The Report from the Commission on Urban Life and Faith
Church House Publishing / Methodist Publishing House 2006
ISBN 1-85852-315-X
click here for further details
A Fulcrum Review by Stephen Cox
This Report is much needed and very welcome. Its predecessor, the 1985 'Faith in the City' report had a huge impact, lifting the inner cities up the political and the church agenda. Political attention has continued to be given to the inner cities, though it has not always been well focussed, whilst my impression is that inner city ministry has slipped quite a long way down the churches' agenda.
I was vividly struck, speaking with a senior Diocesan official about the relative lack of resources and interest in inner cities ministry compared to post 1985, when he replied to my observation by saying "what is 'Faith In The City'?". It made me realise that a whole generation has grown up in leadership and ministry who know nothing of that report. Perhaps this is part of the explanation for the steady decline in the number of clergy looking to serve in the inner city. Before 'Faith in the City' it was common for clergy seeking a move to put on their application forms to the clergy appointments adviser 'no UPA' 'no inner city'. After 1985 it was much easier to attract people into Urban Priority Area (UPA) parishes. Steadily, since then, applications to such parishes have declined and once again it is now extremely hard to fill posts in many inner city parishes. This Report is therefore very timely and welcome.
The Report identifies significant changes to our cities since 1985, among them the rise of religious pluralism as an issue, the emergence of a so called 'regeneration industry', the effect of globalisation, an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and a very much more dynamic participation by faith organisations in the life of our cities, partly as a result of the Church Urban Fund (CUF), partly as a result of government recognition of the potential role of faith communities. Against this background it tries to answer the question 'what makes a good city?'
The 'central idea' of The Report (v) is 'faithful capital', that collection of values, empowerments, relationships, and motivations that often makes community life possible and usually enhances it richly. It is an idea analogous to 'social capital'. 'Religious faith is still one of the richest, most enduring and most dynamic sources of energy and hope for cities. Faith is a vital - and often essential - resource in the building of relationships, and communities.'(1.28). This of course raises the question of how we build and sustain faithful capital. The Report is clear that this cannot be done by law and politics, which 'cannot make people good'. (6.43) As the powerlessness of governments is exposed by ever proliferating legislation that is not, and probably never can be enforced, law is brought into disrepute. This receives a brief mention in The Report (6.43) and could have done with further analysis. The replacement of community and trust by law and regulation, and the resultant loss of respect for both law and politics, with accompanying social breakdown, is a major factor in our city life, and something that the Christian gospel speaks to. The attempt to control life by minute legal regulation at the expense of trust and relationship and deeper values was exactly what Jesus criticised the Pharisees for.
Family life is a source of, and transmission mechanism for, both 'faithful capital' and 'social capital'. Its erosion is therefore potentially serious. 'The other cause of anti social behaviour which comes under the spotlight is families failing to pass on to their children the respectfulness and civility, that are essential to civilised living.' (6.45). However rather than analysing this core issue further, The Report comments that 'focusing on the faltering nature of institutional religion and inadequate parenting can serve to distract us from the impact of market drivers that turn the immediate fulfilment of ones longings into a virtue' (6.45). This is true, and those market drivers deserve, and rightly get, penetrating criticism from The Report. However The Report does little more to examine issues of family strength and breakdown. It is a national issue of some importance, but it is particularly serious in our inner cities, and deserves an examination that The Report fails to give.
For there to be 'good cities', there need to be 'good people'. Faith needs to be 'acquired, nurtured, and sustained'. The need for the clergy to be set free to lead this faith investment in people is repeatedly emphasised. It would have been a much stronger report, however, if the nature of the task and the obstacles to it had been closely examined. Those left behind on inner city estates (they have not usually chosen to live there) have often been deeply damaged by life's vicissitudes. There is a need to work very long term and intensively with many such people to raise hope, self-esteem, relational skills etc., and no body is better placed to do this than the church. However, increasingly thinly spread clergy, of whom more and more demands are made (not least by government initiatives, and church and government bureaucracy) have less and less time to give to this. For most middle class clergy (and the clergy are still overwhelmingly middle class) inner city ministry is a labour intensive, complex and difficult form of cross cultural mission, usually involving a set of varied and interlocking cultures.
