My name is Alex, and it is a privilege to introduce myself as the newest member of the Joint Public Issues Team, as I join the team as Campaigns and Church Engagement Officer. As I begin, a chant is stuck in my head:
Just over a month ago, I was in church singing these words of hope with others. As the chant rose into something that felt like protest, I began to wonder… ‘Imagine’, I thought, ‘if church was always this political’. Similar wonderings have, over time, led me towards this new adventure.
Soon after graduating with a music degree in 2013, I began to work in student chaplaincy and, later, trained for ministry in the United Reformed Church in Cambridge. After a theology doctorate, ministry took me back to Cambridge, where I have served for the past three years as a Special Category Minister, working with people who have felt alienated by church. One of the sources of that alienation was the strong impetus towards social action that the people I ministered alongside felt. As well as forming a new community together, ‘Solidarity Hub’, this clear desire to act for change led me to become involved with a community union and to further develop my interest and skills in social organising, advocacy and craftivism.
Alongside music and ministry, I have worked as a freelance Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) facilitator and as a theologian, writer and tutor with a particular interest in intersectional and liberation theologies. I am currently spending many of my Sunday afternoons writing my third book, which is about the interactions between theology, disability, culture-war rhetoric and exclusion from public and economic life.
I am excited about getting involved with JPIT’s vital work in helping churches to pray and work for peace and justice. I have a particular interest in the dehumanising ways in which economic injustice is often inextricably intertwined with poor access to health and social care, representation, and public life and spaces. This tangle of inequity is particularly noticeable at the moment in discussions around proposed changes to the benefits system. As a full-time wheelchair user, who – along with many of my friends and colleagues – relies on PIP to be able to live and to work, I am keen to respond well to disinformation and to counter the culture-war rhetoric that turns human beings into game pieces. I hope to continue to learn and dialogue more about this disempowering entanglement of economic, care-related and public oppressions with other church members, knowing that we are the hands, feet and mouths of Christ in God’s work for justice today.
As I begin my role, I will particularly be focusing on the Constituency Action Network, Politics in the Pulpit, and the preparation for our 2025 conference on the 8th of November. These are all ways in which I believe that we can dialogue and work together to speak truth to power in the public square. I am also curious about the ways in which work for justice and peace can lead to just, safe, reciprocal and authentic connections between humans who hold a diverse range of beliefs, experiences and perspectives, in contrast to the binary and divisive rhetoric of culture wars. I look forward to working with churches, nationally and locally, to build new connections and to strengthen existing ones so that we can work for change together. Imagine if church was always this political. For some, that wondering might be worrying. For me, it is exciting. The fire in my belly which leads me to think, speak, act and pray politically is central to my faith. God’s desire to lead all people out into spacious places, Jesus’ preference for the poor and the liberating power of the Holy Spirit leads me to wholeheartedly believe that the power of love will rise above the love of power. One fine day.