One of our family traditions around Christmas time is a trip to London to look at the lights, to imbibe the atmosphere, and to stroll around the city at a leisurely pace taking in the scents, sights and sounds of the great city. We usually spend time in Trafalgar Square listening to carols being sung in front of the huge Christmas Tree given by the people of Norway, and looking at the Crib or Nativity Scene. As you may know, the crib that has been around for many years was vandalised, and there is now a temporary replacement awaiting the result of a competition for a new design.

That’s a really challenging thought: what sort of crib is most suited to Trafalgar Square in an age when many do not know the story of the birth of Jesus, in a pluralist cultural context, and at a time when art (Tracy Emin, for example) is pushing the boundaries of form and content? Mark Wallenger has apparently suggested an empty Mothercare cot, and this reminded me of Benjamin Britten’s Child of our Time where the Christian story was made the vehicle for a prophetic contemporary statement.

Over the twelve months of this year in columns for the Webmag I have been attempting to give the flavour of everyday life at Mill Grove, and I hope you have a better idea of what goes on in our home. Ruth and I are committed to Mill Grove for the rest of our lives and so it means a great deal to us. But at the same time I have been occupied on several related projects involving lecturing and writing. One of these is what we have called “Child Theology” and since January I have been at consultations in Cape Town, Houston, Penang and Cambridge on this subject.

What we are trying to do is to explore the full implications of what Jesus meant when he placed a little child in the middle of his disciples and said: “Unless you change and become like this little child you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” It’s obviously of considerable importance to all Christians, given that Jesus is their Lord and provides a pattern for their lives. But the truth is that this brief but revolutionary action and teaching has all but been ignored by traditional theology. Children are as marginal to Christian theology as women, black people, and the poor before the radical theological movements of the 1960s onwards.

We are aiming to bring children to the heart of theological discourse, and this is causing us to ponder how different would have been the dynamics of Christian churches and societies where the Christian faith was predominant had Jesus been taken more seriously at this point. In the UK as I write there is a new Children’s Bill based on the Green Paper Every Child Matters. How come it needed a Government initiative to spell out something that should be taken for granted by the whole of society? Could this have anything to do with the reluctance of Christians to model their lives and teaching on that of Jesus?

For those of you with really good memories I wrote something along similar lines in December 2003. And it is the defacing of the original crib and the need to replace it that has caused me to reflect on this as another Christmas approaches. You will recall that in the Christmas narrative of Luke the baby Jesus was laid in a manger because there was no room for him in the inn. Try as I might, I cannot get out of my mind the feeling that this marginalisation of Jesus at birth is a poignant symbol of the continuing marginalisation of children in our society.

There will be those who disagree, and they will point to the evidence of educational programmes and government child care initiatives. But lurking beneath all such developments there seems to be another agenda: education will improve the economic prosperity of the nation; child care enables parents to work, and so on. And so for me the new crib will be both a revisiting of the wonderful Christmas story and also a challenge to contemporary views of children and childhood.

If you happen to visit London around Christmas time you may meet us in Trafalgar Square: if not let me wish you a joyful Christmas. I look forward to catching up with you in the New Year.