In this lecture given for the Dominican Seminar 2026, Jenny Sinclair examines Christian vocation amid today’s cultural unravelling. Using Catholic Social Teaching, she reads the signs of the times — from community breakdown and the “unencumbered self” to loneliness, polarisation, and a technocratic economy that fractures relationships. She presents vocation as outward-facing and relational, calling Christians to an everyday witness that rebuilds a shared life through civic friendship, subsidiarity, and solidarity. The common good, she argues, emerges only through reciprocal relationships - and offers a hopeful path for the Church to become part of the antidote at this hinge moment in our history.
Please note this is a transcript. A recording can be found here.
Good morning everyone, it’s an honour to be with you.
I’ve been asked to talk about Christian calling in the context of this historical moment. We’re going to look at what’s going on, read the signs of the times - look at what’s happened to our culture and try to name reality honestly. We’re going to use Catholic Social Teaching to do that and to show how this tradition can help us respond so we can be part of the antidote.
We’re also going to look at how God is calling each one of us to be more intentionally relational in order to participate in His mission. Not as some grand strategy, but as our everyday Christian witness. The title of this session is Christian Calling and the Relational Imperative. But before we get to the imperative, we’ve got to understand why the relational is imperative.
Vocational Responsibility
I want to start with the phrase vocational responsibility. Pope John Paul II often spoke about responsibility arising from one’s vocation. Obviously, that will be familiar to most of you here in this room, in terms of the priesthood and the religious life. And those who are married will understand that from the marriage vocation too. But of course, it goes wider than that. Everyone is called to participate in God’s great creative work.
And John Paul II spoke of vocation not just in terms of individuals, but also is realised in “intermediary” institutions1 — that means families, businesses, schools, churches, charities, associations — all have a vocation for the common good. We’ll look at that a bit more later on. But for now, the point is that vocation is not inward-looking; it’s outward-facing. And the responsibility arising from our vocation applies to all of us.
Nudge of the Holy Spirit
With vocational responsibility as our backdrop, let me tell you a little bit about myself so you know where I’m coming from. I had an Anglican upbringing. I am the only daughter of Bishop David Sheppard, who, with Archbishop Worlock, was involved in a groundbreaking partnership between the 1970s and 1990s. At a time of division, high unemployment, instability, and sectarianism, they embodied solidarity and were taken to the hearts of the people of Liverpool.
Their ministry bridged the sectarian divide. Theirs was an example of relational leadership and it led directly to the historic visit of John Paul II in 1982. Without that relationship, his visit probably wouldn’t have happened. It was the first visit of a reigning pope since the Reformation. It was a symbolic healing moment that came out of a unique relationship.2
But I wasn’t happy being a bishop’s daughter. I was actually quite a nightmare as a teen. If any of you are teachers here, I was the kind of student you’d have worried about. I was happier in the Liverpool music scene. I was estranged from the Church.
Years later, in my 20s, I had a conversion experience—a dark night of the soul, a very dramatic experience, an unexpected grace. I then was received as a Catholic under the guidance of Fr Michael Hollings. I developed a prayer life. I was working as a graphic designer, doing a bit of charity work. I got married. I had children. So for about 20 years, I lived a quite unremarkable, ordinary quiet life.
Then, in 2011, in my late 40s, I had what I would describe as a nudge of the Holy Spirit. I didn’t have the language to describe what was going on at that time, but I sensed something was happening. I was being drawn to see the beginnings of things going wrong in our society. It was 2011. You might remember the Tottenham riots and the beginnings of public discontent. What’s now very obvious to everyone was beginning then.
I was seeing that the politics of left and right was failing to meet real needs. I was particularly noticing that the churches were unable to respond adequately. At that point, as I was on this trail, somebody introduced me to Catholic Social Teaching. I’d been a Catholic since 1988, but no one had told me about it all that time. Still today, some still regard it as optional, not central.
At that point, I struggled to understand it. I’m not academic, and it’s quite dense. But I immediately realised it was dynamic and vitally important; though inaccessible, abstract, and dry in the way it was being communicated.
