2025 – This is the year of hope

Against a bleak cultural backdrop, we have an alternative message of hope and the ground is fertile for sharing it. That’s why we should have great hopes for 2025, the Evangelical Alliance’s CEO Gavin Calver told Chris Rolfe.

I am more hopeful about 2025 than any other year I’ve been in ministry. Does that sound strange, considering there’s such a bleak cultural narrative at present? Perhaps.

But alongside that there is a greater openness to our alternative message of hope, and the ground has never been more fertile for us to share that.

Bleak reality

On the face of it, our culture has rarely felt so hopeless. Last year, for example, we had a Labour government come in with a word for its slogan that doesn’t normally exist on its own: change. With previous political landslides like Blair or Obama, “change” and “hope” went together as the rhetoric for them getting in.

This time, change was promised alongside managing our expectations with warnings that things are going to get worse.

Life is challenging outside politics, too. I’m a parent of teenagers and I don’t know anyone who is saying it’s easy to raise kids in this environment. They’re not saying their kids have great aspirations for their futures, that they’re planning to buy their own homes, that things are going to be brilliant.

People are acknowledging life is hard. The secular stories we’re being told have never felt so weak.

We sing a different tune, however, and our Jesus story has lost none of its depth, truth or wonder.

This is where my hope lies for 2025: I’m really optimistic about the message the church can sound into our culture.

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