LICC's work has been founded on the principle of what John Stott called 'double-listening', listening to the Word and listening to the world.

With this in mind, our multi-disciplinary team seeks to engage both with macro issues - broad social trends, globalisation, the influence of mass media - and with micro issues - how can we live as radical, whole-life disciples in today's world?

We make our material and training available through a variety of channels including speaking, training seminars, weekly e-mails, website material, weekly radio broadcasts, magazine articles, resources development.

Whilst our presence in broadcast and print media naturally fluctuates, right now our average regular monthly reach is nearly 600,000.

This excludes appearances on mainstream national radio - Brian Draper, for many years LICC's Lecturer in Contemporary Culture and still an Associate Lecturer, regularly speaks to 2,000,000 listeners on BBC 4's Thought for the Day - TV, web hits, incidental articles in the press or the use of LICC materials by other organisations. For example, a number of organisations pass on our e-mails through their intranet, e.g. Christians@Barclays.

We also run a regular programme of events and seminars at our London base and, since the launch of a partnership with leaders in the North West, now also in Manchester. Indeed, our work increasingly involves engaging with partner organisations, including the denominations, in order to facilitate and resource the shift in church culture which is so crucial for the UK Church in the 21st century.

LICC has a core teaching team of nine, most of whom are part-time. This teaching team is supported by an administrative team that resources them for events and courses, manages the website, and the distribution of materials and communications with friends and supporters.

Key Areas of Engagement

LICC's team works in a number of key applied areas, vitally complementing and supplementing the work of theological colleges and other parachurch agencies. Our current major areas of focus are:

Mission and Discipleship

Jesus made disciples and told us to do the same. The church in the UK and beyond, however, is focused on 'making converts'. Indeed, there is a crisis in disciple-making in the church. Most of the major initiatives of the past few years have focused on evangelism in the narrow sense of conversion and whilst there are still many fine teachers and preachers, good teaching on its own (LICC national research has shown) rarely leads to the whole-life discipleship that is envisaged by Christ.

LICC's Imagine Project is designed to address this crisis. Now widely supported by a variety of church leaders and organisations, it began in 2003 with a robust analysis of the state of UK culture and of the Church and it identified two major blocks to achieving the church's mission:

• The theological failure to recognise that all of life and every context is important to God. This failure inhibited the training, release and support of so-called 'ordinary' Christians to pursue their God-ordained ministry in their everyday contexts beyond the church.
• The methodological failure to follow Jesus' command to make disciples, not merely converts. This has left most Christians ill-equipped to live and share the Gospel in our rapidly changing culture.

These core blocks are, broadly speaking, common to the evangelical Church globally. As such, Imagine learning has the potential to be applied globally. Indeed, even at this early stage this is happening in Spain and the Republic of Ireland. Imagine is now is phase 4 and has already provided the church with a range of resources
To help envision and equip local churches to begin the process of cultural change required to create sustainable whole-life, disciple-making communities. These resources include a DVD, small group study resources, and a series of CD talks, books and magazines.

The local church is God's primary tool for mission and the Imagine Project gives LICC the opportunity to offer local churches a sustainable process and flexible set of resources to help them create the whole-life disciple-making culture that is critical to sustainable mission.

In 2007, a pilot scheme was launched to seek to develop and disseminate wisdom on how to create these kind of churches in different contexts. This currently embraces 16 churches of different sizes, locations, denominations, Churchmanship and social background. Our learning is identifying some key dynamics for change, core competencies for leadership development, and the further resources that are needed.

The Imagine Project is the most obvious expression of LICC's desire to resource whole-life mission and discipleship in the world but not all our output points in that direction. For example, LICC lecturers Margaret Killingray and Helen Parry both explore how the Bible can used to help people engage with contemporary issues. Margaret's focus is on ethical issues, particularly as it relates to everyday decisions, whilst Helen focuses on questions of lifestyle in a consumer culture in a hungry world.

Work

Work, paid and unpaid, matters to God and is a primary context for ministry, mission and witness. Yet patterns of work in the UK are having a hugely damaging impact on health - physical and mental - relationships and communities. Furthermore, it remains the case that the vast majority of Christians are not envisioned or equipped for their mission and ministry at - and through - work. In this context, LICC personnel have been pioneers in workplace ministry for over 20 years and have not only spoken and taught nationally and internationally but have been responsible for a number of 'firsts' in this vital area:

• The first workplace video resource - A Vision for Workplace Ministry
• The first guide to resource pastors for workplace ministry
• Supporting Christians at Work with a follow up Supporting Christian in Education.
• The first small group DVD resource - Christian Life & Work.
• The first resource for graduates and final year students
• Transition: the graduate's guide to life after university
• Some core resources, translated into several languages.

In addition, LICC has significantly contributed to putting work on the agenda of the national church, not only through the work of Mark Greene and Tim Vickers who as an LICC employee pioneered the preparation of students for working life through the UCCF network, but also through the development of a team of Associate Workplace Speakers. This team of six are used not only in local church contexts but at national conferences like Spring Harvest, New Horizon and New Wine. Three of them have written for major publishers, most recently Paul Valler whose book Get a Life was published in 2008.

