Leaving Egypt Podcast

In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Matthew Sanders. Amid conflicting claims about AI, Matthew brings a leading tech practitioner’s experience and rare ethical seriousness. He speaks of what he calls the coming “existential cliff” — the disruption AI and robotics will bring to work, identity and meaning — in societies weakened by Western individualism. Though optimistic, he warns the transition will be messy. The classical, GDP-shaped model of work is ending; what replaces it will appear as we find new forms of work and vocation, and discern what must remain human. For Matthew, the AI revolution is not only economic and technological; it is an anthropological event. His hope rests less in technology than in the Church recovering its vocation as a place of human, intellectual and spiritual formation. Drawing on Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, Matthew locates resolution not in Silicon Valley but in small communities gathered around church life. Just as the monasteries emerged from the collapse of the Roman Empire, Matthew believes the parish is called to become “the ark for a post-work world.”

Matthew Harvey Sanders is Founder and CEO of Longbeard, the leading mission-driven technology company building faithful, Catholic-oriented artificial intelligence. The Longbeard team has developed some of the most significant Catholic AI initiatives in the world, including Magisterium AI, a powerful large language model trained exclusively on official Church documents and ancient Christian manuscripts; Vulgate AI, a dedicated tool for biblical access and study; and Ephrem, the world’s first fully dedicated Catholic AI. Sanders is committed to creating technology that fosters human solidarity, serves the Church, and challenges the dominant technocratic paradigms of our age. He is also the founder of the Builders AI Forum and has served as a digital strategist for numerous Catholic nonprofits, creating ethical tech platforms for evangelisation and environmental education. Matthew is Canadian, and now lives in Rome.

LINKS

For Matthew Sanders:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-harvey-sanders/

https://www.magisterium.com

https://www.longbeard.com/blog/the-reality-of-ai-and-the-crisis-of-meaning

https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/AI-and-the-Future-of-Work-T4CG-report-June-2026.pdf

Magnifica Humanitas

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork

Books:

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)

Joining God in the Great Unravelling

Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:

Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair

Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

Join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack: leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com

In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Karen Wilk, who has devoted her life to discovering what it means to join with God in the neighbourhood. Like many other pastors, Karen began in youth ministry. Over time, though, she grew uneasy watching so much church-life energy go into getting people through the door, rather than helping them develop a real relationship with Jesus. Long before it was fashionable, she recognised there was something upside-down about this and wondered what it would look like to form church in her neighbourhood - with her neighbours. Shaped by influences like John McKnight’s Abundant Community, Karen has quietly and persistently pioneered a deeply loving commitment to place and people. In a moment when many are awakening to the realisation that Christ’s church is meant to be rooted in the local, Karen’s story is a testament to what patient, pioneering faithfulness can create in a neighbourhood - something beautiful for God.

Dr. Karen Wilk is a community pastor and neighbourhood animator who is part of a growing network of Canadian faith communities. For almost 20 years, Karen has been pursuing a ‘new thing’ — seeking to discover and join God at work in her neighbourhood, and equipping and inspiring others to do the same (through Resonate Global Mission and Forge Canada). She has a Doctorate in Missional Leadership from Northern Seminary (Chicago) and lives in Edmonton, Canada. She has been a pastor/teacher for about 40 years. She’s also a spouse, mum, nana, e-biker, birder, pickleballer, outdoorsy and crafty type.

LINKS

For Karen Wilk:

https://forgecanada.ca/

www.resonateglobalmission.org/

Mentioned in this episode:

John McKnight and Peter Block The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods

Barbara Brown Taylor An Altar in the World: Finding the Sacred Beneath Our Feet

Books:

Don’t Invite Them to Church: Moving from a Come and See to a Go and Be Church

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork

Books:

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)

Joining God in the Great Unravelling

Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:

Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair

Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

We hope that you are enjoying Leaving Egypt. We would invite you to join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack by becoming a paid subscriber: https://leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair talk with Christian Smith about what is happening to spirituality in the US. Christian’s deep research on attitudes to religion among the young has led him to the sober conclusion that traditional faith in North America has become “obsolete”. Something massive is shifting across Western societies: amidst the exhaustion of liberal modernity, the turn toward re-enchantment means that the churches’ framing of the culture as secular no longer holds. The spiritual hunger of the young is attaching to politics, identity, conspiracy, the occult and techno-utopianism as readily as to church. When asked how priests and pastors should respond, he sees that authentic Christianity embodies what the young are yearning for: a cosmic vision, sacramental life, disciplined prayer practices, embodied community, faithful doctrine and moral clarity. But rather than conventional evangelising, the times call for a posture of listening, hospitality and dialogue as a better way to connect.

