Christians have always believed that men and women are both made in the image of God: that we have been given shared responsibility to subdue, fill and have dominion over the earth, and that we are heirs together of the gift of life.

Christians have also always believed that men and women are complementary: that we complete one another in family and society, that marriage is a picture of Christ and the Church, that the world would be impoverished if there were only men or only women, and that the sexes are characterised by a beautiful difference.

Today, both the fact and the nature of this beautiful difference are widely debated. For some in society at large, the complementarity of male and female seems oppressive, owing to its implications for sexual expression and gender identity. Many in the Church, while affirming complementarity in principle, struggle to agree on how it should be worked out in practice. With pressure from those who want a gender-neutral society on one side, and those whose vision of family and society looks like 1950s middle America on the other, the future of complementarity is uncertain.

So we’re getting some of the world’s most insightful thinkers on the subject to help us. Alastair Roberts has a PhD from Durham, and is the author of the encyclopaedic Heirs Together: A Biblical Theology of the Sexes (Crossway, 2018), which promises to be the most substantial contribution to the discussion for a generation. Hannah Anderson has been writing insightful articles on women, theology and the image of God for years, and her recent work includes Made for More: An Invitation to Live in God’s Image (Moody, 2014) and Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul (Moody, 2016), both of which she has written as a wife and mother of three young children in rural Virginia.

The conference will be hosted by Andrew Wilson (King’s Church, London) and Livy Gibbs (Emmanuel Church, Greenwich), and will include plenary sessions, breakout discussions, meals together, and time for Q&A.

The cost of THINK 2018 is £150 per person, which includes shared meals at lunchtime and in the evenings, but does not include overnight accommodation in London. We will begin at 3:30pm on the Tuesday, and finish by 2pm on the Thursday. Our hope is that as individuals and teams, men and women, come together to worship, listen and discuss, God will give us wisdom to help us reflect his image more fully.

So come. Take time. Be refreshed. Think.