I continued following this trail of discernment and was introduced to people. Over about a year, I had conversations with about 100 people. Eventually, this emerged into Together for the Common Good, a small charity. We’re still very Spirit-led. Thousands have been involved over the years.
We help people build up confidence and discern how they are called to play their part for the common good, that they have a vocational responsibility. We engage with churches, charities, leaders, and schools. We produce online resources3, hold public talks on the big questions of our time4, produce a podcast5, and we run a schools’ programme.6
In all of this journey, I just try to follow what the Lord is asking of me. It wasn’t my idea! “You did not choose me. I chose you.”7 That’s very much how it feels.
Defining the Common Good
Let me just say what we mean by the common good before we go any further. Many of you are scholars, so you all have your intellectual idea of what the common good is. In wider society, people have an idea of what it is, but it can tend to mean something quite woolly.
People think it’s a bit vague. The classic definition from Gaudium et Spes8 is: “the sum total of social conditions that allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily.” But for me, that’s a bit dry. It’s a bit abstract.
The common good is not an outcome that can be imposed from above. It’s not something that a government can create. It’s not utopian. It can’t be engineered technocratically. It emerges from people being together. There’s something of a mystery about it that comes from the transcendent nature of human beings. It comes through their free participation.
If you had to boil it down, you’d probably talk about a “shared life” - a life that is shared. It requires deliberation, listening, negotiation, forgiveness, and forbearance. Many of you in community will understand what that means, but it’s not easy. It’s not sentimental.
Sometimes, it requires us to negotiate hard. Think about building a common good between business and unions. You may have to negotiate the interests that are at play there. Think about negotiating a common good around immigration. You would have to take into account the interests of the host communities and the people who are travelling to a new country. You work out a balance of interests.
But also, we could think of the common good in a more joyful sense, like a choir - many different voices contributing, where everybody has a different role to play, but the collective experience is transforming and benefits everyone.
Why Is This Urgent Now?
So the question becomes: why is this so urgent now?
We need to read the signs of the times. I think it was Hemingway9 who said that change happens slowly and then all at once. It does feel like that kind of moment, doesn’t it? It’s been building for a number of years.
Pope Francis described this as a process of being “stripped of false securities”10. We’re no longer able to “complacently enjoy” the illusions of the old era. It’s not credible anymore to continue with the assumption that governments can adequately represent us or that the socioeconomic model we’ve been living with can underwrite a flourishing life for all. That feels deeply unsettling, but that is what’s going on.
We’re seeing many symptoms: extreme inequality, estrangement between different groups, the commodification of creation, war, displacement of people, extreme liberalization of abortion and assisted suicide, a profound shift in the idea of what human dignity means.
We’re seeing the young in particular manifesting symptoms of distress: depressi on, self- harm, yearning for meaning, addiction to social media, and profound loneliness—much worse among the young than the old11.
We’re seeing that the new digital revolution is really threatening what we understand to be our physical reality, our relationship with place, particularly in poor communities. If you’ve got very poor infrastructure, you can understand why it’s very tempting to go online where life is shiny and perfect. There’s a real threat to our engagement, our relationship with the local.
In addition, we have the acceleration of AI and robotics and the technocratic paradigm that both Pope Leo and Pope Francis have referred to. There’s this sense of an impending power that threatens our local, relational power.
And arising from the kind of politics we’ve been seeing, we have a collapse of trust in our political leaders. We’re seeing more tribalism and anger in our country.
There is a sense of meaninglessness too. Young people are hungry for meaning12 in a world that’s become a sea of relativism. It’s very difficult for them to find some kind of security, and so they are looking for tradition. This is often described as a mental health crisis, but actually, it’s an existential crisis. It has spiritual roots.
For some people, this might sound like exaggeration. It’s not really that bad, is it? You know, it’s nice and peaceful outside. The hedges are clipped. Buildings are still standing. People still go to work.
