World Christianity Summer Institute 2024 Public Lecture by Mr Richard Lewney

World Christianity Summer Institute 2024 “Poverty and the Church” Public Lecture: Wednesday 3 July 2024, 5-6.30 pm BST

Runcie Room, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, West Road, CB3 9DP, and online

Title:  ’WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS’ – ECONOMICS, POVERTY AND THE CHURCH”    

Abstract

Like many important issues in social and economic policy, the causes of and remedies for poverty are highly contested. Ideas from economics permeate wider society and are taken up or opposed according to how well they accord with our worldview, particularly the worldview of our ‘tribe’. This applies to Christians as much as anyone else. In the same way, while we might expect theological explorations of poverty to inform our thinking, in practice we often favour the theology that conforms with our social and political values rather than, as we might claim, base our values on ‘well-founded theology’. This lecture identifies three key narratives that economics has offered about the socioeconomic system in terms of how each accounts for poverty and what might be done about it, how Christians who adopt the narrative find a basis for it in theology and their reading of the Bible, and what we might expect to see in economic development data if the narrative is broadly correct. It then offers an overview of the evidence for the trends in global poverty over the past several decades to see how well this matches what each of the narratives say.

Bio

MR RICHARD LEWNEY is Chair of Cambridge Econometrics, a spin-off from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Applied Economics.  He served as the company’s Managing Director for two decades from the mid-1990s, applying economic modelling to policy analysis, policy evaluation and possible futures, mainly for government and NGO clients. In recent years his particular focus has been on the economic impact of climate change mitigation policies.  He is an Assembly Accredited Lay Preacher in the United Reformed Church and regularly leads worship in churches in and around Cambridge.  He is Convenor of the Reference Group that oversees the URC’s global justice program, Commitment for Life. He is a Trustee of the Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics, which promotes the development of ideas better suited to addressing real-world economic, social and environmental challenges.  He studied at Cambridge and, as a Fulbright Scholar, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.