Steve Chalke

Awards

In 2004 Chalke was appointed MBE for his "services to social inclusion", an honour bestowed upon him by the Queen.

In 2005 Chalke was made an Honorary Fellow of Sarum College, Salisbury.

In 2012 Chalke was chosen as one of the Olympic torchbearers for London 2012.

In 2015 Chalke was awarded an honorary doctorate by Staffordshire University.

In 2017 Chalke was installed as a Canon of Southwark Cathedral in central London.

Early life and career

Chalke was born in Croydon, South London in 1955. As a teenager he became a Christian and decided to dedicate his life working to end poverty. He graduated from Spurgeon's College, was ordained a Baptist Minister in 1981, and served as a local minister for four years. Then, in 1985, he founded the Oasis Trust to set up housing, healthcare and educational projects.

Oasis has since developed into a group of charities working in 11 countries over four continents (Europe, Asia, Africa and North America) to deliver housing, training, youthwork, healthcare, family support and primary, secondary and higher education. It has grown into a significant voluntary sector provider, delivering services for local authorities and national governments as well as self-funded initiatives. In the UK Oasis’ family of charities now includes Oasis Community Learning, Oasis Aquila Housing, Oasis Community Partnerships, the Oasis Foundation and Stop the Traffik as well as a growing network of Oasis churches. In the UK alone Oasis now employs over 5,000 staff as well as working with thousands more volunteers.

Housing

In the late 1980s Chalke set up Oasis’ first housing project, developed to accommodate homeless young people living in South London and to support them on their journey to independent housing. Then, in the late 90s Chalke began working with a group of churches in his home town of Croydon, Surrey, as well as in partnership with Croydon Council to establish what is now known as the Oasis Aquila Foyer. The Foyer, which opened in 2000, and is an accredited Foyer through the Foyer Federation, provides housing and training for young people aged 18–25 who find themselves homeless.

Since the turn of the millennium the provision of housing for vulnerable people has continued to be a priority for Chalke and Oasis. As a result, in April 2014 Oasis Housing formally merged with another homelessness charity known as Aquila Way to become Oasis Aquila Housing, one of the Oasis UK subsidiary charities. It now helps around 1,000 vulnerable young people into housing each year.

Educator

From its early days Oasis has been involved in the provision of education not only in the UK but also in Asia and Africa.

In the UK early in the 1990s, Oasis began to develop professional training for youth workers. By 2009, this had grown into a range of academically and professionally validated short courses, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of study and the Oasis College for Higher Education was established in central London. Oasis College specialises in studies in children's work, youth work, family practice and community and now offers courses to over 250 students a year.

In 2004 Chalke set up Oasis Community Learning as part of the Oasis Group of charities in order to deliver secondary education through the UK Government’s Academies programme. The first three Oasis academies, at Enfield Lock, Grimsby and Immingham, opened in September 2007. Oasis’ involvement with secondary education has since grown and, from 2009, it has also began to develop a focus on primary education. As of September 2016, Oasis is responsible for 47 primary and secondary academies across England.

Oasis Community Learning aims to serve its academy students as well as to provide a centre of lifelong learning for the entire community, including; adult learning courses, community workers, healthy living programmes, sports courts and out-of-hours children's, youth and adult activities.

Church leader

Chalke was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1981, after studying at Spurgeon's College in London. He was minister of Tonbridge Baptist Church in Kent for four years before setting up the Oasis Trust. He later formed a developing network of community churches around the UK which began with the foundation of Oasis Church Waterloo, London SE1, in 2003 and now includes churches in Salford, Enfield, Southampton, Croydon and Bristol as well as a growing number of other locations. Chalke remains senior minister of Oasis Church Waterloo, in the London Borough of Lambeth where Oasis currently also serves its local community through the delivery of a children’s centre, a primary school, a secondary school, various adult education opportunities, a foodbank, a debt advice centre, a community farm, a coffee house, the local public library, a higher education college, a range of youth work schemes and a breadth of other community building programmes including football teams, choirs, yoga classes and circuit training, reading groups and language courses and more.

