark, R (2006) Cities of God, San Francisco: Harper, p30-31. In his book The Rise of Christianity (1996, Harper Collins), Stark gives some fascinating statistical analysis showing the impact of this altruist behaviour on church growth, pp 88-93.