The thing is, it depends on where you live and who you know and what media you consume. Our media is now so fragmented that we can be living very close by physically and actually be in parallel worlds. The reality now is that we have a sectarianism emerging, and widespread polarization in the country. People really are very alienated from each other’s narratives.
The Roots of the Crisis
So I just want to talk a bit now about what’s behind this. The Catholic tradition helps us to read the signs of the times through the lens of political economy. This is the context in which we live, and it really affects human beings and our relationships.
We can see that the neoliberal political economy, which has been prevalent since 1979, has regarded human beings as units of labour, which must be cheap and mobile. Because of that, manufacturing got offshored to the Far East. Because it was cheaper, obviously, but this broke the tradition of vocational jobs and all the cultural tradition that went with that.
That’s much more profound than people think. It goes to the primal imagination. People who’ve lived with that inheritance for generations suddenly find it’s gone. We mustn’t underestimate the impact of that.
This economic model was also attracting workers from poorer countries to leave their families and take up low-paid jobs here that prop up Western business models. So actually, you’re breaking two lots of communities. You’re breaking our home communities, and you’re also breaking the communities from which the low-paid workers come.
This was all supposed to be creating a “frictionless” environment for investors. It worked very well for them. They made a lot of money. But it was devastating for millions of relationships, not just in our country but around the world.
I was in Doha recently and spoke to workers in the hotel and at the airport. They’d been away from home—for seven years, nine years, twelve years—lonely, missing their families, sending money home. That’s the new reality. Their families now rely on an economy that depends on somebody living in another continent. This is what our economy has become. It breaks relationships.
Pope Francis described it as “an economy that kills”13. If you remember, four decades ago, the idea that people should have to move to find work was regarded as right-wing. Do you remember Norman Tebbit’s “get on your bike”?14 It was an affront to have to leave your family and a settled life. But of course, this has now been rebranded as “freedom” - freedom to move.
Again, this breaking of relationship with place has led to civic degradation on a vast scale. While some people have profited, very large numbers have suffered. Then the shift to the knowledge economy and service economies caused further shame. Communities that had suffered from this globalization dogma were then framed as deficient and backward.
I would describe all of this as a breach of the common good. If we talk about the common good as a shared life, this is no longer a shared life. And, of course, in time, we’d see this politics of abandonment was a recipe for mass discontent. And that’s what we’re seeing, not only in this country but across the West.
The Unencumbered Self
So what’s going on here? How do we make sense of this? What connects all these disparate symptoms?
Every era is shaped by an animating idea. And the idea underpinning the era that’s in the process of breaking down comes from the philosophy of liberalism, from a particularly extreme strain of liberalism stemming from the idea of the “unencumbered self”15.
The unencumbered self is an idea where “freedom” is understood as freedom from constraint—freedom from the constraints of family, country, borders, history, God—and natural law.
This ideology is inherently unstable because it goes against the grain of humanity. It relies on a false anthropology, a desiccated, soulless conception of the human being. This generates a false idea of freedom and leads to a cult of self, quite unlike our Christian Catholic anthropology, where the person is a relational being made in the image of God.
Eventually, this idea liberates society from truth and from mutual responsibility. Its spirit is actually anti-human, which is why the system is now unravelling. Its relativistic and materialistic logic ultimately brings about its own destruction.
This misconception that human beings are somehow isolated, rights-bearing individuals has led to the emergence of identity politics—this identitarian focus on race and gender categories, the oppressor-oppressed forms of victimhood that we see, and the culture wars—all stem from this idea. Because it’s materialistic and against the nature of human beings, it has led to spiritual confusion and demoralisation. It has also led to a distorted meaning of “social justice”, which was originally a Catholic term, that has now been colonised by progressive ideology, which is focused on identity and the oppressor-oppressed dynamic.
All of this eats away at shared values and erodes our sense of citizenship. It dissolves relationships. It undermines the particularity of place. It commodifies what it means to be human. This all puts human beings and communities under great strain. It separates and divides. It promotes an overemphasis on rights and erodes our sense of mutual responsibility.
