A Tale of Two Worlds

Andrew Kirk has spent most of his adult life in theological education. After a three year curacy in a North London parish, where he met his future wife, he lived and taught in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There with his growing family (3 children) for 12 years, he worked with a number of different theological institutions. He was a founder member of the Latin American Theological Fraternity (1970) and the Kairos Community (1976). Whilst in Latin America he wrote on the use of the Bible in Liberation Theology and on the revolutionary nature of Jesus life and ministry. Returning to the UK, he helped found the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (a lay academy) and taught there for eight years. He also acted as Theologian Missioner for the Church Mission Society during the same period. Subsequently he was appointed as the Dean of Mission at the Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham and later a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham in the field of Mission Studies. Since retirement in 2002, he has been involved with theological institutions in the UK, Prague, Amsterdam and Budapest. He has also been involved in leading study sessions in Romania, Sweden, Singapore, the Lebanon, Armenia, South Korea and New Zealand. He.has continued writing. His latest books are Being Human: An Historical Inquiry into Who We Are, The Abuse of Language and the Language of Abuse (both published in 2019), and Truth to Tell: Basic Questions and Best Explanations (published in 2021). He is married to Gillian. They have four grandchildren. When not staring at a screen, he busies himself in local ministry, gardening, walking, playing badminton, trying to finish crosswords and supporting Arsenal FC.He is qualified to write books, as he has already had 21 published over a period of 50 years by a number of different publishers (three in Spanish). Some of his books have been translated into Portuguese, German, Swedish and Korean. Some have been co-published in the USA. As far as the topic of this book is concerned he has spent the last 40 years seeking to investigate a Missiology of Western culture, i.e. what are the key aspects of Western culture that the Christian Gospel should be engaging with and how should it respond to them. In particular over the last 10 years he has dedicated much time to three highly controversial topics, namely human identity, sexual existence and abortion, all of which ask basic questions of Christian belief. This has led him to think about the main theological reason(s) why Western culture is becoming increasingly confrontational against its own long Christian moral and spiritual heritage. The fruit of this investigation is summarised in this book.