Broadcaster

Chalke has been a regular broadcaster for over 25 years. Hosted various shows for ITV during the 1990s as well as being part of their GMTV morning breakfast show team from 1993 to '99. He also presented BBC1's Songs of Praise during that period, as well as hosting a regular show on BBC Radio 4 about community development entitled 'Changing Places'. He currently contributes to Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2 and 'Prayer For The Day' on BBC Radio 4.

Guinness world record holder

In 2005 Chalke became the official holder of the Guinness World Record for the largest amount of sponsorship money ever raised by an individual through a single event. He broke this record by raising £1.25 million for Oasis' work with schools in disadvantaged communities, through running the London Marathon. His record was beaten at the following year's marathon by Sir Steve Redgrave who officially raised over £1.785 million. However, in April 2007, Chalke recaptured the title as well as becoming the fastest money-generating sports person in history, by raising over £1.855 million in 3 hours 58 minutes 40 seconds. When he crossed the finishing line at the 2011 London Marathon, after 4 hours 31 minutes, Chalke broke this record for a third time by raising £2.32 million.

Activism

Chalke has taken on many causes in his career, from working with vulnerable children on the African continent, to community learning through his Oasis Academies, to helping churches to realize their potential for helping people in their communities with such issues as poverty and homelessness, to stopping human trafficking, and a myriad of other things.

Faithworks

In 2001 Chalke founded The Faithworks Movement, along with a companion magazine, to raise awareness of the role the Church can play within their local communities. Faithworks's resources support churches of all denominations across the UK. Chalke has become a spokesman for the church in the national debate about the provision of public services by faith-based groups. Over 20,000 members—including individuals, churches and other not-for-profit organizations—count themselves as part of the Faithworks movement.

Stop the Traffik

Chalke is the founder and chair of Stop the Traffik, a global coalition of over 1600 charities in 97 countries, which works to raise awareness of human trafficking in all countries and communities and to stop the buying and selling of people. In 2008 he was appointed Special Advisor on Community Action to the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT), following the coalition's delivery of 1.5 million signatures in support of a global declaration against human trafficking at a UN conference in Vienna in February of that year. He held this position until 2015.

March 2009 saw the publication of Stop The Traffick: People should not be Bought and Sold, co-authored by Chalke and Cherie Blair, which looks worldwide at the issue and responses to it.

Chalke continues to work with Stop the Traffick campaigns, including "Start Freedom" and a Traffick-free chocolate campaign. As a result of the latter, in:

The Meaning of the Cross

In 2003 Chalke co-authored The Lost Message of Jesus with Alan Mann (Zondervan). This book provoked considerable controversy within evangelical Christian circles. The debate arose mostly because of Chalke's rejection of a fundamental evangelical theological understanding of the atonement known as penal substitution. Chalke's views drew much criticism as well as support, with numerous articles, blogs and books being written on both sides of the debate.

The continuing controversy led to the Evangelical Alliance organising a symposium in July 2005 to discuss the issue. A record of this symposium includes a chapter by Chalke and his views are also contained in "the atonement debate". A group of three conservative evangelical theologians responded to Chalke with their book, Pierced for our Transgressions (Crossway Publishing, 2007), which strongly criticised Chalke's position as inconsistent with some evangelical confessions of faith. However, the prominent Anglican Open Evangelical theologian and former Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, endorsed Chalke as a leading evangelical and spoke out against the latter book, commenting, for instance, that ‘despite the ringing endorsements of famous men, it [Pierced For Our Transgressions] is deeply, profoundly, and disturbingly unbiblical.’

Support for social activism

Chalke is a prominent social activist and leading advocate of the role of Christian faith in public life and the delivery of public services including education, health care, youth services, etc. He has drawn strong criticism from leading atheists and secularists such as Polly Toynbee and Keith Porteous Wood, with whom he has publicly debated, as well as Terry Sanderson and others for his stance. "Most dangerous are the Christian global corporations such as Oasis headed up by Steve Chalke who have snatched growing numbers of academy contracts, also have ambitions to run hospitals too."

