Making Britain great ‘again’?
September is one of those ‘ending and beginning’ times of the year. The summer is drawing to an end and autumn advances, the harvest brings to the end another growing season, the school holidays end, a new school year starts and people return to more regular working patterns. It is a familiar annual pattern of events that we have all seen many times before.
Yet at another level it is all new; we are all a year older than the last time this happened, some children are starting school for the first time, some are moving up to secondary school, some are preparing to leave home and go to university, some are preparing to start full time work for the first time. Looking back in my own life and the lives of my family I see a repeating annual pattern in which there has been growth, development, progress and change.
Yet in other ways it seems that there is no progress, in fact they seem to be getting worse. The road to recovery from the problems in the banking sector 9 years ago is still resulting in problems for many people, we hear the same political arguments over and over in the press about immigration, the NHS, welfare, pensions, etc. On a global scale, the world seems to be going backwards with more instability, more international tensions and conflicts and the rise of more extremist groups.
Tim Thornborough writes:
It’s a creeping yet indefinable sense of decline that has made the “Let’s make our nation great again” slogan such a powerful piece of rhetoric. Ask any group of people, and you are likely to get a wildly varied response to what this decline includes. Immigration. Our spending power. The price of housing. The availability of jobs. Pension and health provision. All these and more are made the basis of a voting decision to someone who promises to “make us great again”. Older people reflect with rose-tinted nostalgia on how “great” things were back in the day. Younger people are filled with hope for a more rapid climb to the life of comfort and ease they aspire to.

But, how do we truly make our nation or our world great ‘again’? How do we bring significant change on this larger scale? How do we see the same sort of progress we see in the development of our children, reflected in the development of our nation or our world? It can seem like a hopeless task, but I believe that it is possible.
For me, what makes an individual great is not the fortunes they amass, the empires they build, or the power they wield. Looking back through history, the truly great people that have made a lasting difference in the world have always been focussed on serving others. Sometimes in that service they have achieved personal fame and fortune and sometimes they haven’t, but they have always served.
Jesus said, "Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.” (Matthew 20 v 26)
All of us have had people in our lives that have cared for and served us at home or school, and they have helped us grow to be the people we are. There are many people in our communities that serve in helping run village halls, community groups, churches, clubs and activities. Others serve in their work places, their pollical office and so on. Not everybody serves, there are people that just ‘take’, but it is the ones that serve that make a difference.
As a nation is just a collection of individuals living in a certain place, then it seems reasonable to say that the greatness of a nation could be defined in the same way; by the way that nation serves and the contributions they make to the world and humanity.
So, I believe that if there are more people who are focussed on serving and helping others, then there is more hope for our nation and our world. There are many different organisations that exist to encourage and help serve others and make a difference in the world, and the church is one of those. As a young man and an atheist, I had always thought that the church was a boring club for people that believed that sort of nonsense. I discovered to my surprise in the late 80’s that it was a dynamic movement that was changing the world through loving and serving people in some very challenging places. It was this servant heart of the church that first attracted me to want to explore the claims of Christianity and, years later, led me to attend an Alpha course (like the ones we run here in the village).
So as September brings us round to a new beginning in the annual cycle of the school year and so many things begin again, I pray that we would all find new ways to serve in our families, our schools, our communities, our workplaces and more. So that we all do our part to build people up and together help make our nation and our world truly ‘great’.
Rev Barry Jackson