Thinking Faith Network is the parent of Faith-in-Scholarship. The organisation that runs FiSch is a 30-year-old UK-based charity committed to helping people explore how imaginative Christian thinking can transform and enrich every area of life. For a multimedia introduction, the promotional video released on 9 April is now available on YouTube. For some background, read on!
I began working for Thinking Faith back in 2010, when it was called West Yorkshire School of Christian Studies (WYSOCS). Based in Leeds, the charity’s aim was to provide opportunities for education in a wide range of subjects from a Christian perspective. At that time the main activities were an ongoing series of occasional seminars and workshops called LifeMatters, and a ministry called RealityBites that went to schools and youth groups to present Christian faith by contrasting the biblical worldview story with other big stories that shape young people’s lives. Faith-in-Scholarship was born at that time out of a desire to help Christian postgraduate students think through their studies in the light of a Christian philosophy.
The aims and the Leeds base of the organisation remain the same, but its reach has grown. To be fair, the “West Yorkshire” bit of WYSOCS was never meant to restrict geographical reach; speakers and listeners alike regularly came from other parts of the country to LifeMatters events. But the “School” bit wasn’t doing justice to the growing diversity of initiatives and audiences. RealityBites was getting materials onto radio while FiSch was setting out to support campus-based postgraduates’ groups – and Christian thinkers everywhere through this blog. There was a growing awareness that the charity’s heart could be expressed more clearly.
So this spring we became Thinking Faith Network – for “faith in all of life”. That is, biblically-founded Christian faith applied to every area of life. We also profess the faith that all of life matters – to God, eternally, and so to us too. It emphasises that faith can be very fruitfully coupled with thinking, and vice versa. And it calls for community: networking among thinking Christians for mutual support.
We were delighted when people we approached who’d been involved with WYSOCS in the past agreed to appear on camera endorsing it and its new name. Among them were two prominent writers and speakers called Tom… Prof. Tom McLeish had spoken for LifeMatters last year on Faith and Wisdom in Science; he expressed gratitude for the role WYSOCS had played at an earlier stage of his intellectual development and reminded us of Paul’s exhortation in Romans 12 that God’s people be transformed by the renewing of their minds. Then Prof. Tom Wright, who had spoken at two previous LifeMatters events, generously spent over an hour and a half with the three of us who went to film him, giving us much food for thought. He reminded us of 1 Corinthians 14 (in his impromptu paraphrase): “I want you to be babies when it comes to evil, but when it comes to thinking – you’ve got to be grown-ups!”
We believe that faithful thinking can’t be overvalued, because “ideas have legs”: the most godly and the most evil human actions alike arise through people’s thoughts. Tom McLeish emphasised this at the end of his video clip with a call to potential supporters of Thinking Faith Network: “I would urge you to think about supporting TFN for the long game, because that’s the one that counts.”
[Views expressed here are his own.]
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