Leaving Egypt Podcast

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In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Karen Wilk, who has devoted her life to discovering what it means to join with God in the neighbourhood. Like many other pastors, Karen began in youth ministry. Over time, though, she grew uneasy watching so much church-life energy go into getting people through the door, rather than helping them develop a real relationship with Jesus. Long before it was fashionable, she recognised there was something upside-down about this and wondered what it would look like to form church in her neighbourhood - with her neighbours. Shaped by influences like John McKnight’s Abundant Community, Karen has quietly and persistently pioneered a deeply loving commitment to place and people. In a moment when many are awakening to the realisation that Christ’s church is meant to be rooted in the local, Karen’s story is a testament to what patient, pioneering faithfulness can create in a neighbourhood - something beautiful for God.
Dr. Karen Wilk is a community pastor and neighbourhood animator who is part of a growing network of Canadian faith communities. For almost 20 years, Karen has been pursuing a ‘new thing’ — seeking to discover and join God at work in her neighbourhood, and equipping and inspiring others to do the same (through Resonate Global Mission and Forge Canada). She has a Doctorate in Missional Leadership from Northern Seminary (Chicago) and lives in Edmonton, Canada. She has been a pastor/teacher for about 40 years. She’s also a spouse, mum, nana, e-biker, birder, pickleballer, outdoorsy and crafty type.
LINKS
For Karen Wilk:
https://forgecanada.ca/
www.resonateglobalmission.org/
Mentioned in this episode:
John McKnight and Peter Block The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods
Barbara Brown Taylor An Altar in the World: Finding the Sacred Beneath Our Feet
Books:
Don’t Invite Them to Church: Moving from a Come and See to a Go and Be Church
For Alan J Roxburgh:
http://alanroxburgh.com/about
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork
Books:
Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)
Joining God in the Great Unravelling
Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions
Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time
For Jenny Sinclair:
Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair
Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/


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In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair talk with Christian Smith about what is happening to spirituality in the US. Christian’s deep research on attitudes to religion among the young has led him to the sober conclusion that traditional faith in North America has become “obsolete”. Something massive is shifting across Western societies: amidst the exhaustion of liberal modernity, the turn toward re-enchantment means that the churches’ framing of the culture as secular no longer holds. The spiritual hunger of the young is attaching to politics, identity, conspiracy, the occult and techno-utopianism as readily as to church. When asked how priests and pastors should respond, he sees that authentic Christianity embodies what the young are yearning for: a cosmic vision, sacramental life, disciplined prayer practices, embodied community, faithful doctrine and moral clarity. But rather than conventional evangelising, the times call for a posture of listening, hospitality and dialogue as a better way to connect.
Christian Smith is a leading figure in the sociology of religion. Best known for coining the term “moralistic therapeutic deism” to describe the beliefs of American teenagers, he has written many influential works on faith, culture and the moral life. His books include the forthcoming Occulture: The New Face of American Spirituality (2027) and the recent Why Religion Went Obsolete (2025). Christian is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught for nearly twenty years and founded the Center for the Study of Religion and Society. Prior to Notre Dame, he spent twelve years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a BA from Gordon College and an MA and PhD from Harvard University. Raised an evangelical, he and his wife, Emily, were received into the Catholic Church in 2010. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.
Links
For Christian Smith:
https://sociology.nd.edu/people/christian-smith/
https://christiansmith.nd.edu/
“Why I’m Done with Notre Dame” (First Things, on his decision to leave)
Selected Books:
Occulture: The New Face of American Spirituality (forthcoming, 2027)
Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (2025)
Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (with Patricia Snell) (2009)
Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (with Melinda Lundquist Denton) (2005)
For Alan J Roxburgh:
http://alanroxburgh.com/about
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork
Books:
Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling (with Roy Searle)
Joining God in the Great Unravelling
Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions
Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World
For Jenny Sinclair:
Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair
Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/


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Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair welcome Maurice Glasman back to Leaving Egypt for a second conversation. Maurice traces the exhaustion of a settlement built on progressivism and globalisation -one the church has too often been co-opted into rather than resisted. In its eroding, he sees opportunity for a politics built not on elite abstraction but on ordinary virtues - commitment, constraint, solidarity, family, place and nation - drawn from the well of Catholic Social Teaching. Water, land, the human person: for Maurice these are gifts of God, not commodities, and recovering that conviction is where renewal begins. He argues the divide is no longer left versus right but sovereignists versus globalists, those who want power to rest with peoples and places, versus those who would transfer it to borderless, unaccountable systems of capital, ideology and technology. He turns to two countries close to his heart: confronting Iran’s regime and backing its people’s resistance, and Ukraine’s costly defence of its sovereignty. What may be coming, he senses in a yearning for settled life from working-class Britain to Ukraine and the Iranian people, is restoration: the recovery of family, faith, place and nation: a hopeful story the church could yet join, if only it had eyes to see it.
Lord Maurice Glasman is a British politician, political theorist, commentator and community organiser who has served as a Labour life peer in the UK Parliament since 2011. He is best known as the founder of Blue Labour, a movement launched in 2009 to address Labour’s drift from its founding roots, challenging both New Labour’s neoliberalism and progressive identity politics. Drawing on Catholic Social Teaching, Aristotle and the thought of Karl Polanyi, he promotes a politics of the common good. Alongside his parliamentary work he remains active internationally, particularly in relation to Ukraine and Iran. He has a longstanding commitment to community organising, most recently in Grimsby, through the Common Good Foundation, which he founded and directs. Born into a Jewish working-class family in North London, he studied at Cambridge, York and Florence. His official title is Baron Glasman of Stoke Newington and of Stamford Hill.

