How Fierce Convictions Led to Amazing Grace
“Last Sunday there was preaching
We all went out to hear
The little church was crowded
The rich and poor were there
It was a splendid sermon
The singing full and free
Amazing grace
How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me”
Salt and Light Stories, Illustrated by Wade McComas
At the end of June, we launched Salt and Light Stories, examples of modern-day “saints” who have shaped our perspective of seeking the welfare of the city in the form of illustrated short stories or “mini-comics.” We chose comic-style storytelling because it is becoming a familiar genre for Gen Z and Alpha, for whom graphic novels are now fully mainstream.
We started with a comic adaptation of an essay (“The Story of Solid Rock”) by the pioneer rock and roll artist Larry Norman from the liner notes on his album In Another Land, his best-selling album ever and also the one best-received by mainstream Christian culture at the time (1976). We released one page a week, and the adaptation is now complete. You can see all of the pages in sequential order here.
We now shift to the comics about our namesake, the Clapham Sect, a group of social reformers in late 18th-century England. Our latest post, “How Fierce Convictions Led to Amazing Grace,” introduces us to the stories of William Wilberforce and Hannah More. Spearheaded by Wilberforce, a politician who worked to abolish the slave trade, and More, a poet who wrote plays and poems for cultural reform, the historical Clapham Group has shown us that pursuing justice requires a holistic theory of social change — one that leverages both political and cultural influence.
I first heard of Wilberforce in 1984 when the pastor of my church in Pittsburgh, The Rev. John Guest, gave a sermon about him after reading God’s Politician, a biography that I promptly bought and have never put down. As I entered the Masters of Arts and Religion program at Trinity Seminary a few years later to focus on “public square theology,” Wilberforce and the Clapham community were a north star and an aspiration. Rubber met the road when I oversaw the longshot challenger Congressional race of Rick Santorum in 1990, and after a surprise victory, came to Capitol Hill as his Chief of Staff to practice what I had been planning to preach.
For the next 16 years, until I left the Hill in 2007, Clapham and Wilberforce were constant vocational companions and counselors. I then started my firm, The Clapham Group, to embody the principles of their work and contextualize it to the 21st-century American public square. We are writing two stories about Wilberforce and Clapham member, playwright, and poet Hannah More because many people find it easier to receive and process new information visually in an increasingly visual world.
Holy Trinity Church, Clapham
As I write this, my wife, Leanne, and I just attended services at Holy Trinity Church, the very church that the Clapham community worshiped together in. We had dinner with the current pastor, Jago Wynne, and discussed how relevant Wilberforce’s example is to us today. He was fully integrated in his spiritual walk. As John Piper wrote in his short biography of Wilberforce (which we urge you to read), “[he] sustained himself and swayed others by his joy. If a man can rob you of your joy, he can rob you of your usefulness. Wilberforce’s joy was indomitable and therefore he was a compelling Christian and politician all his life. This was the strong root of his endurance.”
Outside Holy Trinity Church in Clapham
Hannah More, his wealthy friend and a co-worker in many of his schemes for doing good (please read more about Hannah in our friend Karen Swallow Prior’s biography of her), said to him, “I declare I think you are serving God by being yourself agreeable . . . to worldly but well-disposed people, who would never be attracted to religion by grave and severe divines, even if such fell in their way.”
Plaque in front of the Holy Trinity Church in Clapham
Later this week, we will be in Rome for a gathering at the Vatican, where I have prepared a talk on the importance of Beauty to reach Gen Z with the Good News. Visual storytelling also enhances the reader’s experience and usually increases comprehension and retention of information. We want these stories to have the best chance of reaching as many people as possible. We especially have in mind Gen Z readers who are currently coming of age and finding their way in the world – they are in a crucial stage of their lives when encountering these saints whose stories we will be telling can hopefully influence them positively for the future.
The project is being guided by Emily Mitchell, in partnership with illustrator Wade McComas. Last year, Emily wrote a history of the Clapham Group that you also might enjoy perusing.
If you subscribe, a new comic page and an accompanying essay will be delivered to your inbox every Wednesday. On Fridays, we will also send an additional short essay to share more about Salt and Light Stories, our mission, vision, and hopes for this project. We invite you to follow us on Instagram @saltlightstories for exciting announcements, sneak peeks at new content, and more.
As we said when we launched this project, it is a grand experiment – please join us and subscribe to our substack page here for free. We are excited to share these stories that have profoundly shaped us.
One last providential twist to our trip this week. When we return from our side trip to Rome, we will spend some time in Oxford with the Rev John Guest, who was born and raised there, and although still living in Pittsburgh, happens to be visiting his boyhood home the same weekend we are! While studying as an engineer, he was invited to hear the American evangelist Billy Graham, in London, 1954. That night John responded to God’s call and made his commitment to Jesus Christ at age eighteen. Shortly thereafter, he felt God calling him into full-time service as a pastor. We will be worshiping with John and his wife Kathi at St. Ebbe’s this Sunday if you want to join us. Full circle.
Statue of Wilberforce
So for us at The Clapham Group, we have learned some very important lessons from the likes of William Wilberforce, Hannah More, and their cohort at the original “Clapham group,” lessons that we try to emulate and perpetuate: share conviction in community, take a holistic approach to the issues that we face and the problems that we are trying to solve, and be transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his Church that is at the heart of what we believe and how we live our lives.
We hope you will join our Clapham community through this comic series.