In our third podcast of 2010, Greenbelt Trustee, Simon Hall spoke to Brian about about his recent trip to Palestine, the Obama administration, his new book 'A New Kind of Christianity' and the churches division over human sexuality.

Listen or download using the player below.

The following is an extract from the interview :

"I would consider myself fairly well read on the Israel/Palestine issue, but it really does affect you to be there. The experience of seeing the wall, seeing this huge structure. You can't see it without thinking of apartheid in South Africa, or without thinking of Berlin, and I can't see it without thinking of the wall that my country is building at the Mexican Border. It's a visible expression of apartness. I think this idea that we can physically solve our problems with a wall, this sense that "Forget it, we can't get along, we have to divide", I think is very, very sad. So the experience of seeing the Wall stands out in my memory from the visit.

While we were out there, we stayed with a wonderful Palestinian Greek Orthodox family. So many Christians in the States aren't even aware that there are a lot of Christian Palestinians. And you come to realise that people are people - the father had just died, the mother is a widow, she has an adult son with Downs Syndrome - and to be in their family and feel all of those issues going on that would be felt in any family, it's just very powerful.

A very moving experience - we went to the offices of the PLO and a committed Christian who works in the PLO gave us a briefing on the status of peace negotiations, and for me growing up in the US, where the news is very pro-Israel slanted, PLO was a bad word! You realise that here are people who are trying to work on their problems.

But I would say the two most moving experiences I had were discussions with people who had been tortured by the Israeli Defence Force.

One man had spent a year in prison with no charges against him, then was let out with no explanation. After a couple of years, he was arrested again, and spent another year in prison with no charges, no trial, nothing, was released with no explanation. Several years later, he was arrested for one day, and then let go, and it was just as if he was arrested to remind him that he had no control over his future. And to think that somebody had had two years of their life taken away, and they were not consumed with hate... it was a very powerful thing to see that a human being can say "This is an injustice in my world, and I'm not going to let it turn me into a hateful person."

And another guy had been brutally tortured, and he said "I used to be filled with hate, but I've changed and I have no hate in my heart any more." It was very moving, that a human being can forget that hatred.

The news media tends to paint extremes - the settlers and the suicide bombers - and there are a lot of very ordinary people on the ground, who do not fit these extremes. When you paint the whole group based on the extremes, it's a terrible loss for everybody.

I think about a young woman I met, newly married. She said, "This is all I've ever known. My whole life has been lived in this situation, I have nothing to compare it to. My parents tell me that life used to be so much better. And I can only imagine it - I've never experienced it. So I'm making the best of it."

And her fear is that her generation have been so oppressed, that they become depressed and make the best of it that you can. To me, that sense of a generation being so demoralised that they accept the state of affairs is very sad.

And a big reason why I've stuck my neck out on certain issues because I grew up evangelical, I love the Bible, I'm committed to the Bible, but the fact is that in the past we've used the Bible to do some awful, awful things. Here's a situation where the UK and the US are deeply connected.

English Bible-believing Christians got on boats, and based on their reading of the Bible, came to North America, and decided to lift the story of the slaughter of the Canaanites, the conquest of Judea by the Hebrew people, they lifted that and applied it to how they would treat the native people of North America. It was ethnic cleansing, it was attempted genocide. Horrible, horrible things done in the name of the Bible.

I've never heard a sermon in my life where a preacher says, "Here's how the Bible was misused by our ancestors, let's be sure not to misuse it again."

Everybody talks about William Wilberforce, an evangelical Christian who led the battle against slavery, but we neglect to say that it was other Christians who were defending slavery, and that Wilberforce and his allies were vastly outnumbered.

We've never gone back to say how did our use of the Bible cause terrible destruction in the past, and as a result, we're using the Bible in exactly the same way when it comes to Israel and Palestine.

Can I just use a strong word? It's stupid. And it's wrong, and it's evil, that we haven't had that kind of reflection. The Bible calls us to examine ourselves. This is a situation where we have boards in our eyes, and we've got to deal with it."