LINKS

For Maurice Glasman:
https://x.com/blue_labour?lang=en
https://www.bluelabour.org/
https://www.commongoodfoundation.org.uk/
Books:
Blue Labour: the Politics of the Common Good
Unnecessary Suffering: Management, Markets and the Liquidation of Solidarity

For Alan J Roxburgh:
http://alanroxburgh.com/about
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork
Books:
Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)
Joining God in the Great Unravelling
Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions
Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:
Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair
Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/


Get full access to Leaving Egypt at leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack: leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com
In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Ian Williamson. Ian is a man of great courage whose life was transformed after being dominated by heavy drinking, cocaine addiction, gambling debts, and self-destruction. When he encountered Christ, he chose not to leave but to stay on the council estate where he grew up - and recognised that discipleship there required a distinctively relational approach. He now mentors fellow working class pastors, encouraging them to let their lives speak and to dwell among neighbours as fellow travellers. Ian speaks frankly about the deep alienation between many working class communities and mainstream churches. He names the collapse of moral leadership and the failure of many middle-class leaders to connect with the concerns of poor areas. He also describes the catastrophic damage done to family life and how globalisation has eroded community-centred ways of living. He sees an urgent need for spiritual rebuilding, one relationship at a time. Ian is “the genuine article” — an ordinary man living an extraordinary vocation, through whom the love of Jesus shines.
Ian Williamson is a working-class pastor and church planter from Middlesbrough. Raised in a single-parent home, his early life was dominated by violence and addiction and shaped by work as a nightclub bouncer. After meeting Jesus, Ian’s life was transformed. He was led to plant and pastor New Life Church, and with his wife Rachel, to co-found SixtyEightFive, a ministry supporting men and families affected by fatherlessness. Now, as Executive Director of Medhurst Ministries, he equips pastors for contextual mission, evangelism and relational discipleship, planting and supporting churches in the UK’s most deprived places, especially council estates.

For Ian Williamson
www.medhurstministries.org
In Context Podcast:

For Alan J Roxburgh:
http://alanroxburgh.com/about
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork
Books:
Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)
Joining God in the Great Unravelling
Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions
Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:
Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair
Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/


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Join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack: leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com
In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair speak with Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani. As a bishop in the Church of England, she knows its challenges, both internal and external. She is sensitive not only to its wrestling with decline, but also with the need to reorient itself in a time when both society and the churches confront crisis on multiple levels. Her life has prepared her well for this moment. Experiences of disruption as a refugee have given her a deep confidence that God is both present and actively working, even as familiar structures undergo change, even as communities fragment. With realism and quiet courage, she embodies the struggle of a faithful pilgrim finding ways to “leave Egypt” within the confines of institutional life. Resisting the rush toward strategies and programmatic fixes, she prefers prayerful listening rather than seeking safety in control. In the midst of uncertainty she delights in grassroots relationships, encouraging others to discern the movement of the Spirit and to discover what kind of church God is forming in this time of crisis.
Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani is the Bishop of Chelmsford in the southeast of England, UK. She is the lead Bishop for Housing for the Church of England, a member of the Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords, and is currently Chair of the Board of the Church Army. Born in Iran, daughter of Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, the Anglican Bishop in Iran, and Margaret, daughter of William Thompson, Guli and her family left the country in the wake of the Iranian Revolution in 1980 when she was 13 years old, and to date she has been unable to return.

LINKS

For Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani
https://www.chelmsford.anglican.org/about-us/the-bishop-of-chelmsford/
Bishop Guli’s address at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, 16th Sept 2024
Books
· Listening to the Music of the Soul, 18 September 2025
· Stations of the Resurrection, Encounters with the Risen Christ, written with Malcolm Guite
· Cries for a Lost Homeland: Reflections on Jesus’ sayings from the cross
· Reflections for Lent 2021: 17 February - 3 April 2021

For Alan J Roxburgh:
http://alanroxburgh.com/about
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork
Books:
Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle)
Joining God in the Great Unravelling
Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions
Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time

For Jenny Sinclair:
Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair
Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/


Get full access to Leaving Egypt at leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com/subscribe