Christian Smith is a leading figure in the sociology of religion. Best known for coining the term “moralistic therapeutic deism” to describe the beliefs of American teenagers, he has written many influential works on faith, culture and the moral life. His books include the forthcoming Occulture: The New Face of American Spirituality (2027) and the recent Why Religion Went Obsolete (2025). Christian is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught for nearly twenty years and founded the Center for the Study of Religion and Society. Prior to Notre Dame, he spent twelve years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a BA from Gordon College and an MA and PhD from Harvard University. Raised an evangelical, he and his wife, Emily, were received into the Catholic Church in 2010. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Links

For Christian Smith:

https://sociology.nd.edu/people/christian-smith/

https://christiansmith.nd.edu/

“Why I’m Done with Notre Dame” (First Things, on his decision to leave)

Selected Books:

Occulture: The New Face of American Spirituality (forthcoming, 2027)

Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (2025)

Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (with Patricia Snell) (2009)

Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (with Melinda Lundquist Denton) (2005)

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork

Books:

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling (with Roy Searle)

Joining God in the Great Unravelling

Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World

For Jenny Sinclair:

Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair

Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair welcome Maurice Glasman back to Leaving Egypt for a second conversation. Maurice traces the exhaustion of a settlement built on progressivism and globalisation -one the church has too often been co-opted into rather than resisted. In its eroding, he sees opportunity for a politics built not on elite abstraction but on ordinary virtues - commitment, constraint, solidarity, family, place and nation - drawn from the well of Catholic Social Teaching. Water, land, the human person: for Maurice these are gifts of God, not commodities, and recovering that conviction is where renewal begins. He argues the divide is no longer left versus right but sovereignists versus globalists, those who want power to rest with peoples and places, versus those who would transfer it to borderless, unaccountable systems of capital, ideology and technology. He turns to two countries close to his heart: confronting Iran’s regime and backing its people’s resistance, and Ukraine’s costly defence of its sovereignty. What may be coming, he senses in a yearning for settled life from working-class Britain to Ukraine and the Iranian people, is restoration: the recovery of family, faith, place and nation: a hopeful story the church could yet join, if only it had eyes to see it.

Lord Maurice Glasman is a British politician, political theorist, commentator and community organiser who has served as a Labour life peer in the UK Parliament since 2011. He is best known as the founder of Blue Labour, a movement launched in 2009 to address Labour’s drift from its founding roots, challenging both New Labour’s neoliberalism and progressive identity politics. Drawing on Catholic Social Teaching, Aristotle and the thought of Karl Polanyi, he promotes a politics of the common good. Alongside his parliamentary work he remains active internationally, particularly in relation to Ukraine and Iran. He has a longstanding commitment to community organising, most recently in Grimsby, through the Common Good Foundation, which he founded and directs. Born into a Jewish working-class family in North London, he studied at Cambridge, York and Florence. His official title is Baron Glasman of Stoke Newington and of Stamford Hill.

LINKS

For Maurice Glasman:

https://x.com/blue_labour?lang=en

https://www.bluelabour.org/

https://www.commongoodfoundation.org.uk/

Books:

Blue Labour: the Politics of the Common Good

Unnecessary Suffering: Management, Markets and the Liquidation of Solidarity

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork

Books:

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)

Joining God in the Great Unravelling

Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:

Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair

Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

Join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack: leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com

In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Ian Williamson. Ian is a man of great courage whose life was transformed after being dominated by heavy drinking, cocaine addiction, gambling debts, and self-destruction. When he encountered Christ, he chose not to leave but to stay on the council estate where he grew up - and recognised that discipleship there required a distinctively relational approach. He now mentors fellow working class pastors, encouraging them to let their lives speak and to dwell among neighbours as fellow travellers. Ian speaks frankly about the deep alienation between many working class communities and mainstream churches. He names the collapse of moral leadership and the failure of many middle-class leaders to connect with the concerns of poor areas. He also describes the catastrophic damage done to family life and how globalisation has eroded community-centred ways of living. He sees an urgent need for spiritual rebuilding, one relationship at a time. Ian is “the genuine article” — an ordinary man living an extraordinary vocation, through whom the love of Jesus shines.

Ian Williamson is a working-class pastor and church planter from Middlesbrough. Raised in a single-parent home, his early life was dominated by violence and addiction and shaped by work as a nightclub bouncer. After meeting Jesus, Ian’s life was transformed. He was led to plant and pastor New Life Church, and with his wife Rachel, to co-found SixtyEightFive, a ministry supporting men and families affected by fatherlessness. Now, as Executive Director of Medhurst Ministries, he equips pastors for contextual mission, evangelism and relational discipleship, planting and supporting churches in the UK’s most deprived places, especially council estates.

