From N. T. Wright's Address in Nottingham on June 28.

"It is becoming increasingly clear in our society – you only have to look at France to see the point – that under the superficial smile of tolerance is the hard fist of secular power. And the task of the church in this day, as in Luke’s day, is to find the appropriate ways of declaring that Jesus is Lord, openly and unhindered, recognizing that this is a statement about the real, public world as well as the world of private religious experience, indeed that it is only truly the latter, about me and my religion, because it is truly the former, about God and his created world. And this is part of the point of Acts as a whole: that whatever troubles the church may get itself into, whatever divisions and persecutions and disputes there may be, we must end up, whether in Rome in the first century or in Edinburgh this next weekend, saying to the powers of the world that Jesus is Lord and that they are not. That is our primary calling; it is for this task, not in order to wallow in our own spiritual experiences, that the church must pray for the fresh wind of the Holy Spirit." --Wright