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Good morning. As we grow weary of pandemic conditions, our public conversations have turned to imagining post-COVID Britain – not a state we can put on a timeline; nevertheless, it’s one which dominates discussion. From the personal - who we miss and what we want to do – to the public – what needs bailing out, and how we can build something better. There appears to be consensus that we cannot simply return to our pre-pandemic lives. But how we imagine our collective future varies. Some people assume that transformation is inevitable, as if society were a computer which will recognise its errors and recalibrate. Others treat the year 2020 as a malignant force over which we have no control: they hope it will pass in time, and then things will improve.

Public discussion of large-scale change can end up treating the future as a playground for trying on different political or economic theories, an experiment that a select group gets to shape. This pandemic has reminded me that big pictures and large numbers – of deaths, of hospitalisations – can, even with good intentions, dehumanise the subjects, detaching responses from the people and places who suffer most. But there are other ways to imagine the future.

This week, a story from Zamfara in Northern Nigeria caught my attention. With an overwhelmingly agricultural economy and under increasing pressure from unpredictable weather, conflicts between Fulani herders and other farming communities have grown and heavily armed bandits are terrorising the state. Governor Matawalle has announced that bandits can now hand in their AK-47s and receive 2 cows in return, equipped to start afresh. I couldn’t help but hear echoes of the prophet Isaiah’s vision of a peaceful kingdom, where swords are turned into farming tools: a beautiful moment of political imagination in the midst of turmoil. Though belonging to different religious traditions, Governor Matawalle and the prophet Isaiah both offer here seemingly impossible and large-scale visions which remain deeply intimate to particular contexts. Within my own Christian faith, belief in resurrection ought to similarly inspire such imagination: not simply resuscitating old ways but transforming and renewing people and places which are known and loved.

A post-pandemic Britain will not happen in an abstract location, but here, in the places we know and love. It belongs to the many asylum seekers living below the poverty line, to malnourished school children, to our depleted wildlife. This is the kind of vision I long to see from the Church in public discussions of a post-pandemic world: imagining the impossible in response to the needs of the communities we serve.

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