Sister Helen Alford pointed out to me that when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was released, originally it incorporated rights and duties, but they couldn’t agree on the duties, so they dropped them.16 That’s quite stunning, isn’t it? Think of the effect of that over the last several decades. We have a culture that’s dominated by rights without a concept of the balance of responsibility.
So we now end up with the “me culture,” the “I” this, and the “I” that. It sounds like a cliché, doesn’t it? But it’s actually true. This culture drives us to outsource more and more things that we used to do as families and communities and neighbours to the state, fostering a culture of dependency and entitlement, or to the market—”I don’t need anyone to get what I want. I can sit at home and order everything on Amazon. I don’t need anybody.” This weakens civil society. It is said that people won’t open their front door now unless it’s a delivery.
It’s a kind of slavery. We end up with this list of pseudo-freedoms. The system says, “On condition of your compliance, you can have mobility! You can have consumer choice! You can have rights! You can have self-determination!” This false story of freedom is endlessly promoted by the principalities and powers of our age—the over-centralised technocratic state, global finance, and big corporations, who stand to gain so much from this and accrue more and more power. Yet it promotes an individualism that separates and divides and provokes a profound yearning for meaning.
All our political parties have been colonised by this dogma. They’ve become disconnected from realities on the ground. They’ve lost touch with their founding purpose. The Conservatives stopped conserving. The Labour Party abandoned its purpose to represent human labour. The Greens are no longer green.
There’s a colonisation of this dogma going on across the piece. It’s really striking once you see it; you can’t unsee it. This is a kind of hegemony. A hyper-liberal hegemony of the politics of both right and left, although they express it in slightly different ways. There’s a sort of blind spot going on.
The right attribute moral unravelling to excessive liberalism, but somehow the neoliberal economic system gets a free pass. The left attributes poverty to the neoliberal economic system, but they embrace the progressive ideas of unlimited self-actualization—”I can remake my own body and basically become God.” Both the left and the right have absorbed this liberalism in slightly different ways. But they are two sides of the same coin.
This antihuman philosophy has led to gross mismanagement and provoked widespread discontent. We’re living with this political upheaval, and now potentially facing the greatest realignment for 100 years.
Efforts by the political overclass to fend off this revolt have just alienated the public further. As John Gray says, they “cannot comprehend that what they term populism is actually political blowback against the social disruption that their policies have produced.”17
In the last few days, we’ve seen the beginning of a new trend of insurgent populist politics, not only on the right but now also on the left—identitarian, sectarian—emerging along religious lines. Fragmentation is becoming the norm.
We can see how this hyper liberal philosophy has affected public opinion more broadly. There’s no mass outrage, for example, against the profound shift in human dignity that we mentioned earlier—the extreme of autonomy in terms of abortion up to full term and assisted suicide as a “healthcare option”. These things are now widely accepted. But actually, this is the logical conclusion of that animating idea. That’s exactly where it leads.
This idea of “choice” and “rights” has become hegemonic. The idea of mutual obligation - “I can make the choice to end my life—doesn’t matter. “It’s none of your business. It won’t affect you.” This is nonsense. We know that our decisions affect each other. We are related.
We are relational beings. It’s a big lie that’s being sold to us here.
A Hinge Moment in History
So we find ourselves at a hinge moment in history. The coming months and years are going to be volatile. It’s probably not going to settle down anytime soon, so we’ve got to get used to it. It remains to be seen if any political leadership can deliver a social peace.
Understanding this context is vital if we’re to discern our mission in this new era. The shape of the new era is turning out to be quite different from the old.
As Lord Glasman said in a recent lecture for us, “the emerging era is tragic. The previous era was procedural, legal, administrative. The new era is political, volatile, and democratic” (note that note of hope there), and he sees, (or perhaps hopes for), “a shift from individualism to institutions, from self-definition to the authority of tradition.” He’s sensing some of the things that we’re seeing in the Quiet Revival18, for example, and the importance of the local institutions we mentioned earlier.
