​If society was more loving, more free, more just, and more truthful, we would all benefit.
This is the Evangelical Alliance’s vision for the kind of society we want the UK to become. We believe that the Christian faith has provided the foundations for flourishing in the past and we are confident and hopeful that it can for the future.
As evangelicals we are committed to engaging in public life and believe we have a contribution to make for all of society. We believe things can be better than they are now. Evangelicals frequently say they want to change society, so we want to stimulate the next stage of the conversation: what kind of society do we want?
We live in times of dizzying social and political turbulence. There is a crisis of leadership in our society, a lack of vision for a common good, and a hope deficit. This vacuum is a challenge but it is also an opportunity for evangelical Christians.
Politicians do not have a clear framework to guide them as to what policies to pursue, and the wider public doesn’t have one to help them decide which to support. The decline of public understanding and acceptance of a Christian vision for the good life has left a vacuum which cannot be filled by political ideologies. We want to help equip Christians to have, a vision for what public life could look like and a few core values that help structure how it is worked out.
We often know what we are against – and are often known by what we are against – but for our engagement in society to be effective and lasting we need a vision for that society, and we will need to be able to articulate the vision in a way that makes sense and is appealing. This means asking ourselves two keys questions:
- What do we want?
- How do we best communicate what we want?
Our goal with What Kind of Society? is to provoke and address these questions and to get the church started with what it needs to practically cast a vision and be a voice for the good of all.
