Fulcrum and the Barnabas Fund

Letter to the Church of England Newspaper, 20 March 2009

from Elaine Storkey, Graham Kings and Simon Cawdell on behalf of the Fulcrum Leadership Team

Sir, We wish to correct a misleading impression in the letter from Mark Green, Deputy Director of the Barnabas Fund, (CEN 13 March 2009).  He suggested that articles written by Dr David Zeidan and Dr Tawfik Hamid for the Fulcrum website had been wrongly presented by Fulcrum as an official ‘Barnabas Fund’ response.

Unfortunately, the letter omits to mention that these two articles were issued to us by Mark Green himself, as Deputy Director of the Barnabas Fund.  Following Ben White’s review of his book, Patrick Sookhdeo (Director of the Barnabas Fund) had contacted Elaine Storkey (Chair of Fulcrum) and explicitly asked for a right to reply. This call was reinforced by calls from Mark Green, (Deputy Director of the Barnabas Fund) to both Graham Kings (Theological Secretary) and Simon Cawdell (General Secretary), with the same request. Fulcrum gladly complied, and agreed to the request that such a reply would be published on the front page.

The articles by Dr David Zeidan and Dr Tawfik Hamid were then submitted to us by Mark Green. We gave them prominence because we accepted them as commissioned by the Barnabas Fund, and constituted Patrick Sookhdeo’s ‘right to reply’. If this had not been agreed, they would have been posted along with other contributions on the Forum pages.  

To present these articles as a response from the Barnabas Fund, who had commissioned and sent them to us, was therefore the right and proper thing to do. We hope this clarifies the situation. A fuller statement about this can be found on Fulcrum (www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk).

Yours sincerely

Elaine Storkey (Chair of Fulcrum), Graham Kings (Theological Secretary), Simon Cawdell, (General Secretary) on behalf of the Fulcrum leadership team.

[The letter from Mark Green to the CEN may be found on the Fulcrum thread here, 14 Mar 09, 9.05am. For the Fulcrum index page on this discussion, click here]

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