ND had a Christian CND section,which could draw 900 to a conference at Coventry Cathedral in 1981

Many churchgoers accepted new ways of expressingfaith which supplemented their existing perceptions and which en-hanced their appreciation of God, but they objected when traditionalideas were explicitly challenge

here was new thinking, too, about the purpose of Christ’s com-ing. In the past it had been widely assumed that Jesus came to earthto redeem individuals but from the late nineteenth century someProtestants began to argue that individual conversion was but partof a much greater design, the establishment of the kingdom of God onearth. Rather than portraying the kingdom as an other-worldly phe-nomenon, Christian Socialists depicted it in terms of earthly peaceand justice and proposed that it could — and should — be brought intobeing here and now. These ideas spread beyond Christian Socialistcircles and were reflected in the hymns that congregations sang.