However, Chalke maintains that though Christian faith is personal, it is never private, and has written extensively about Public Theology (see Intelligent Church).

"There is a widespread, popular myth that unless faith is restricted to the private sphere, it will inevitably lead to intolerance and extremeism [sic]. But the reality could not be more different. Beneath the headlines of religious fanaticism and intolerance are the untold stories of countless individuals who, motivated by their personal faith, choose to work for the betterment of our society. For them, faith may be personal, but it is never private. Like the thousands of churches and other faith groups up and down the country that commit to improving the lives of society's most vulnerable - running homeless hostels, alcohol recovery programmes and youth mentoring schemes in response to the needs they see around them."

Chalke claims that; "Intolerance and extremeism [sic] are more to do with fundamentalism, than faith. Indeed, the memory of the 20th century is forever scarred by the fundamentalism and intolerance of communism, whose regimes not only left millions dead, but impoverished and excluded many more." He maintains that, "Without public faith, there would not have been a civil rights movement in the US or a Jubilee debt cancellation amopaign [sic] in the UK. Both these movements were inspired and led by people of faith who decided that what they believed about God and humanity should impact on the world around them."

Chalke contends that there are two elements to healthy democracy; representative and participatory. He has suggested: "Democracy used to be focused around participation as much as representation, two ideas which together created a balance." Whilst Chalke believes that the hallmark of any healthy democracy is that it gives expression to these two types of democracy, he suggests that, "In our modern society, the democratic process has become far more passive and is now dominated by the idea of representation, where elected representatives (e.g. MP's) are held responsible for delivering the needs of those who voted, or who did not vote, for them. Westminster is the seat of representative democracy. Our society needs to invent new forms and practices that combine representative with participative democracy. The two can and indeed must meet. And the crucial point regarding the relationship between the two - between representative and participative democracy - is that the activity of the second guarentees [sic] the quality of the first. Representative democracy needs to be held accountable by participative democracy. /about-us]."

Chalke developed the Charities Parliament, now known as the People's Parliament, in order to establish a stronger voice for third-sector organisations in public life. It is intended to enable debate and dialogue between churches, charities, faith groups and government and aims to increase participation by these groups in public life.

The People's Parliament has received support from many parliamentarians and church leaders, including the Bishop of Liverpool, the Right Revd James Jones, who endorsed it, saying: "This new initiative is based on the well established principles of Christ-centred vision, rigorous thinking, a depth of community engagement and a clear articulation of a biblical worldview, which are the foundations on which Oasis' work has been built."

Support for Monogamous Same-Sex Relationships

In early 2013, Chalke sent what The Independent said would be "shockwaves through Britain’s evangelical community", of which he is a leader, by stating, both on the Oasis Trust website and in an article in Christianity magazine, that he supports monogamous same-sex relationships and marriage.

In mid-January 2013, Chalke posted both abridged and unabridged/extended versions of his declaration that he will no longer oppose – and will now support – monogamous same-sex relationships. Characterized by The Independent as a "decision which will send shockwaves through Britain’s evangelical community", the declaration came soon after the newspaper having reported a small but growing acceptance of homosexuality among at least "some" evangelicals.

Chalke had been reflecting on the matter for a long time and his January 2013 declaration represents a completely opposite position from the one he had earlier when, in 2001, he wrote an article for Christianity (then known as Christianity and Renewal) entitled "What might Jesus say to Roy Clements about the Church and the Homosexual debate?" Clements had been a leader among Britain's evangelicals for many years when he suddenly revealed that he was gay, left his wife and began a relationship with a man.

After performing his first same-sex couple blessing ceremony in his church in September 2012 and now offering a special same-sex couple blessing liturgy of his own creation on the Oasis website, Chalke explained that he was torn about the January 2013 declaration, writing that he was "[c]ompelled because, in my understanding, the principles of justice, reconciliation and inclusion sit at the heart of Jesus’s message. Afraid because I recognise the Bible is understood by many to teach that the practice of homosexuality, in any circumstance, is a sin or ‘less than God’s best’."

