Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

In a high-profile debate and Q&A, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was asked how Christianity could remain “relevant” in the modern world. His response surprised audience members.

In a recent panel discussion — entitled “The Battle for Reality: Does God Exist?” — for Premier Unbelievable, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, a Welsh Anglican bishop and the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury (2002–2012), was asked about the relevance of the church in a modern age.

Unbelievable is a program known for bringing Christians and sceptics together for cordial but robust discussions about life’s biggest questions — including the existence of God, the historical evidence for Jesus and the Bible, and many other questions.

The Battle for Reality

Hosted at the prestigious Royal Institution, London, the “Battle for Reality” debate was chaired by Jack Symes and featured four high-profile guests: Sabine Hossenfelder, William Lane Craig, Slavoj Žižek, and Rowan Williams.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist who runs a YouTube channel with nearly 1.8 million subscribers. She holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics and earned her doctorate in theoretical physics from Goethe University Frankfurt, supervised by the renowned German physicist Horst Stöcker.

William Lane Craig is an American analytical philosopher and Emeritus Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology of Biola University. He holds two doctorates — one in philosophy from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, and a second in theology from LMU Munich, Germany. He is best known for updating and defending the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God and was featured on The Daily Declaration’s list of ten philosophers who defend Christianity.

Slavoj Žižek is an eccentric and world-renowned Slovenian public intellectual, philosopher, and cultural theorist. He is currently the Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University and professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School. Like Dr Craig, Žižek holds two doctorates: the first in philosophy and the second in psychoanalysis.

Rowan Williams is a Welsh bishop, a distinguished theologian and a poet. He was the previously Archbishop of Canterbury (2002–2012), the first in modern times to be appointed from outside the Church of England. He earned his doctorate in theology from the University of Oxford and served as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge (2013–2020).

Rowan Williams on the Church Stays Relevant

Following the wide-ranging and stimulating four-way discussion, Symes opened the discussion up for questions from the floor.

One questioner asked about strategies for the church to remain relevant in the modern age: “What must organised religion do to stay relevant in this increasingly digital, artificial, secular world.”

Without missing a beat, Williams responded: “Pray”.

When his answer was met with a ripple of laughter from the audience, presumably because of the apparently impractical nature of his recommendation, Williams doubled down: “No, seriously”.

While he acknowledged the question and said he understood why it was asked, he said he was always “a bit stymied by questions about relevance”.

More important than ‘relevance’, according to Williams, was ‘integrity’: “I don’t think anything can be relevant unless it has integrity”. And that integrity is modelled by a community that takes the practice of prayer and embodying Christ’s example seriously.

He continued, “… the integrity of the community is how deeply and seriously it prays, how deeply and seriously it seeks — in the Christian case — to embody what Jesus is about in terms of mercy, healing, and promise.”

Williams said there was “a bit of” him that wanted to say, “Look, for goodness sake, just do that and let the strategy come a bit later”. Such a strategy puts the horse before the cart, allowing the practice of the community to develop authentically in such a way that it becomes and remains relevant without any efforts to force relevance through strategising.

Indeed, as Williams noted, not much is gained by trying to be relevant, simply because “you’ll have to do it all over again in ten years’ time”: “But something can be done by asking, well, ‘How do we deepen our anchorage in this reality we believe we’ve been inducted into?’”

Williams’s response flies in the face of tactical approaches to Christianity that reduce authentic spiritual life to a matter of business, marketing, and “growth” strategies in a desperate effort to keep things “exciting” and “relevant” in light of the latest craze.

Authentic Christianity has survived and thrived for nearly two thousand years not through fine-tuning its relevance strategy, but through more deeply sinking into, and sharing, the eternal truth of divine revelation.

___

Image from Premier Unbelievable on YouTube.