The Antidote
So why should we focus on all of this when we want to talk about our calling? Because understanding context is vital if we’re to discern our mission in this era. Despite attempts by the modern state to subordinate the Church to the private realm19, what goes on in society is the location of our calling. It is of great spiritual importance that we engage.
I wanted you to get the sense of the causes of the unravelling so that you can see clearly what the antidote needs to be. I think you can see how severe the problem is and that its causes are deeply rooted in this false anthropology of the unencumbered self. Therefore, we can see that the antidote must be a relational anthropology.
This anthropology is embedded within our tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. This tradition is a gift that has often been too well hidden, ignored, or seen to be optional. It has always placed great emphasis on the relational. It is not meant just for Catholics; it’s meant to be a gift for all people of goodwill. So we shouldn’t be keeping it to ourselves.
At times it has become dry, theoretical and abstract, while at others oversimplified by being attached to specific campaigns. Its broader purpose as a worldview can be obscured, its practical framework for good judgment can be missed, and you could easily overlook its deeply embedded relational ethic that needs to be integrated within our Christian witness.
Catholic Social Teaching and Relational Anthropology
When we think about our recent popes, they’ve all emphasised the relational in the Catholic Social Teaching tradition. Pope Francis, of course, talked about the “culture of encounter”20.
But somehow, it just gets stuck as a sort of nice rhetorical piece of language. What does it actually mean on the ground? He also talked about “integral ecology,”21 echoing the concepts of his predecessors,22 but sometimes it has been received as a nice rhetorical idea that isn’t properly worked out on the ground. People tend to focus on the environmental to the exclusion of other considerations. People and planet are meant to be balanced.
Benedict XVI, borrowing from Newman, emphasised the connection between human beings: “Heart speaks unto heart”23 He focuses on the life giving relational connection between human beings. He says “Truth is received in relationship” and that “the human being is a listener before being a speaker”24. That is a profound way of thinking about the relational imperative—being in that listening posture, opens you up to the other person.
John Paul II insisted that “the human person is created from love and fulfilled in communion.” He said that “man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”25
They’re all pulling out this profoundly relational anthropology. Pope Leo XIV also said it’s through relationships that we grow: “only genuine relationships and stable connections can build good lives.”26 This fundamentally relational anthropology runs right throughout the Catholic Social Teaching tradition.
Themes of Catholic Social Teaching
The teaching includes a series of themes that together help us generate a vision of how human beings can thrive in relationship, both in a vocational and a metaphysical sense.
It starts with personhood—what it means to be a human being, a relational being with a transcendent nature. From this flows the dignity of the person, respect for life, and the dignity of work.
Then, of course, there’s the family, often called the fundamental cell of society or the school of love. In fact, the family is a relational form in which we learn who we are, and how to live with the unbidden. We don’t choose our family. This is very important. It’s really counter to the idea of “me being in charge” of the world. I’m not God. Within the family, I have to live with the people I’m given. That strengthens us as human beings. At the community and local level, the Catholic tradition talks about a layer of civil society institutions as particularly important. It calls them intermediate institutions, and each has a vocational responsibility. This is what John Paul II spoke about so much. It means clubs, associations, businesses, schools, charities, churches, religious orders, and other religious bodies.
Rather than an inward orientation serving its own interests, each institution is called to an outward-facing responsibility and to live up to its unique vocation for the common good— whether it’s serving great pizza or running a great fishing club. Each has its own calling, not only to deliver for itself but in relationship with its neighbouring institutions.
John Paul II talked about a lateral relationship—the building of friendships between institutions—and working together for the common good of the area. It’s a very local, grounded vision.
The local church has a special role here. It’s not just like any other institution. Part of its uniqueness is to unveil the sacred. But also, as an outward-facing body, its vocation is about proactively building relationships with other neighbouring institutions, being that leaven in society, encouraging relationship, infusing the wider community with its gifts.
But this is critical: it must also be open to receiving from its neighbours. The church actually needs to get over itself and not be so ecclesial, not so self-centred, recognising that it also has things to learn. That sense of reciprocity—being open, being able to receive as well as give—is at the heart of being relational.
