‘If you are asking, why are there no children in our church? Maybe you need to start solving their problems?'

It strikes me that when Christians talk about ‘revival’ and ask when it’s coming, they are looking for a particular kind of revival that God will sovereignly do.

But I am already seeing ’signs of revival’. Our charity and those we work in partnership with, are seeing things happen in church that haven’t been happening for 150 years. And often churches say, ”well, who’s there on a Sunday morning?”, and we would say, ”Who are you feeding? Who you’re giving counsel to ? Who you giving hope to, in the other days of the week?” You’ll find that in some communities the reach of the church is back at levels it hasn’t know since The Middle Ages. Churches are impacting their communities, perhaps beyond where they realise and so we might actually be in the middle of a revival. It’s just it’s not the one that we thought God was going to bring!

Open the window!

Spurgeon’s Children’s Charity is a large charity, operating multimillion pound contracts in partnership with local authorities, the prison service, schools and the NHS, to deliver high end complex intervention to vulnerable children, in many communities. So we see thousands of children every year in that context.

There’s a scene in the film, Good Morning Vietnam (1987), where a guy asks the weather forecaster, ”what’s the weather like?” And a guy responds,  ”Open a window, can you see?!”

if you want to know what the UK is like, open a window! There is a tremendous increase in children with mental health issues, identity issues, eating disorder issues, but also those suffering from trauma from parental conflict and connected to special educational needs. The reality is that complexity levels are ever increasing, so the next problem is more difficult to deal with, and the volumes increase. At the same time, the capacity of local authorities and the NHS to better respond is diminishing. Political and financial decisions have been made over the last six months, which mean that local authorities have had to cut hard cut the services that they’re providing. We speak to a number of local authorities that are looking to close all of their children’s centres.