Living as I do in Greenwich, almost exactly on the Meridian Line, I thought it might interest readers of The Rock to hear about the Millennium and how it is being viewed at the coalface", so to speak, – and in particular about some of the Bugs which those who are responsible for it are having to contend with.

You should know, first of all, that I am in the fortunate position of being offered two quite different "views" of what is going on down the road on the peninsula known as Blackwall Point where the Dome is being built.

One view is the one which I have from our bedroom window: the view of the Dome itself, which we have seen gradually rising from the ground. That view I will call the external or outsider's view and it's what most residents of Greenwich have been getting used to for the past eighteen months and, more to the point, will have to live with throughout the whole of the Millennium year and for some time to come thereafter.

But there is another view which I can access because of knowing personally some of the people who are presently working on what will eventually be put into the Dome. That view I will call the internal or insider's view of things.

Bug No. 1 was always predictable. It is bred from the fact that English people are notoriously reluctant to get enthusiastic about, or spend money on, anything until it has become a proven success. That's why, although England has bred its fair share of inventors and innovators it's usually been people from abroad – USA, Germany, Japan, France to name but four – who have been willing to underwrite the financial risks involved with their own money and, deservedly, derive most of the financial benefit. 'Twas ever so, and it would be an understatement to say that it's difficult at the present moment to find anyone, locally or nationally, who is enthusiastic about the Dome or indeed the Millennium itself.

Of course once it's all open and proved to be successful it will be a very different story: we shall all be falling over ourselves in our protests that “we were really right behind it all the time”. Of course it won't be true, but why let the truth spoil a good storyline? Anyway that lies a little way off in the future.

It was the same with our forebears and the Dome's two predecessors – the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Britain in 1951. On both occasions its promoters had great difficulty in "getting the idea off the ground", and once again, it was a foreigner, Prince Albert of Hecht, Queen Victoria's husband (whose idea the Exhibition was in the first place) who made the real difference by his support and enthusiasm for the whole project from the word Go.

The detractors of the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park were confounded, because the result – Paxton's Crystal Palace – attracted so many visitors that it was possible to fund from its profits the building of many of the permanent museums in Kensington, as well as Imperial College.

Much the same thing happened in 1951. Although in that case the financial success of the venture was partly disguised by the fact that it came in the form of much-needed foreign currency from increased exports rather than in actual cash from people passing through the turnstiles, the truth remains it all happened pretty much as planned; and people today who went to it (myself included) believe that it compared quite favourably with its predecessor of 100 years previously.

Today, however, there are two very significant differences between the AD2000 event and its predecessors.

1851 was the brainchild of one exceptionally able man, Prince Albert, and he used his unique position as Prince Consort to get his ideas across to those who were in a position to implement them. It was also a time of unparalleled national self-confidence and the idea behind it was that Britain could hold its own amongst all the other manufacturing nations of the world, America, Germany, France in particular, as their equal if not their leader; whilst 1951, although it had no Albert to guide it, came shortly after the end of the Second World War in which the Free World had defeated Germany and Japan. This gave it an important morale-boosting "spin". Although there was still many signs in London of the devastation which the war had caused, there was the general feeling around that there was both something to celebrate and something to show by way of post-war recovery.

Bug No. 2 then arises partly from that fact that there just isn't an Albert-equivalent around – someone of real vision and ability who uses his status an influence to convince fearful politicians that it's in their interest to throw all their political weight behind the project; and partly because the phrase "The Year Two Thousand" doesn't have the same ring as "We've won the War" or "Victory!" did in 1951. So we're lacking two of the vital ingredients – a Man and a Message which were there before.

Why does “The Year Two Thousand” fail to raise a cheer? Well for a start there's Bug No.3 in the form those Clever Dicks who point out that the Third Millennium begins in 2001. But that's a comparatively trivial and small bug compared with Bug No. 4.

The big problem is that the majority of this nation aren't practising Christians and don't even pretend to be. So most of them have no incentive whatever to celebrate the [approximate] 2000th anniversary of someone they suppose to be no more than a Good Man – to be venerated, perhaps, alongside Mohammed, Moses, Buddha and various other historic figures of outstanding goodness and vision.

Which means, of course, that the Christian Churches cannot expect any preferential treatment in the Dome: and that, needless to say, has caused them a good deal of angst. In 1851/1951 it was widely assumed that Everyone Who Mattered was a member of the Church of England – or jolly well ought to be if they were true-born Englishmen. There were exceptions of course – some ancient Roman Catholic families (who were thought to be a bit peculiar anyway), and the Irish (who didn't really count). But in 1999 it's no longer possible to say anything definite about the Church of England except that the Monarch of the day is its Supreme Governor ("so far as the Law of God doth allow") and for that reason is not permitted to marry a Roman Catholic.

