Current campaigns
Towards the Conversion of the Church of England by the Rest of England
The William Temple Foundation’s June 2025 roundtable at St Katherine’s Foundation gathered distinguished contributors from a range of backgrounds and disciplines to explore the types of challenges and opportunities facing the new Archbishop of Canterbury Bishop Sarah Mullally as the Church of England seeks to understand its relationship and purpose to the huge diversity of citizens who reside in this country and who identify to a lesser or greater extent with this county and the notion of Englishness. We collated our contributors’ papers in this Temple Book Towards the Conversion of the Church of England by the Rest of England: A William Temple Roundtable. View our public lecture, where we further explored these themes through contributions from Linda Woodhead and John Denham.
See Abigail King’s chapter contribution Towards the Conversion of the Church of England by the rest of England: A Gen Z Perspective on the Changes and Challenges facing the Church in 2025 here.
Radical Hope
The William Temple Foundation is exploring the concept of Radical Hope and what it might mean for citizens, communities and institutions shaping the public square in the UK and around the world. We began this exploration in 2023, through a blog by Simon Lee exploring radical hope in terms of the value and values of universities. This staked out an agenda which might also be considered by other institutions contributing to the public sqaure. In 2024, Fellows of the Foundation, Dr Val Barron and Dr Matthew Barber-Rowell developed gatherings around the idea of Radical Hope in an Election Year. This was inspired by the fact that democratic processes were taking place in 82 countries around the world that year. We have curated the responses on this page, including a Radical Hope ebook from a gathering at Liverpool Hope University in April 2024. In 2025, we are continuing our exploration through the Radical Hope Podcast, new publications and the Radical Hope Conference with partners from the USA at Virginia Theological Seminary, exploring how to communicate radical hope in the public square in an era of poly-crisis.
Faith(s) in the City
2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Church of England’s influential report on urban poverty called the Faith in the City Report. This historic report, first published in 1985, was released four years after Lord Scarman’s report on the Brixton disorders, and at a time of continuing urban unrest. Faith in the City asked what future is there for our inner cities and housing estates, and considers how should the Church of England, and other bodies, including government should respond. The report made recommendations to the Church about its place and responsibilities in the urban priority areas. Important recommendations were also made about public policy issues: unemployment, housing, social and community work, education, policing, and urban policy. In its call for action on a broad front, the Commission argued that Church and State must have faith in the city. One of the consultants in the production of the Report along with a great many others listed in the opening pages of the report, was Rev Canon John Atherton who represented the Foundation. 40 years on, our current Director of Research, Chris Baker honours John’s memory and the role of the Foundation in the production of Faith in the City, by supporting a series of public events during 2025, in partnership with Ripon College Cuddesdon, the Urban Theology Union (based in Sheffield) and the Church Urban Fund (and their Near Neighbours programme).