As the Leaving Egypt podcast turns three and passes its 70th episode, co-hosts Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair reflect on the conversations that have shaped it - from finding God in the neighbourhood, to local economies, to deindustrialised communities finding faith - and share where the show is headed next: deeper into the local church as a hub of relationship, formation and economic life.
Three years ago, over a series of long conversations that had already been running for four years, we asked each other a question neither of us could quite let go of: what does it mean to be God’s people in a time of unravelling? Al is a missiologist and theologian in Canada; Jenny is founder and director of Together for the Common Good in the UK. We had been meeting weekly with a small group since 2019, working through what we were each seeing in our own contexts - congregations losing confidence, institutions under strain, a whole way of life coming apart faster than any of us quite knew how to name. That weekly group was ecumenical from the start, drawing in friends from across the Christian traditions who found they were seeing the same thing from different vantage points. In 2023, our conversation became a podcast: Leaving Egypt.
The name was deliberate. Leaving Egypt is not simply about departure - it’s about the wilderness in between, the uncertain, testing space where a people learn to live differently before they arrive anywhere new. Three years and seventy episodes later, that image is still a generative frame for the stories we feel compelled to explore.
In each conversation, we invite our guest to help us do two things: read the signs of the times, and share stories of hope from the grassroots - stories from people who are sensing where the Holy Spirit is moving. Our guests come from many different Christian traditions. Catholic social thought in particular weaves through the whole series as a way of holding our discussions and asking better questions.
If you have not come across Leaving Egypt before, welcome! We’ve found our audience the old-fashioned way, mostly by one listener telling another. We hope it rewards newcomers as much as long-time listeners. We’re unusual in two respects. We’re transatlantic - Al in Canada, Jenny in the UK - and ecumenical: Al a Protestant, Jenny a Catholic, in conversation with guests from across the Christian traditions. Listeners now tune in from across North America and the UK, and from 160 countries besides. We are a modest operation telling big stories: we give our time freely to this, as does Rob our volunteer manager, and we are supported by the professional skills of Ben, our comms partner, and Drew, our podcast producer.
What has held seventy conversations together for us is not a formula but a trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit - we trust in the deliberations that lead us to each new guest. We began, intentionally, with attentiveness rather than strategy: Karen Reed’s account of neighbourhood friendship stood out for many listeners (ep 8), as did Avril Baigent’s guidance on listening to the Holy Spirit (ep 5). Mark Lau Branson showed us the same thing from another angle (ep 62), that renewal begins not with grand strategy but with faithful presence, attentive listening, enabling the leadership of others, and commitment to the place God has given you. These kinds of episodes conveyed what has always been our founding instinct - that discernment and daily practices of prayer have to come before programme. Many other wonderful guests have told us moving stories of how the Holy Spirit has drawn them to form local communities of hope amid profound change in church life.
Amidst these stories we were looking at context - what has been happening to our societies in the unravelling we see. From there, we built out an intellectual backbone, largely through economists and theologians focused on the re-embedding of economic life in relationship and place: Phillip Ullmann on the Old Testament’s wisdom about economy (ep 16), Adrian Pabst (ep 40) on political economy, Luigino Bruni on gift and reciprocity (ep 35), Sr Helen Alford on the theology of economics (ep 30), Luke Bretherton on the commons (ep 48), Rob Stewart on the cooperative model (ep 61), and Melanie Rieback on steward ownership (ep 63) - guests who each shared with us not only expertise but their own remarkable personal journey. Their stories, taken together, are a set of clues to what a re-humanised economy could actually look like.
A persistent thread that has run through our conversations is the impact of a culture that has become captured by a false anthropology. This sharpens the importance of a church understanding what it means to be human. With the acceleration of the technology paradigm, Paul Kingsnorth articulates the meaning of the age of the Machine (ep 26) and Susannah Black Roberts sets out a new Christian humanism (ep 44), both exploring how to uphold human agency against an increasingly technocratic and dehumanising culture.
And running through the whole series is an increasingly significant thread: the mission of the church amid post-industrial and working-class communities living with the fallout of globalisation. Bishop Philip North (ep 50), John Clifton (ep 55), Sarah Small (ep 52), Angie Allgood (ep 47), Ian Williamson (ep 69) and Justin Gill (ep 67) each shared powerful insights - that where the old economic settlement has been stripped away, the church is called to respond with companionship, moral clarity and solidarity. Sophie Taylor threw light on the yearning of Gen Z for meaning (ep 65), while Mgr John Armitage (ep 64) and Andrew Willard Jones (ep 58) gave that pattern its theological shape: renewal that is local, sacramental, and rooted, not abstract or imported. Harvey Kwiyani brought a complementary vantage point; called as a boy in Malawi to become a missionary to a Europe he found marked by functional atheism (ep 20), he returned for a conversation with Jide Ehizele on how African Christian migration might be catalysing exactly the sacramental spirituality that has been lost (ep 57).
For the final episodes of our third season, we turned to two guests who spoke with unusual candour. Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani talked with us honestly about what it takes to lead a church facing real decline (ep 68), and it felt fitting that episode 70 went to Maurice Glasman, in his second visit to the podcast, describing the political and cultural moment we are in and the vital role the Church is called to fulfil within it.
These are but a small selection of more than seventy conversations; we’ve mentioned them here simply to give a flavour. Every guest contributed colours that enriched the overall picture.
Where do we go next? If there’s a single diagnosis underneath everything we’ve explored, it’s a false anthropology that treats the human person as an isolated rights-bearing individual rather than a relational being made in the image of God. That diagnosis produces two distortions we want to keep naming - an outdated political map in which the old lines of left and right no longer work, and commodification: of people, work, land, even faith itself. Our response to these has to be a recovered practice of discernment, lived out in proximity to the poor, grounded in a practical, biblical political economy rather than a borrowed secular simulacrum, and rooted in a real place rather than abstraction.
We expect important corrections to keep challenging us. This is already happening among Christians outside the dominant Western frame. They have challenged assumptions we no longer notice we’re making. In the coming year we will press further into what it means for a local church to become a hub of relationship, formation, and economic life: a place where people are not just served but known, and where the ordinary work of a neighbourhood - shared land, mutual aid, local economies - becomes part of the church’s vocation.
None of this happens without a growing audience whose encouragement spurs us on. Leaving Egypt has never been backed by a media organisation, a sponsor or any religious institution. We are completely independent and do it because we believe these conversations matter, and because our listeners keep telling others. If you find it helpful too, then the simplest thing you can do is pass it on - to a fellow parishioner, a colleague, anyone wrestling with the same questions. And if this gives you something to hold onto, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than a coffee a month, and it buys us real things: it helps us meet production costs, it buys us more comms capacity to reach listeners who haven’t found their way to us yet. More support means more people joining us as we make our way through the wilderness together.
Thank you for being part of this - whether you’ve been here since episode one or are only just finding us now. We’re glad you’re with us for what comes next.
Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair
The conversations this podcast gives a place for are so important right now. Every episode is so full of wisdom and insight from a slightly different perspective, but all converging on the themes you mention above. This podcast gives me hope that there are people out there who are working for the common good.
I love how Jenny and Al give space to the guests to open up about their own backgrounds and journey, and how that has put them where they are "in this time of unravelling".
Thank you Al, Jenny, and all involved.
- Tim,
Northumberland