There is no one inner city culture. The fact that people use the same postage stamps and speak a variant of the same language spoken in the suburbs and Home Counties, should not (but often does) blind us to the existence of a cultural boundary that takes as much skill and determination to cross as I found I needed when I worked in the Middle East. In fact I honestly believe that in UPAs it can be harder. The assumption that we are one culture, "after all we are all 'British'", blinds us, so that we fall into a myriad of cultural traps. When this is set in the midst of the fragmenting sub-cultures of post-modern choice, (youth cultures etc.) and the ethnic and religious variety of the inner cities, the challenge, (and the potential riches) are truly staggering. For all these reasons building 'faithful capital' can be a long slow process in UPA areas. This Report helpfully touches on all this, but it could have made the issues clearer to a wider church that is sometimes impatient with the slowness of results, and the relatively high ratio of clergy to congregation members that the church in the inner city seems to need. This, I guess, is partly the result of the make up of the new commission which seems to contain only one priest in parish ministry. (There were three in 1985 plus one clergy wife) (So described in the report). This has led to a lack of focus on the realities of faith nurture in the inner city.
Furthermore, many of those who do begin to 'get their act together' under the impulse of religious conversion and nurture, then move to what they imagine to be greener pastures. There is a constant outflow of Christians from the inner cities, to the suburbs and beyond, and there are not that many ready formed Christians moving in, unless one is fortunate enough to be in an area of high African and Caribbean influx.
Because building 'faithful capital' in the inner city is usually long term, time expensive, uncertain of outcome, and demanding, it is often tempting to work with the most receptive and apparently productive people groups. This often means working with middle class people, and people from Afro Caribbean backgrounds (usually women). This is a particular danger in cities like London where middle class communities and estates often exist side by side. All too often we see a middle class takeover of what had been working class churches. This situation is exacerbated by the ever greater pressure for churches to be self financing, as middle class congregations tend to produce more in the way of giving (though statistics show that this is because middle class churches tend to be larger. Per capita giving tends to be higher in poorer congregations, just one aspect of the richness of faith in UPAs that should be celebrated.) Whereas in many places it is true to say that the church is one generation from extinction, in some parts of the inner city it is one generation from a middle class takeover. Too often in such cases we end up with predominantly middle class churches running community projects for estate people, or the socially marginalised, but from a church base that does not feel comfortable for such people to attend or join. Many middle class people do not realise how intimidating even their most well meaning involvement can be to some of the less confident inner city people. As a result, as Robin Gamble has commented ('The Irrelevant Church') 'The working classes have never had their fair share of God'. He discovered that someone brought up in a suburb had a statistically much higher chance of being converted to Christ than someone brought up on a council estate. Yet The Report does not deal adequately, if at all, with this.
'Faith in The City' (162) called for a 'church urban fund' 'to give priority to strengthening the church's presence, and promoting Christian witness in Urban Priority Areas in ways which meet local needs' (italics mine). The current Report calls on the funders of church faith based projects (who are sometimes restrictive about evangelism) to allow faith communities to 'tell their faith stories'. The motivation for their community service is their faith, the two are bound up together in ways that are impossible to disentangle. Therefore prohibitions on 'proselytising' are unfair and counterproductive, undermining the very faithful capital that has made the projects possible in the first place, (8.18-20). This is helpful and important, and if taken on board by funders, would make the life of inner city faith communities significantly more straightforward.
The Report recognises that for this investment in 'faithful capital' to happen effectively it is important that clergy are not always the person to be sitting on, for example, the local regeneration project board or partnership consultation. They may not be the best equipped to do this, and anyway this can be a distraction from their work of building 'faithful capital'. It is the clergy's job to help equip lay people for such roles. Furthermore, for effective incarnational ministry to happen (ministry that meets local needs in a myriad of compassionate demonstrations of the love of Jesus) a new cadre of Christian community workers needs to be released into inner city ministry, (7.64). 'We call upon the Church of England and other denominations to exercise a fierce commitment to staying in the urban communities of our nation to contribute in every way possible to the flourishing of our cities. When we express our determination that faith should have a role at every level in bringing 'good news to the poor' we are not referring simply to providing a care service to the victims of poverty, exclusion or misfortune.' (8.54)
The Report goes on to ask many pertinent questions of the so-called 'regeneration industry'. What drives physical regeneration, and in whose interests is it pursued? Is it in the interests of the local community or of developers? The Report describes how such developments often relocate and marginalise the poor on the edges of the 'regenerated' area. This highlights again the need for the regeneration of individuals (the building of 'faithful capital') to go hand in hand with the regeneration of the physical locality and infrastructure, as well as raising serious political questions about power and money and their abuse at the expense of the poor.
Much careful analysis is given to the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and the implications of this for the health of society as a whole as more and more people feel themselves excluded from the common wealth, and for all this means in terms of participation in society. I would have welcomed more analysis of how the same dynamics or power and wealth are operating in churches as well as in wider society, as the rich displace the poor within churches in the ways described above. Abuse of power, including a (silent) contempt for the poor (especially where they can be dismissed as the 'underclass'), often bedevils Church of England culture. We must put our own house in order if we are to be heard by the rest of society.
