The Round Church is an iconic cultural monument.
It is older than the University of Cambridge surrounding it.
It stands testament to the 12th century renaissance in Christian Europe which gave birth to the modern university movement and changed the world.
Through 900 years it has witnessed the rich contribution of the Christian worldview in Western culture, and the attempts of secularism to privatise our faith.
Today as people wonder what it means to be human, the Round Church puts our late modern dilemmas into their proper context, and calls us back to Christ who is our foundation.
The Christian gospel announces hope. Jesus is the Christ the Son of God.
Everything in creation exists from him and through him and points us to him.
Overcoming our divided minds and lives: ‘in him all things hold together’ (Col. 1.17).
His death and resurrection herald personal and cosmic reconciliation.
His teaching calls us to a transformative faith in him who is the way, the truth and the life – with promise for humanity in this age and in the age to come.
This hope is for the whole world – and Cambridge represents a unique opportunity to reach it.
Cambridge offers unique opportunities to reach the world with the hope that Christ is the foundation of everything in creation and redemption.
This is not just a matter of tourism, through which 16,000 visitors enter The Round Church every year.
Cambridge remains one of the globe’s most influential locations, with the university drawing the world’s best minds together and often retaining them through the city’s science park and local tech industries.
It also has one of the highest concentrations of Bible-teaching churches in the United Kingdom arising from a unique evangelical legacy. From Germany, smuggled up the River Cam, Luther’s works saw Cambridge become the birthplace of the English Reformation through which it became the cradle of English Puritanism and the Pilgrim Fathers. Here Charles Simeon inspired generations of students, leading to the formation of the Church Missionary Society, the departure of the Cambridge Seven, and ultimately to the formation of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, from which UCCF and later IFES were formed.
The City also benefits from a cross-fertilising cluster of evangelical charities serving the wider church. These most famously include Tyndale House, one of the world’s leading biblical research centres. They also include our own charity, The Foundations Trust, which now stewards The Round Church itself.
It was this global vision – intellectual, theological and evangelical – which led our founder Ranald Macaulay back to Cambridge in 2001, to establish this long-term work.
The opportunities of our work at The Foundations Trust are enriched by the deep evangelical roots of our board.
The work emerged twenty years ago from English L’Abri through our common founder, Cambridge alumnus Ranald Macaulay, who is also Francis Schaeffer’s son-in-law. Ranald carried forward Schaeffer’s theological commitment to the significance of the gospel in all areas of life, and the vital importance of a transformative personal faith in Christ.
Our early trustees included Lady Elizabeth Catherwood, Dr Martin Lloyd Jones’ daughter. When at the start of 2022 we changed our name from Christian Heritage to The Foundations Trust, Ranald was joined on the board by two of this generation’s leading evangelical statesmen:
As an undergraduate, John Lennox heard C. S. Lewis lecturing in Cambridge, and now he himself is an academic, author and an internationally acclaimed apologist who famously debated Richard Dawkins.
Lindsay Brown has served for over forty-five years in university ministry, including as global General Secretary of IFES; he recently stepped back from serving as International Director of the Lausanne Movement.
The Foundations Trust provides a long-term base to support ministry which reaches the world through Cambridge, holding out the reason for our hope that Jesus Christ, revealed in the gospel, is the foundation of everything in creation and redemption.
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