For Ian Williamson

www.medhurstministries.org

In Context Podcast:

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork

Books:

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)

Joining God in the Great Unravelling

Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:

Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair

Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

Join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack: leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com

In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair speak with Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani. As a bishop in the Church of England, she knows its challenges, both internal and external. She is sensitive not only to its wrestling with decline, but also with the need to reorient itself in a time when both society and the churches confront crisis on multiple levels. Her life has prepared her well for this moment. Experiences of disruption as a refugee have given her a deep confidence that God is both present and actively working, even as familiar structures undergo change, even as communities fragment. With realism and quiet courage, she embodies the struggle of a faithful pilgrim finding ways to “leave Egypt” within the confines of institutional life. Resisting the rush toward strategies and programmatic fixes, she prefers prayerful listening rather than seeking safety in control. In the midst of uncertainty she delights in grassroots relationships, encouraging others to discern the movement of the Spirit and to discover what kind of church God is forming in this time of crisis.

Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani is the Bishop of Chelmsford in the southeast of England, UK. She is the lead Bishop for Housing for the Church of England, a member of the Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords, and is currently Chair of the Board of the Church Army. Born in Iran, daughter of Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, the Anglican Bishop in Iran, and Margaret, daughter of William Thompson, Guli and her family left the country in the wake of the Iranian Revolution in 1980 when she was 13 years old, and to date she has been unable to return.

LINKS

For Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani

https://www.chelmsford.anglican.org/about-us/the-bishop-of-chelmsford/

Bishop Guli’s address at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, 16th Sept 2024

Books

· Listening to the Music of the Soul, 18 September 2025

· Stations of the Resurrection, Encounters with the Risen Christ, written with Malcolm Guite

· Cries for a Lost Homeland: Reflections on Jesus’ sayings from the cross

· Reflections for Lent 2021: 17 February - 3 April 2021

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork

Books:

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)

Joining God in the Great Unravelling

Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:

Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair

Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

In this episode, Al and Jenny meet Justin Gill. Justin became a follower of Jesus as a young man in his native Pakistan from where he immigrated to the UK. Immersed in post-industrial English communities for twenty years, he became well acquainted with the complex realities of race, poverty, religion, and questions of belonging. This conversation explores the turbulent relationship between Christianity, Islam and secularisation in a time of cultural and political instability. Justin senses that God has brought him, as a Christian, into Muslim contexts, and to be among the indigenous English working class. His love for peoples and place is evident in his deep understanding of these different communities’ reactions to deindustrialisation, and how their responses to current tensions express their distinct histories and worldviews. Tying all this together is his deep conviction of Christ as Redeemer and His presence in hard, conflicted places.

Justin Gill works with the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC), advising on cross-cultural mission in a network that links more than 50,000 Christians across the UK. Justin speaks here in a personal capacity. Born and raised in North Pakistan, he was an advisor on minority affairs to a political party and led relief operations following the 2005 earthquake. Moving to the UK in 2006, he gained an MSc in Development and Project Planning at Bradford University and lived in North Yorkshire. He continues to support evangelical church networks in Pakistan. He now lives in Leicestershire and attends Knighton Free Church.

For Justin Gill

https://fiec.org.uk/people/justin-gill

https://fiec.org.uk/who-we-are/staff

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/justin-gill-fiec

https://x.com/Justin4Gill

https://fiec.org.uk/resources/moving-towards-intercultural-church

https://fiec.org.uk/resources/should-every-church-be-multi-racial

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork

Books:

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)

Joining God in the Great Unravelling

Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:

Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair

Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

We hope that you are enjoying Leaving Egypt. We would invite you to join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack by becoming a paid subscriber: https://leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Tim Soerens. Tim is a wild dreamer - in the very best sense - who describes his development in terms of a “re-enchantment with Christian faith”. Tim is on a rich, imaginative journey fostering ways of being church within creative experiments of local life – through postures, practices and relationships rather than programmes. Dedicated to flourishing neighbourhoods, he has become convinced of the need for stronger local economies, and now, to that end, he convenes collaborations across faith and secular lines. Tim sees the Christian imagination offering many gifts along that road, especially through local-scale partnerships that shift congregations to become relational communities in solidarity with their neighbours.

Tim Soerens is Executive Director and co-founder of the Parish Collective, an ecumenical network that connects and resources Christians to be church within their local neighbourhoods, focusing on presence, place, and community renewal. He is also co-founder of Neighbourhood Economics which convenes faith leaders and entrepreneurs to catalyse ideas for repairing local economies. Tim studied rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned his Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

For Tim Soerens

www.timsoerens.com

https://www.parishcollective.org/team

https://neighborhoodeconomics.org/who-we-are/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoerens

https://x.com/timsoerens

https://www.instagram.com/timsoerens/

https://www.facebook.com/tim.soerens/

Books

Everywhere You Look: Discovering the Church Right Where You Are

The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community (with Paul Sparks)

https://www.ivpress.com/tim-soerens

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork

Books:

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)

Joining God in the Great Unravelling

Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:

Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair

Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

We hope that you are enjoying Leaving Egypt. We would invite you to join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack by becoming a paid subscriber: https://leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair speak with Sophie Taylor about the quiet but growing movement of young adults towards the Catholic Church. Drawn by a hunger for truth and belonging amidst a chaotic culture, many arrive with little formation - some new to faith, others reclaiming what earlier generations let slip. Sophie explores what attracts them: the Church’s sacramental imagination - beauty, liturgy, art, and mystery - and the way parish life can reframe reality and relationship. She also names the challenges of moving from online isolation and post-COVID social anxiety into embodied community, arguing that young adults need more than a friendly welcome: they need intentional formation in relational life. With realism and hope, Sophie describes how deep listening and attentive encounter can renew belonging in the Church and beyond. This is a compelling picture of God’s mission at work - one heart at a time - inviting the whole Church to become a living oasis amid the storms of our age.

Sophie Taylor is the Adult Faith Formation Officer at the Diocese of Leeds, where she supports new Catholics, resources catechists, and organises formation events and days of reflection to help adults across the diocese grow in faith. She also works part-time supporting the pastoral life and community at the parish of St. Joseph Brighouse and St. Patrick’s Elland. After gaining her degree in Theology at Leeds Trinity University, when she also served in the diocesan youth team, she taught RE in the North East of England, where she also served in her local parish.

For Sophie Taylor

https://www.dioceseofleeds.org.uk/education/welcome/meet-the-team/

https://www.dioceseofleeds.org.uk/new-eve-faith-formation-day-celebrating-womens-call-to-holiness/

https://www.dioceseofleeds.org.uk/new-catholics/

https://stjosephschurchbrighouse.co.uk/our-faith/our-news

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork

Books:

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)

Joining God in the Great Unravelling

Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:

Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair

Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

We hope that you are enjoying Leaving Egypt. We would invite you to join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack by becoming a paid subscriber: https://leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Fr John Armitage. These days, there is much talk about the challenges for leadership and what it means to be church in a post-everything society. Anxious questions abound: Is revival coming, or are we sliding into an even more uncertain season? Yet when listening to Fr John, a completely different response emerges. Amid what he describes as the great emptiness of modern life - the worship of idols, the loss of community – here is a wise, seasoned leader who carries a quiet sense of joy, anticipation, and delight in the work God has given him right where he is. What’s the secret? First, he is deeply rooted in place. When asked about himself, he begins with the story of where he grew up. It’s as if he’s saying: if you want to know who I am, you need to know where I was planted. The relational character of working-class culture has shaped his life. Second, he is firmly rooted in the Catholic tradition; the ordered rhythms of the Church have formed him. There is no fancy strategy to what he does, no new thing that makes the parish successful. But there is this deep rooting in the Gospel. These realities give him the grounding to be present with people, to enter their everyday lives in a way that lets them know they’re being met by someone held by a bigger story. This is a man in love with his neighbourhood, his life in God, and therefore with the people around him—core elements, it seems, in being a kingdom people in Egypt.

Monsignor John Armitage is the longstanding parish priest at St Margaret’s Church in Canning Town, his lifelong East London home. Fr John is an inspirational retreat leader, speaker and mentor to clergy and has held senior roles in the Diocese of Brentwood, including Vicar General. For five years between 2014 and 2020, he was Rector of the National Basilica of Our Lady of Walsingham, overseeing its modernisation and leading the Rededication of England to the Dowry of Mary during the Covid lockdown. Deeply committed to social justice, he was instrumental in founding the UK’s first community organising alliance, the East London Communities Organisation (TELCO) in 1996, which launched the original Living Wage campaign in 2001. Since 2020, he has also taken on the leadership of the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom, the UK Catholic evangelisation charity which has birthed the WeBelieve Festival of Catholic Life.

For Monsignor John Armitage:

https://www.dioceseofbrentwood.net/clergy/rt-rev-mgr-john-armitage/

https://www.guild-ransom.co.uk/about

https://www.cbcew.org.uk/home/our-work/living-wage/videos/east-end-dockers/

Mentioned in this episode:

England: The Dowry of Our Lady of Mary

Article by Maurice Glasman

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork

Books:

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)

Joining God in the Great Unravelling

Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:

Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair

Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/