So how should the Christian Faith in general and Church of England in particular, be represented in the Dome? That was the problem which faced George Carey and his apparatchiks in Lambeth Palace.

That brings me onto my second View of the Dome – the view from inside.

Debugging Bug No.4 is taking the form of having a Faith Zone. The idea is that every major religion should be given space and opportunity to display its wares to those who are visiting.

It all sounds very simple and straightforward; that is, until you try to put it into practice.

For the fact is that unlike, say, the various manufacturers of computer equipment or zip-fasteners who may well be displaying their wares in the Dome and insisting "my product works better than the others", the various faiths represented in the Dome are not only each claiming to being superior to the others, but in the last analysis to being right whilst the others (in varying degrees) are wrong. In other words, like the other exhibitors they are competing for scarce resources (i.e. adherents, converts, clients, call them what you will) but are additionally claiming that their rivals are simply leading people up the garden path – if not to the everlasting bonfire!

Now there's nothing new about all this of course. The novelty consists in trying to bring all these conflicting faiths together under a single roof and trying to make an exhibition of them.

The Church of England in 1851/1951 didn't have this problem to contend with for the simple reason that they probably didn't see the need to have a Faith Zone – or anything like it. They simply carried on "Business as Usual" in their Cathedrals an Churches in the belief that in the end everyone even the most dyed-in-the-wool recusant Catholics (though perhaps not the Irish – that would be too much to hope!) would come to see the superiority of Anglicanism over every other faith that had ever existed. I'm not sure what happened to church-attendance figures in the aftermath of 1851 but I have reason to believe that they proved to be a disappointment, as was certainly the case a hundred years later.

Today's misapprehension behind the concept of a Faith Zone was brought home to me rather dramatically when one of its directors sent her research team out to interview a sample of young people to get them to give examples of ideas which they believed would change the world. The director was expecting that the researchers would come back with a whole lot of new principles designed "to make the world a better place and life a worthier thing".

But it was not to be. The young people had ideas a-plenty, but almost without exception they were hundreds if not thousands of years old (the Bible and Jesus Christ scoring most of the hits!). And this was hardly surprising for, as C.S. Lewis wrote in his essay The Poison of Subjectivism (1943):

The whole attempt to jettison traditional values as something subjective and to substitute a new scheme of values for them is wrong. It is like trying to lift yourself up by your own coat collar. Let us get two propositions written into our minds with indelible ink

1 The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary colour in the spectrum

2 Every attempt to do so consists in arbitrarily selecting some one maxim of traditional morality, isolating it from the rest, and erecting it into an unum necessarium [the one necessary thing]

Now if these proposition are true then two important consequences will follow from them.

1 The principles by which life should be lived, and through which civilization becomes possible will vary little, if at all, from one nation to another and from one age to the next and may equally well be found to have applied two thousand and more years ago just as much as they do today.

2 These principles can only be learnt the "hard way" by individuals from their parents and teachers. Unlike other forms of knowledge which can be picked up and forgotten as necessary, moral behaviour is something which has to be "assimilated" whole if it is to do any good. In other words nobody is born either "caring", "unselfish", "polite", "self-disciplined", "brave" or "temperate". They are all virtues which have to be acquired, sometimes painfully and with many failures in the course of their acquisition.

All of which brings us back to the good old $64,000-question What think ye of Christ? and Who do you say that I am? which Jesus Christ confronts all of us with.

For if Jesus is God (as Christians claim) then he has a unique position amongst all the good and wise and holy men that have ever existed. Equally if Jesus is not what he claimed to be, God incarnate, then there is no conceivable reason for including him amongst a gallery of world religions. He's someone the less said and known about the better. Aut Deus aut homo non bonus as Anselm's dictum said – either he's God or he's not a good man.

You can see why I am rather glad not to be personally involved in setting up the Faith Zone!

However, lest it should be thought that Forward in Faith is turning its back on the Millennium let me end by saying that, on the contrary, we are organizing one of the largest, if not the largest, single Christian events of the Millennium.

It is called Christ Our Future and it will take place on Saturday, 10th June 2000 at the London Arena, just over the Thames from the Dome.

There, at noon in the presence of at least ten thousand people we shall be celebrating, in the company of bishops from all over the world, the memorial of our "faith in the only sacrifice which can for sin atone" and our belief in the Man in whom God was "reconciling the world to Himself".

In doing this we shall be expressing our faith firstly that we have a future – which consists in our incorporation into Jesus Christ as his Body on earth; secondly, that this expression should take the form which it has kept from the very moment that it was instituted at the Last Supper until today; and thirdly that in Jesus Christ "the Light has shone in the darkness and the darkness has never overcome it"

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