Tim Chester, a pastor at The Crowded House, Sheffield, penned an article published at the excellent theologynetwork.org. Here’s how it begins:

In our culture Friends have become a television programme and Neighbours are experienced vicariously through Australian soap operas. We’re living in an increasingly fragmented and isolated society. It’s not just community that’s fragmented, but truth itself. Truth is now a matter of individual choice. We’re left with little shared basis for community life or social cohesion.

Human societies have always struggled to integrate the one and the many; the individual and the communal. Sometimes we universalise: the one dominates over the many. We see this in totalitarianism where the state constrains individual expression. We see it, too, in more subtle imperialisms, in the McDonaldisation of the world – the spread of an homogenous, global culture which destroys or co-opts local cultures. We’re manipulated by advertising and peer pressure into conformity with the consumer dream – a false dream at that.

Sometimes we particularise. In the West we’ve become a society of individuals. Personal freedom and choice is everything. The political discourse is all about individual consumer rights. We don’t want to take responsibility for others. Ultimately I’m answerable only to myself. But, when others are also answerable only to themselves, the result is fragmentation and isolation.

In this context the doctrine of the Trinity is good news.

Read the rest of the article here.