Creativity, Resilience and Justice

Word count: ~3,300

Estimated reading time: 16 minutes

This essay is based on a talk given at St John’s Waterloo on 7 March 2026.

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I am an Anglican priest in Leeds.

I lead a community called Lighthouse — a church and charity for adults with multiple and complex needs, or as we often say, a family for those battered and bruised by the storms of life. Around 150 people call Lighthouse their church. It is a community of deep joy, fierce friendship, and stubborn belonging, but also one that knows suffering up close. Addiction, homelessness, trauma, mental illness — the kinds of wounds polite society often prefers not to see.

Living alongside people who carry that kind of weight changes the way you see the world.

Over time I have come to think of my vocation as something like that of a prophetic theologian.

Not someone who predicts the future.

But someone who tries, however imperfectly, to tell the truth about the present.

The prophetic task has always been this: to articulate truth in cultures that prefer denial, to enact hope in cultures that drift easily into despair, and to speak truth to power for the sake of those who possess very little power at all.

The prophets of Israel were not fortune tellers.

They were truth tellers.

They named reality as it was — especially when political, economic, or religious systems preferred silence, distortion, or polite avoidance.

But prophecy in Scripture is never only diagnostic.

It is also imaginative.

The prophets did not simply expose injustice. They imagined another world.

They spoke of swords beaten into ploughshares. Valleys lifted up. The hungry filled with good things. The proud scattered in the imagination of their hearts.

Prophecy cultivates what we might call a moral imagination — the capacity to envision a future shaped not by the inevitabilities of history but by the purposes of God.

And that means the prophetic vocation is also, in a deep sense, a creative one.

It asks the church to imagine and embody ways of living that resist the assumptions of the present and anticipate the future God promises.

In cultures sustained by denial, imagination becomes a demanding task.

The prophets knew this.

The psalmists knew it.

The poets and liturgists who first gave the church its language of prayer knew it.

Faith requires language capable of telling the truth.

Language rooted deeply in Scripture and tradition, yet capable of challenging the assumptions of the present rather than baptising them.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed that if we want to know what we ought to do, we must first ask a more fundamental question:

What story do we find ourselves living in?

Human beings live by stories.

Cultures live by stories.

And so the question presses itself upon us.

What story are we inhabiting?

And perhaps even more urgently:

Is it a story capable of sustaining hope?

For much of the modern West we lived, often without quite realising it, inside what might be called the myth of progress — the quiet assumption that things would gradually and inevitably get better.

Economically.

Politically.

Socially.

Even morally.

For a long time there seemed to be evidence to support that story. Life expectancy increased. Infant mortality declined. Higher education expanded. The end of the Cold War appeared to promise a measure of global stability.

In the 1990s the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama famously suggested that liberal democracy might represent “the end of history” — not the end of events, but the end point of humanity’s ideological development.

But today that story feels less convincing.

Ecological crisis intensifies year by year. Climate systems are destabilising. War and geopolitical tension have returned with a force many thought belonged to the past. Economic inequality continues to widen. Many young people live with a quiet but persistent anxiety about the future.

Beneath the routines of everyday life there is often a sense that something is shifting.

Some writers describe our moment as the long emergency.

Others speak of the age of unravelling. Scholars increasingly use the word polycrisis — a convergence of multiple crises interacting and amplifying one another.

However we describe it, many people sense that we are living between worlds.

The old certainties are fading.

The shape of what comes next has not yet fully appeared.

The philosopher Rupert Read, writing about climate breakdown and civilisational risk, describes three broad trajectories for the future.

The first he calls the Butterfly.

This is the hopeful scenario — the possibility that humanity might recognise the danger in time and change course before catastrophe forces the issue. In this vision societies gradually transform their economies, technologies, and ways of life. We learn to live within the limits of the Earth, reducing emissions and ecological damage while building more sustainable forms of life together.

For many years people assumed something like this would happen.

Scientists issued warnings. International agreements were signed. There was talk of transitions and targets that might allow the global economy to decarbonise while avoiding the most dangerous forms of climate disruption.

But we ignored those warnings for far too long.

Global emissions continued to rise. Fossil fuel dependence deepened. Political systems repeatedly postponed the scale of transformation the science demanded.

And now we are living with the consequences of those delays.

Climate scientists increasingly tell us that we are effectively locked into a world approaching two degrees of warming above pre-industrial temperatures by the middle of this century.

The ship, in many respects, has already sailed.

Which leads to the second possibility.

The Dodo.

Here the trajectory is not transformation but collapse. The systems that sustain modern civilisation — ecological, economic, political — begin to falter under the pressures placed upon them. Climate disruption intensifies. Food systems strain. Political instability spreads.

When people hear the word collapse they often imagine human extinction.

That is not what is meant.

Collapse means something both less dramatic and, in many ways, more disturbing: large-scale social breakdown and immense human suffering. The loss of stability and security. The unraveling of infrastructures that sustain everyday life. The weakening or failure of institutions people once assumed would always endure.

History reminds us that civilisations can and do collapse.

The third possibility Read calls the Phoenix.

In this scenario the crisis deepens and many of the structures we currently depend upon fail. Yet out of that disruption something new begins, slowly, to emerge.

New forms of community.

New ways of organising life.

New cultural and spiritual resources capable of sustaining a different kind of civilisation.

The image is ancient: a bird rising from the ashes.

But if that is the future that awaits us, then the question becomes urgent.

What seeds must be planted now?

Because whatever kind of world emerges beyond crisis will not appear from nowhere. It will grow from the moral, cultural, and spiritual seeds sown in the present.

Practices of community.

Habits of cooperation rather than extraction.

Ways of living that honour the limits of the Earth.

Stories capable of sustaining courage rather than despair.

If the Phoenix is to rise, it will rise from seeds planted long before the fire.

For Christians, however, even this is not the final horizon.

The church has always lived with a deeper hope.

The return of Christ.

Christians have prayed the same prayer for two thousand years:

Come, Lord Jesus.

This prayer is not escapism. It is a longing for the reconciliation of all things — for the day when every tear is wiped away, when justice and peace finally embrace, and when creation itself is renewed.

But we also pray those words in another sense.

Come into our anxious hearts.

Come into our fragile communities.

Come into a wounded world that often feels close to exhaustion.

Bring peace where there is anxiety.

Bring hope where despair has taken root.

Bring courage where fear has begun to rule.

If we are living in a moment like this, then the church will need more than strategy.

We will need imagination.

The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues that modern Western culture has become dominated by a narrow analytical mindset — one that excels at breaking reality into fragments but struggles to perceive the whole.

If that diagnosis carries even a little truth, then our moment requires more than technicians.

It requires poets, artists, storytellers, and theologians.

People who can help us see again.

Creativity helps us imagine another world.

Resilience helps us remain faithful as we move toward it.

Justice calls us to stand with those who suffer within the present one.

And so the task before us may be simpler than we think.

Tell the truth.

Practise lament.

Build communities of courage and compassion.

Keep returning to Jesus.

Refuse despair.

Because even in an age of unravelling, the Christian story insists on something the world struggles to believe.

That death is not the final word.

That love is stronger than domination.

And that the future of the world does not finally belong to collapse, or violence, or despair —

but to the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

And so even now,

in a wounded world,

hope leans forward.