Evangelical advocacy body Christian Concern (CC), and its sister organisation Christian Legal Centre, is increasingly being asked to bring its expertise in championing and campaigning for Christian values to nations outside the UK.
Demand from other countries is such that, in the last few years, CC has been invited to speak to groups involved in similar work from Italy, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Korea, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Nepal, USA, and Canada.
Chief Executive Andrea Williams said: ‘People there cannot believe that, in the UK, street preachers are put in police cells, nurses lose their jobs for offering prayer, or doctors are dismissed for refusing to say that a man is a woman. The UK is the outlier nation here as most other nations simply don’t have the cases. That is why they call upon us, to help them resist’.
A good example is Columbia, where Williams has spoken to leaders in various key sectors – church, law, media, politics, education – advising them how to formalise their hitherto informal but effective movement to resist the radical progressive agenda being foisted on their country.
Similarly, in Italy, eastern Europe and South Korea, CC has highlighted how developing diversity and equality legislation may serve as cover for the LGBT agenda. A vital issue is training, using the UK as a laboratory. Its experience over the last 50 years or more, from the 1967 Abortion Act, to loosening of marriage and family structures, to curtailing the freedom to preach the gospel, helps open the eyes of Christians in other countries to what their futures may hold.
Successes are already evident, ranging from how Christian lawyers in South Africa are disrupting liberal-agenda legislation, to how the compelling legal arguments deployed to prevent church closures in Scotland have also been used to good effect in New Zealand.
Williams concluded: ‘Christians in other parts of the world are now calling on us to help them because they simply don’t want to get to where the UK is now. I first realised this when we were lobbying the Council of Europe before our European Court of Justice cases in 2013. Then, representatives from central and Eastern Europe, who had lived under Communism, told me that our cases were a mark of dissent-forbidding totalitarianism. They understood this in a way that British people did not – which prompts their desire for assistance and training to check the secular, liberal agenda in future.’