The local church has a particularly important calling when the local life is thin. In a thriving small town, you might have lots of nice boutiques, cafes, and associations. But in a poor place, you might just have a chicken shop and a betting shop. In that setting, the church is particularly important as a place for enabling people to meet, and perform a civilising, humanising role.
Subsidiarity and Solidarity
What I’ve been talking about is really a reflection of the subsidiarity principle. This underpins the entire architecture, the way of understanding society through a Catholic Social Teaching lens. This principle holds that decisions should be taken closest to those they affect, that responsibility should be taken at the appropriate level, and that no central authority should do what can be done more locally.
Its purpose is to empower the person to participate according to their gifts and ability. Its meaning is to uphold the integrity of the human person. If you ever hear a government talking about having “a local consultation” or “including” local people, that’s a top-down interpretation. Subsidiarity arises from below. The whole point is to uphold and enable what arises from below, not just to benevolently “include” people from above.
The purpose of subsidiarity is to prevent domination, to prevent dependency, and to prevent the centralisation of power. It’s to enable agency among human beings—that precious moment between human beings that is the common good. It enables responsibility to be taken locally and for power to be relationally distributed.
In a church or a religious order or a congregation, clericalism as we know can a bit of a problem. The idea of shared leadership is also a reflection of subsidiarity—distributing leadership.
This understanding of subsidiarity also helps us to understand the purpose of the state, which is to create conditions that allow and enable—but not seek to control—families, persons, and intermediate institutions to flourish, within the law, to fulfil their vocational responsibilities together.
Alongside subsidiarity is solidarity. These two principles are always in partnership. Solidarity views human beings as social beings designed to be interconnected by relationships of mutual concern and support. Solidarity is a “determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual.”27 No one should be facing the struggles of life alone.
That’s unfortunately what we’re seeing a lot of now—a single mum stuck in a flat surrounded by unpaid bills, damp on the walls, curtains closed, probably suffering from depression. All she gets is a transfer of cash from the welfare state. She should be in relationship with someone. The churches should be right in that space, reaching out to and accompanying people who are isolated.
This is the reality of the modern state: it claims to be efficient but actually is really inefficient because it doesn’t reach people relationally where they are. We should be building relationships, particularly with people who are poor, honouring their concerns, and acting together.
At scale, it means joining people together to act on issues like damp housing or getting together to demand decent local jobs. That’s the sort of thing I understand solidarity to mean in practice.
Option for the Poor
Then, of course, there’s the option for the poor. Its relational element is not immediately obvious. Yes, of course, the option for the poor often refers to charity and almsgiving and justice. But there is another, deeper meaning that comes originally from the Bishops of South America in the Aparecida28 document.
If we’re not in relationship with people who are poor, we will get the wrong conclusions. It’s like the image in Corinthians, the image of the body29. If we ignore the weak and vulnerable parts, the whole body becomes sick. We have to pay very careful attention to the poor parts of the body.
The poor “often experience a deep sense of interdependence and solidarity, recognising their need for others”30 in a way that the affluent and the busy don’t have or have lost or forgotten. This is something that the Church needs. In fact, the Church needs to be “evangelised by the poor.”31
This means we shouldn’t be complacent. It’s not enough just to run a food bank based on a service provider model - this dynamic inadvertently encourages dependency, it alienates and creates an estrangement between poor people and the middle-class “benevolent giver.” Rather, we should be aiming for participatory models based on a reciprocity that generates a collective sense of common good—a shared life.
We can see how that hyper liberal animating idea has even affected our idea of charity. It’s turned it into a transactional dynamic.
Christian Witness in a New Era
I just want to pause for a moment and think about how the Catholic Social Teaching tradition is fundamentally relational. It becomes clearer to us why it’s the antidote for our time. Everyone will have different expectations and interpretations of what this might look like in practice. But let’s explore some possible approaches, especially if you’re thinking about developing formation for Christian witness.
What does this mean for our everyday lives? What does it mean to be a Christian now in this new context? It’s not good enough to think that we can just do things the way we’ve always done them. This is a new time. People call it a post-Christendom context. But it’s also the context of unravelling—individualism has dominated and wrecked our society. We’re in a new time.
We see evidence of some young people—numbers are small but significant—through the Quiet Revival research, turning to the Catholic Church, hungry for meaning, looking for tradition, perhaps to counter progressivism, searching for some discipline to give shape to their lives.
Some of them may be motivated by political reasons; others are distressed by nihilism or loneliness, looking for belonging. But if we’re to foster an authentic Christian discipleship, especially in the context of the emerging Christian nationalism32 —some of which is adopting Christianity for political reasons—then we have to think carefully about a Christian witness that is shaped around an authentic, relational Christian anthropology that incorporates a common good thinking approach.
There are many dimensions to this. Let me throw some ideas out, and we’ll have a discussion afterwards. Within your Dominican tradition, interiority is fundamental. I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the newcomers to Catholicism or to Christianity have really got that yet. They might have come for political reasons or intellectual reasons.
And so teaching people to pray is fundamental—a daily practice, perhaps of the Examen. But I would inject here a question, “how can we make prayer more relational?” You might think about ways of making liturgy more communal, perhaps making adoration more communal, and also to inject into the mix the question: “what is God doing here among us?”
Beginning to raise a habit of attentiveness, a sense of His work, His movements among us. It is also vital to help people be aware of their gifts and skills, what they have to contribute. We need an outward-facing posture, oriented physically and metaphysically, grounded in our neighbourhoods. No longer is it viable for the Church to be inward-facing, serving its own people. We’re called to offer outwardly, but also to be in listening mode, attentive to the Holy Spirit, to find out what’s going on where we live, to be conscious of context.
Too often, Christians carry on as if it’s business as usual. To develop a new practice of noticing, we might perhaps do some walking in the area, mapping: and ask, “who do we know? Who don’t we know? What institutions are in our neighbourhood? Are we in relationship with them? If not, why not? Do we know someone in our congregation who knows them? How can we be proactively relational?” We might consider one-to-one conversations33 as a practice, getting used to having proactive conversations. This is the way we will learn what’s going on in the places where we live.
We can do small relational acts. Fr Sam mentioned “the London Tube problem” – where people avoid eye contact. But now we know that this is actually a much deeper problem.
We can make intentional eye contact as a countercultural act—a simple, friendly thing to do. We can say hello in the street. We can refuse to use the self-checkout. I do. It takes longer.
In terms of our Christian witness in conversation with people, we can assert a confidence about what how faith draws us to live. We can say, “Children are a gift, not a right.” We can say, “We are designed for relationship.” “We should care for our elderly and not kill them.”34 These are becoming strangely countercultural things to say, but this is part of what we need to be building up in terms of our confidence as Christians.
Not a triumphalist version of being a Christian, but a generous, capacious Christianity that has a clear understanding of what it means to be a human being. Bear in mind that in this society, we have been and are being evangelised by another belief system—to become consumers and rights-bearers. It’s not neutral. It’s not a neutral set of ideas that is being pushed: it comes from that animating idea. We have to decide to do things differently.
Part of that is about telling the truth. Truth speech is actually a really powerful device. Many of you will have felt a sense of self-censorship: “I can’t say that. That might be a bit awkward. What’s going to happen if I say that?” When that next happens to you, just take a little pause and think: could I just have the courage to say something that injects a note of doubt, that allows you to be in tune with your conscience?
Because the more we self-censor, the worse it gets. We may have to sacrifice some lack of safety in doing that. We will have to get used to being a bit uncomfortable.
Friendship and Civic Engagement
I also want to speak a bit about friendship—not just in terms of our mates, our friends, but social friendship, civic friendship. Being intentional about reaching out, building those connections with neighbouring institutions, perhaps with unlikely people that we wouldn’t normally come across.