Engaging with the Bible

Prior to joining LICC in November 2007, Antony Billington taught Hermeneutics and Biblical Theology at the London School of Theology for sixteen years. As Head of Faculty, his role is to contribute to, and develop, the biblical and theological breadth and depth of the LICC Faculty and our ongoing work with Christians, churches and church leaders. He brings to this task a desire to see Scripture handled appropriately and applied wisely, in a way that will inspire and equip people to engage with the whole of life from the perspective of a biblical worldview.

Engaging with Culture

Nigel Hopper is LICC's Lecturer in Contemporary Culture. An accredited Baptist Minister, and former Editor with Scripture Union, Nigel is passionate about the potential for Christians to transform their culture through distinctively biblical engagement with it. To this end he is seeking to develop teaching programmes on Christian cultural engagement that can be delivered primarily in the context of a local church. Nigel also edits our weekly Connecting with Culture email, as well as our quarterly mailing publications: Highlights and EG magazine.

Engaging with Youth

Jason Gardner, our youth researcher, has been exploring the generation gap in society and the church and his book Mend the Gap: can the church reconnect the generations? was published by IVP in 2008. This work which focuses on how churches can create multigenerational discipling communities is now honing in on the area of youth discipleship. In an age where many young people's understanding of faith and spirituality is minimal or non existent how do we successfully nurture whole life young disciples?

Innovative Partnerships and Operational Principles: Getting the Word Out

It's one thing to develop good thinking and resources, it's quite another to get the word out. There is wisdom development and wisdom distribution. So, as an influencing institution, partnerships are vital to our goals. If you want to be effective yeast, someone needs to put you in the dough. Indeed, over the last three years we have seen an increasing number of organisations wanting to work with us to achieve maximum quality and maximum impact at a minimum cost. As such, our partnerships are governed by certain key principles.

Focus on influence - not organisational glory

LICC is committed to putting the kingdom goal before branding and organisational kudos, trusting that even if a partner gains more 'credit' for an initiative, this matters less than that the initiative is fruitful.

Focus on reach - not royalties

It is more important to get material out than worry too much about royalties for authors. This has opened up radically different forms of publishing and print distribution in a number of successful cases:

• Supporting Christians at Work was distributed at a low price through bishops, denominational leaders, partner organisations, reaching over 34,000 leaders. Probably still the most widely distributed major pastoral resource of the last twenty years.
• Imagine How We Can Reach the UK was offered to the Evangelical Alliance and they have given a whole issue of their magazine, Idea, to its publications. The result was that it reached 47,000 through their network and sparked a major national mission project.
• The joint development of a development of a booklet on Globalisation with Grove that has sold over 7,000 - around 4 times the reach of a standard Grove booklet.
• Developing a web-based advent calendar with Lifewords (formerly Scripture Gift Mission) which saw their web hits quadruple over the period and double afterwards.

Our partners have included the Evangelical Alliance, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, Spring Harvest, Alpha in the Workplace International and Reaching the Unchurched Network (RUN).

Similarly, we work with a large number of parachurch organisations, conference providers and churches from across the denominations - CofE, the Methodist Connexion, Elim, Fresh Expressions, New Frontiers, Church of Scotland, Emergent, and Salt and Light - with a wide range of theological emphases - from Keswick to New Wine.
Our partners include:

Funding & Future Growth

Although there is enormous demand for our team, LICC primarily dependent on donations from individuals and Trusts because churches, conferences and colleges are rarely able to pay anything approaching the full cost of developing and presenting our material. We have over 1,000 'friends' and our funding base has increased over the last five years quite considerably. This has enabled us to expand our staff as well as to generate much higher levels of output. However, we do need new partners to consolidate our financial base and to help us realise the medium-term vision. Our current annual budget is £840,000.

Looking to the future, LICC's primary objective is to make whole-life Christianity an unavoidable, central and operational component of church life in the UK. This is an ambitious goal and a longterm goal that can only be achieved through a persistent strategy that combines inspirational Biblical teaching with practical methods to make this a reality in the lives of individuals, churches and Christian agencies.

With this in mind, LICC recognised that we needed to grow our capacity to address these issues both through our own staff and through the development and deployment of others who share the vision, as has been the case with our Associate Workplace Speakers.
We need to appoint a faculty person to build on LICC's substantial, though foundational , workplace resources and develop biblical responses to the range of complex issues and challenges Christians now face in living out their faith in the marketplace and in seeking to influence structures, systems and values as well as individuals.

We envisage that this will increase our budget to around £950,000 per annum by 2010.

Three projects are key to the next stage of LICC's development. All are strategic and have global traction. However in terms of LICC's strategy their order of priority and execution is:

• The Imagine Project
• Developing whole-life Christianity church training resource
• Appointing a Director of Workplace Ministries

Can you help us envision and equip churches, leaders, and 'ordinary' Christians for missionary engagement in the real world?