In many ways The Report is as much about the dangers of wealth as about the problems of poverty. It would be a salutary experience for it to be read by richer Christians. I encourage any Bishops, Archdeacons, Area Deans and Lay Chairs reading this to develop a strategy for getting this report read and debated in your churches and synods. It looks at the divisive and excluding effects of misapplied wealth, and at the limitations of wealth (beyond a certain point) in bringing any kind of meaningful happiness. The report mentions the looming environmental crisis in passing. This is probably beyond the terms of reference of The Report, but this, more than anything, is likely to produce the change in attitudes and behaviour The Report would like to see.
I have long felt that some of the emphases in 'Faith In The City' on government action and taxation as a way of supporting the poor was in danger of excusing the rich, and particularly rich Christians, from much deeper obligations. 'Faithful Cities' says that 'churches must, by their own teaching, preaching and practice, demonstrate the gospel challenge to the rich - wealth brings obligation to those who are less fortunate and these obligations go beyond simply paying tax. Judaeo-Christian teaching is not against the wealthy, but it does require that we make a stern challenge to those who are rich but ignore the needs of the poor'.(4.21) 'They (the comparatively rich and poor) may live cheek by jowl in the modern city, but their lives barely intersect'.(4:23) I remember many years ago trying to get a group of middle class carol singers to sing on some of the council estates that made up the bulk of our parish. The first year they frankly refused. They were clearly afraid. The following year, under protest, we did make it on to one of the estates, where some of our singers insisted on walking down the street defiantly singing a carol in Latin. They then made their excuses and returned home as quickly as possible leaving the estate residents in the group to carry on the singing. Such fear born of ignorance needs challenging among Christian people, and is much more widespread in the church than we imagine. The challenge of Faithful Cities is timely and welcome. Much of the middle class church, let alone middle class Britain does not have a clue what life is like on many of the estates, and such ignorance is culpable.
The report speaks approvingly of faith schools (3.60ff) and defends such schools against accusations of elitism and segregation. However it also expresses a wish to see faith schools more open and inclusive than they are, with eligibility for a school place based on a demonstrable willingness to support the school's ethos, rather than on membership of a particular denomination or faith. There is plenty of evidence that, in practice, church schools are open in this way, with a wide mix of pupils and only a core (which varies in size from school to school) necessarily belonging to a church. Without that core it is difficult to see how a school's ethos could be preserved. The report calls for a review or enquiry into faith schools and their admission procedures. I do not think they have demonstrated the case for such a review, and I wonder whether such a review is politically wise in the current climate of secular opinion.
A major difference from the 'Faith in the City' report is that, reflecting the makeup of the commission, there is a major stress on the work of all faiths in the city. It suggests that, despite their differences, the faiths have a core of shared values that enables them to work together on projects of common concern. Moreover, in a time of religious fragmentation and tension, it is a major duty of all the main faiths to co-operate at the local level wherever possible. The report avoids the obvious trap of proceeding on the assumption that all faiths are basically the same. 'Clearly, all these faiths tradition are diverse within themselves as well as in relation to one another, with points of difference as well as convergence in their teachings'. (1.8). However, three core principals and convictions are identified, namely we understand God to be the source of our life creation and meaning, to be human means that we are made in the image and likeness of God and therefore each person possesses an innate dignity, and thirdly, we are called into relationship with God in ways that finds expression in human relationships of love, mutuality and justice.(1.10). There is an element of truth here, and it is certainly imperative that we learn to work together where we can and foster cordial relationships even when we can't work together. Ignoring each other, let alone mutual hostility and suspicion, is not an option. However there are many unanswered questions that circle around these three claims in practice. Our understanding of God as Christians is profoundly shaped by His revelation through Jesus Christ. To what extent is it true to say that we share common convictions about the nature of God? How much do we share convictions about what it means to be human? In the light of the Hindu caste system, or the Moslem approach to women can we really assert this? I believe the report is right to call for co-operation at the local level in all kinds of projects of common interests, but I believe it is a little naive theologically in some of what it states. It goes on to call for the appointment of community workers of a different faith from that of the employing church or faith community. (8.47). I think this should call forth an examination of questions such as: What happens if the members of a staff team then cannot worship together? Is there a sufficiently shared vision of human flourishing to enable such close working together? What happens when ethical standards clash between members of a staff team? What happens when food laws severely restrict table fellowship? How are we to make an explanation of the faith that motivates us, in our community projects (as Chapter 8 recommends) if we are not in agreement about that faith? It is not nearly as straightforward as the commission appears to suggest. But there is an even more fundamental point of issue here for Christians, namely, is Jesus central to our mission in the city?
