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Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

Tag: kingdœmocracy

A split image featuring two scenes: on the left, a woman in a yellow shirt passionately singing in a church setting with a cross in the background; on the right, a smiling woman in a green sweater is engaged in conversation with a man at a desk with a "jobcentreplus" sign visible.

Singing of the Goodness of God… and of the State?

May 20, 2025 / / 0 Comments

At church this weekend we sang the worship song Goodness of God

All my life You have been faithful,
All my life You have been so, so good…
With every breath that I am able, I will sing of the goodness of God

And in the middle of worship I found myself wondering whether anyone could ever sing the same about public institutions.

All my life, the state has been faithful
All my life, public administration has been good to me

It may have surfaced because I’d been able to make some progress with PrayReps this week. Or perhaps because of my day job helping the Department for Work and Pensions to design a new approach to providing jobs and careers support for the country. A life-long companion to help people navigate work, whether they’re seeking their first job, having a mid-career reinvention, or easing into a well-earned retirement.

What would it take for one of our future users to say: “All my life, it’s been good to me. It didn’t fail me. It was there”.

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Praying for representatives: US edition

December 9, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Over the last year Dave and I have been kicking around the idea of “Kingdom Democracy” (or maybe kingdœmocracy) as we try to encourage our fellow Christians to adopt a hope-filled, faith-inspired perspective on democracy and how we’re governed. We haven’t quite managed to write the book yet, but it has been brilliant to take things that we know in our bones and put them into words.

It’s also been a powerful exercise in challenging me to put what I believe into practice at a personal level. That led to my prayer walk along the boundaries of the Croydon constituencies, the election night prayer watch party, the time spent praying for every one of our new MPs and subsequently trying to turn that tool into an actual product called PrayReps at Code for the Kingdom BUILD.

I was hoping PrayReps would be online by now. It’s not there yet, although good progress made with the underlying data. Going back to work has definitely slowed progress. So, no product on the internet but I did repurpose my old locally hosted ChatGPT-assisted code for the US Presidential, Congressional and Gubernatorial elections. Now, with the final result finally being confirmed at the end of last week I can finally publish this blog post.

It’s a blog post in three parts.

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