We have the sense that governments may not be able to fix the problems that we face. So in the meantime—and in fact, anytime—and this is what subsidiarity teaches, our approach is to build civic friendship.35 It should be part of who we are. We are part of families, communities, local relationships, associations. We must build connections with our neighbours.
This actually has a cosmic purpose. There’s something profound about human connections in terms of our transcendent nature forming a resistance against the power of the overbearing state and the pervasive power of capital.
We need to be identifying relational forms. For example, you notice a little group in your area, and you think, “They’ve actually got a bit of energy about them.” If it is good, encourage it. Strengthen it. Help to expand its friendship. Connect them with other groups.
Trust in what good people are doing.
I mentioned earlier about charity and how it’s morphed. Consider the meaning of the word. Charity means love: but it’s become a service provider. That’s so different, isn’t it? So when we see the word caritas or charity, let’s try to remember what it’s really about. In the World Day of the Poor letters in recent years, there’s been a strong emphasis that charity is meant to be personal and relational, that we should stop outsourcing.36 We should be approaching this personally.
Giving our time—the gift of time—is so powerful. Our actions here in terms of Christian witness don’t need to be big. Don’t need to be a project. They don’t need to be grand. We don’t need funding. We can actually just start with one small step. In the new era of AI and robotics, this becomes even more important—that we hold on to what it means to be human—that we make things together, do things together. That we don’t just consume.
We can organise a dance. A night playing games. Create spaces for grace—in which people can come together and discover company. Things emerge through relationships. People learn what is going on and discover ways to act together. Associational forms may emerge; we can foster alliances based on relationships of civic friendship.
No one should go through life alone. But many are going through life like that. People are so touched by the opportunity to tell their story, to be heard, to be called by name. We have no idea how lonely many people are. I have a psychoanalyst friend who says the level of distress she sees is really profound.
I’m going to leave you with this passage from Jeremiah that everybody knows so well. I do think this is for our time: that we’re not to turn in; we are to turn out, to be outward facing.
There will be hard years are ahead. The cavalry is not coming over the hill. It’s actually up to us. Courage is required. With the friendship of Christ, we’re called to be pilgrims of peace.
But seek the peace of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the LORD on its behalf for in its peace you will find your peace. (Jeremiah 29.7)
Jenny Sinclair is Founder and Director of Together for the Common Good (T4CG), a Christian charity dedicated
to spiritual and civic renewal. Working with leaders, churches and schools, T4CG helps people read the signs of
the times and play their part for the common good.
John Paul II, Centesimus Annus (1991), para. 13.
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John 15:16
Gaudium et Spes, 26
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926 (Book I, Chapter 13)
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Centre for Social Justice, Lonely Nation, May 2024
The Prince’s Trust, Youth Index 2024; UK Youth, State of Youth 2023/24, 2024.
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Norman Tebbit, speech to the Conservative Party Conference, 15 October 1981.
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Andrew Willard Jones, A Church Against the State, New Polity, 24 August 2020.
Pope Francis. Evangelii Gaudium, para. 220 (2013).
Pope Francis. Laudato Si’, paras. 137–162 (2015).
John Paul II. Centesimus Annus, para. 38 (1991).
Benedict XVI. Homily at Newman’s Beatification, 19 Sept 2010.
Benedict XVI. Address to the Roman Curia, 21 Dec 2012.
Gaudium et Spes, para. 24 (1965).
Pope Leo XIV, Prayer Vigil with the young people, Tor Vergata, August 2, 2025
Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concern), 1987, paragraph 38
Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, The Aparecida Document (2007) (§§26, 396).
1 Corinthians 12:12–27
Message for the Eighth World Day of the Poor, June 13, 2024
Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §198.
Madeleine Davies, Long Read: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Church Times, 6 February 2026
https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/resources/one-to-one-conversations
Plough Magazine, Schooling Hope: An Interview with Stanley Hauerwas, April 16, 2020
Andrew Willard Jones, A Church Against the State, New Polity, 24 August 2020.
Vatican.va, Message for the Seventh World Day of the Poor, June 13, 2023