CT: You said that when you started at Jubilee you had hoped to be part of a movement that would turn the UK back to Christ and that you felt that hadn't happened. Do you leave the position a bit disappointed?
MS: I came to realise that you will not turn Britain back to Christ by one or even a series of single issue campaigns.
We ran a successful campaign initially - Keep Sunday Special - but eventually the cultural tide of consumerism, individualism and consumer rights became so strong, like a tsunami, that we just got overwhelmed. We didn't lose Sunday completely but we lost it substantially.
We realised, therefore, that you will never win a single issue campaign - be it on abortion, betting, consumer credit and debt - when you are not tackling the underlying cultural tide. It became clear that we needed to address the underlying tide of consumerism and individualism, and that is a much, much bigger project.
I had become interested in relationships as the underlying and unifying principle of biblical law while working with the World Bank in Kenya in the 1970s (see Matt 22: 37-40, where 'love' is a description of relationship). The whole idea of what we call Relationism, or Relational Thinking for wider society, came out of a biblical reflection in which we looked at biblical laws talking about land, capital, the state, criminal justice, and what holds them together. Well, Jesus says it's all about love. When we asked what's love got to do with land tenure and the ban on interest and so on, the common theme of course is relationships.
It wasn't immediately obvious how you could base public policy on the theme of relationships but the more we did various projects the more we could see they were all really about relationships.
For example, Keep Sunday Special was about whether people should spend time at work or with their families at the weekend. Credit and Debt was about the impact of debt on family relationships and the relationship between the lender and the borrower. In South Africa we worked with the ANC in the apartheid era where the relationship was between black and white. Everywhere we looked it was about relationships, so I wrote The R Factor with David Lee in 1993, and the Jubilee Centre team established the Relationships Foundation as a separate charity.
My hope for the future now would be that God would bless the work of focusing on relationships both in the Jubilee Centre, as it tries to communicate this to the churches, and through the Relationships Foundation as we work with politicians and political parties, public services and the commercial world.
