Author and CEO of the Cinnamon Network, Matt Bird, considers what God is doing and how we can join in.

There are 50,000 churches in the UK and 17,000 residential care homes, so if one in three churches adopts a care home, every care home would have a Christian presence of people who love Jesus going in to befriend elderly people. It'd be amazing, wouldn't it?

Emily: So how about on a global scale? What have you seen globally?

Matt: I've just come back from the United States and meeting networks of churches there across major cities, where they're working collaboratively, and this is happening all around the world. In fact, the endorsements in the book you'll probably notice, come from India, Australia, Africa and the United States, as well as here in Europe. All around the world God is helping churches and communities find one another and regardless of denominational differences they're working together collaboratively, to have a greater impact in their communities.

Emily: That's great!

Matt: There's a chapter in the book called 'Stronger together' and it's all about that movement of unity for transformation that we see around the world.

Emily: There's a phrase that you use, which is 'pietistic Christianity'. What do you mean by this?

Matt: It's a Christianity that I used to have actually, where it was about me and Jesus and the assurance that I was going to heaven when I died and taking as many people as possible with me as I went. That's 'pietistic Christianity'.

You may be thinking, "Well, what's wrong with that?" There's nothing wrong with that, but if that's where it ends, that sort of Christianity is impotent to change the world.

There are so many countries and communities where there are high percentages of Christians and high percentages of church attendance. However, the impact upon the culture in those areas is absolutely minimal and that's what I call a privatised faith or a pietistic faith. It's just kept privately between us and Jesus and going to heaven, rather than a Christianity that impacts the whole of life and transforms relationships and communities and cities and cultures.

I believe that when Jesus walked the earth that's what he did. He called it the 'kingdom of God', but it wasn't a kingdom of God that you just discovered when you died, it was a kingdom of God in the here and now. Families were transformed, communities were transformed and cities were transformed, and that's the power of the gospel.

Emily: What was it that led you to set up the Cinnamon Network originally?

Matt: There's a vision that I heard from a politician about what I would now call 'participative society'; not a society where we don't pay our taxes and expect government to do everything for us, but a society where we have a sense of responsibility and commitment for the communities in which we live and the cities in which we live. Where we say, we do pay our taxes and the government does stuff, but actually we have a responsibility as well.

I was recently interviewed for a TV programme because Cinnamon Network works with a lot of police forces, and they said "Why is the Church doing the police's work?" Well, it's the wrong question, because it's not the police forces job to build stronger and safer communities; it's all of our jobs. We all have an interest in building safe communities and strong communities for ourselves, our friends, our neighbours, and our children. We want to live in a place where people can flourish and thrive and that is all of our responsibility as citizens.

So participative society, which is a vision where Cinnamon came from, is a society where everybody has a part to play, everybody makes a contribution and we build a strong and safe society together.