The report is about cities, and about the role of faiths in the city, but not particularly about Jesus in the city. This is inevitable given that the commission chose to look at faiths in the city, (and I believe it was right to do so) but it has consequences.
Regeneration must surely involve the regeneration of individuals through conversion to Jesus Christ, who can change a person from the inside. Hand in hand with this must go exterior regeneration of education, the physical environment, and the local community in all its aspects. For Christians, Jesus is central to all of this, the personal and the political. Christians are called to involvement in the physical regeneration of communities because Jesus became incarnate, and because of His command to love our neighbour. Sometimes, as when forming coalitions with those who do not share our faith, for a particular campaign or act of service, it is necessary to focus on the shared project. However it then becomes very easy, if we are not vigilant, to substitute something else, such as politics or community regeneration, for Jesus at the heart of our faith. If infrastructure is renewed and people are left unchanged either the new infrastructure becomes a slum (some '70s tower blocks) or it is taken over by the rich, and the poor are pushed to the margins again. The disillusion with many regeneration projects that the Report identifies I believe stems partly from this. It is essential that our urban ministry stays Christ centred. It would be a pity if the report appeared to weaken this because of its laudable concern to speak of faiths in the city. Belonging to Christ demands of us action on behalf of the poor. It is not true, however to say that action for and with the poor can substitute for Jesus Christ.
Thus the report says 'incarnational theology is about translating the divine call to do justice into the ephemeral realities of day to day politics'.(7.62). One is forced to ask, is it only politics? I believe this confusion is at the root of some woolly thinking in the report, ie 'although this (regeneration) is often interpreted in an individualistic way, nevertheless, within the Judeo-Christian tradition it is essentially communal' (7.6). Surely it is both individual and communal. Transformed individuals are compelled by the love of Christ into a fresh relationship with their neighbours, both their brothers and sisters in Christ, and even their enemies. This and the incarnation forces us, whether we are inherently individualistic or not, to chose to live together and to work this out in every sphere, including the political. It does not do, however, to simplistically polarise the individual and the communal as this paragraph does. It stems from a failure to highlight the power of Jesus in regeneration. All of this raises the question of what is the primary purpose of the church? Yet, because of multi faith sensibilities, it seems unable to answer this by saying that the primary purpose is to introduce people to Jesus Christ and nurture them in following Him and serving Him. All else follows from that. The report over and over again edges towards acknowledging this, stressing the limitations of purely physical regeneration projects, the importance to being able to evangelise, the importance of not allowing ministers to be deflected from 'their own primary purpose' (7.60). Coyness in speaking about Jesus at the centre leads the report into confusion here. 'For members of the Christian community, prophetic presence and participation in these struggles is the critical core of our Urban Mission'. (5.42). Is it? Surely the critical core is the compelling incarnation and love of Jesus. This, if it is genuinely owned, then necessarily results in prophetic presence and participation in struggles.
Given the commission's decision to be a multi faith body, and to look at all faiths, then the line taken, namely looking at what is common to all faiths, and leaving those faiths to fill in their own details, is understandable. However the question arises, how do we avoid the same lack of focus infiltrating our local mission, resulting in the marginalisation of Jesus, especially if, as recommended, we employ multi faith staff teams? If we lose our focus on the wellspring of our faith, in a generation or so there will be no churches to engage in regeneration in the city.
The style and lay out of The Report is like a serious magazine, with fairly substantial chunks of text interspersed with photographs and coloured text boxes with extensive quotations, examples and stories from inner city situations. It is an altogether slighter and briefer piece of work than 'Faith in the City'. It is more an up dating of that report than a work of equal substance. Thus it lacks the many valuable statistical tables that Faith in the City contained, often meaning that it is difficult to discern from within the text the evidence to support the conclusions. Faithful Cities is also a more difficult report to use (and review) due to the lack of any kind of index.
There is much to celebrate in this report. It draws attention to the injustices of gross inequality, and the dangers of wealth and power, it addresses the rich, and especially rich Christians, individually, not expecting the government to do it all for them, but it lets neither government nor church off the hook. It recognises, celebrates and encourages the specific contribution of faith to the city, and offers a workable (on the whole) model for principled inter faith co-operation. The weaknesses are in the areas of faith nurture in inner cities, which poses its own problems, a failure to challenge just how much the culture and structures of the Church of England are biased to the powerful, and how this is worsening with the need to pay for current ministry out of current resources, and the need to go into more detail in many of the areas it touches on, especially some of the issues raised by interfaith co-operation. Perhaps it is unfair to criticise the report for this, and we should be grateful for the agenda for further work that has been brought to our attention.
The Revd Stephen Cox is Team Rector of the Upper Holloway team, Stepney Area, Diocese of London and has ministered in inner city London for 25 years.
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum