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ProphetIn the role of prophet I ask not "What will this or that congregation agree to sing?" but "What shall we want to sing if our faith is Christ-centered?" Sometimes this means writing a hymn poem because I believe it needs to be written, in the hope that, somewhere, a congregation will want to sing it. During the early 1980s, while still resident in Britain, I was active in Oxford Christians for Peace, a local grouping in the national Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Often romantically dubbed "a city of dreaming spires," Oxford is a university city, a magnet for international tourists, and an essential stop on hundreds of coach (i. e. bus) tours from London. Most tourists had no idea that Oxford was ringed with nuclear installations and nuclear war targets. Fourteen miles to the north sat Upper Heyford U. S. Air Force Base, housing nuclear-bombs and nuclear-capable bombers. Greenham Common Cruise Missile Base lay thirty miles due south. British nuclear warheads were serviced at a facility thirty miles to the southeast, not far away from the Atomic Weapons research center at Aldermaston. A NATO command bunker was sited at High Wycombe, twenty-five miles to the east. If "deterrence" failed, Oxford would be obliterated. Amid teach-ins, prayer meetings, pickets, and non-violent protests, we agonized over the theological affront posed by nuclear war. A monk, Brother Roger, imitated Martin Luther's "95 Theses" by writing 32 Theses for Christians in a Nuclear Age. One of them remains etched in my memory: "The evils that Christians should fear most are not what their enemies might do to them, but what they might do to their enemies." This inspired me to write a hymn.
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