Because evangelical communities tend to place enormous importance on Biblical literalism, inerrancy and infallibility, the approximately 5,000-word extended version of Chalke's declaration provided theological and scriptural justifications for his new acceptance of committed homosexual relationships. Acknowledging that many of his fellow evangelicals will be upset by it, Chalke wrote that some would think that he strayed from scripture and is no longer an evangelical. "I have formed my view, however, not out of any disregard for the Bible's authority, but by way of grappling with it and, through prayerful reflection, seeking to take it seriously." Chalke insisted that it is only by scriptural misinterpretation that those who claim the Bible condemns all forms of homosexuality have arrived at such a position; and that this position will eventually become the minority view in the same way that those who cited Biblical justifications for slavery and a secondary role for women have also become minority views.

Chalke criticised traditional Christianity's rejection of "faithful gay relationships", saying that it has left far too many people feeling "vulnerable and isolated". He also wrote that it has done genuine physical harm. "People’s lives are at stake", he wrote. "Numerous studies show that suicide rates among gay people, especially young people, are comparatively high. Church leaders sometimes use this data to argue that homosexuality is unhealthy when tragically it's anti-gay stigma, propped up by Church attitudes, which, all too often, drives these statistics."

"When we refuse to make room for gay people to live in loving, stable relationships", he wrote, "we consign them to lives of loneness, secrecy and fear. It's one thing to be critical of a promiscuous lifestyle, but shouldn't the Church consider nurturing positive models for permanent and monogamous homosexual relationships?"

Chalke is a member of Accepting Evangelicals which describes itself as an "open network of Evangelical Christians who believe the time has come to move towards the acceptance of faithful, loving same-sex partnerships at every level of church life, and the development of a positive Christian ethic for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people."

In a 2017 interview with HuffPost Chalke explained that he believes the writings of the Apostle Paul in the New Testament are warning the early Christian Church against engaging in human relationships that are based on exploitation, abuse, and corruption. On the other hand, he claims, the New Testament has nothing to say about genuine, compassionate love between people of the same gender, as it is understood in today’s world.

“Every Christian believes God to be a God of love. It is no wonder that these abusive practices are condemned by inspired scripture. But it is a disingenuous misreading of the text to conclude that what Paul describes in Romans 1 can be used to prevent people forming loving, faithful, and nurturing relationships with people of the same-sex.”

He continued; “Our poor understanding of the New Testament has brought misery, persecution, oppression and rejection to countless hundreds of thousands and millions of LGBT people. It’s time to apologize for the mistakes we’ve made and move on.”

Support for Transgender People

Chalke has officiated at a number of services celebrating and welcoming transgender people into Oasis Church Waterloo. He and others have developed a liturgy which affirms trans people.

Rejection of Biblical Inerrancy/Infallibility

In February 2014 Chalke published a paper on the Oasis UK website entitled "Restoring Confidence in the Bible: Can we use the Bible as a reliable moral and spiritual guide in our twenty-first century globalised world?" in which he states his rejection of the evangelical teaching that the bible is inerrant or infallible.

In his paper Chalke argues, 'Throughout my life, the Bible has been a constant reference point and source of personal inspiration. Because of this, I feel deep sorrow that, on one hand, vast numbers of people around the world consider our sacred text to be, at best, confusing and, at worst, intolerant and violent. On the other, I am frustrated that our responses, as the Church, to their questions are so often ill thought through, poorly articulated and laden with in-house, inhospitable and inaccessible language...Developing a consistent and honest methodology for interpreting the Bible is a pivotal issue for the Church around the world. Only as we adopt an open, humble, discursive and transparent approach to this task will we be in a strong position to respond with integrity to the moral, social and political issues which face us as individuals, as local and national communities and as a global society as a whole.'

Personal life

Chalke enjoys going to the gym and running. He married Cornelia Reeves in 1980 and they have four adult children; Emily, Daniel, Abigail and Joshua and three young grandsons.

Writings

Chalke is the author of more than 40 books. He has also written monthly columns for Prima Baby on fatherhood and for Christianity magazine on church leadership. His writings include: