Leading research on the hard cultural issues of the day will underpin a new initiative from Crosslands Training, which wants to support God’s people and their communities.
Crosslands Forum is running events and courses, hosting networks and providing talks, videos and articles to support local churches as they grapple with today’s culture.
Forum has been launched as a platform to provide pastors and others with tools to ‘engage culture with Biblical conviction, theological clarity and gospel confidence’. Its aim is to significantly expand the number of churches and leaders who ‘confidently engage their culture with a better story, and who lean into the issues of the day, and offer the hope of salvation to the lost, with the truth of God’s word’.
Crosslands, an evangelical organisation that helps local churches and individuals with theological training and resources, launched the initiative to be community-focused and collaborative. The Forum project is already working in partnership with CARE, The London Project, the Wilberforce Academy, and Acts29 – with more in the planning stages.
At its launch event, Forum director Dr Dan Strange described the complementarity of gifts and characters within the team as ‘dynamite’.
He spoke of the need more than ever to take our confession seriously and said: ‘Our culture is frantic, fragmented and fractured and we need solid ground on which to stand. Only the ultimate authority of the Bible can give us the light and clarity we need.’
He went on: ‘We need to think Biblically about what it means to think Biblically … This means going deep; looking at the patterns presented to us in Scripture … What we need is a Christian social theory and Crosslands Forum wants to support the people of God in the articulation of this Biblical vision.’
Dr Strange also talked about the need to get ‘cultural traction’ and the need for ‘contextual intelligence’ – understanding the times that we are in.
