ABSTRACT
A small band of former gladiators and slaves, perhaps no more than 80 in number, and led by Spartacus, grew to an army of around 125,000, to challenge the might of the Roman Empire. The slave-woman Varinia, the lover of Spartacus, and with whom she has borne a son, escapes from the clutches of Crassus through the intervention of Batiatus, the former slave trader. Varinia holds up their son to his face, and simply proclaims, ‘he is free, Spartacus; he is free’. The rebellion, it would seem, is vindicated. The confident national church of the 1960s and 1970s – producing senior clergy at the forefront of progressive social change on decriminalising homosexuality or divorce laws, for example – gave way to a more circumspect church in the twentieth century. Local congregational life, therefore, and for the purposes of constructing meaning, value and concepts of wider belonging and catholicity, is dominant than it used to be.
