ࡱ > ^ ` ] @ p bjbjPP 8 : : 7h S , 8 $ , , , B B B $ & & & & & & $ [ R J L L L J B B _ L d B B $ L $ B : " u 0 M M r M > [ , $ J J , , R , , Empirical evidence and public theology: The Church of Englands national policy on urban regeneration and the work of local congregations. T. D. Atfield, University of Birmingham & The Queens Foundation, Birmingham I think the art of academia is taking a paragraph and turning it into a monograph [Laughter] and certainly I'm going to have to make heroic virtue out of dire necessity because I realised I have a doctoral project that can actually be summarised in one word. My question was, did a certain report by the Church of England change the practices of local congregations within the Church of England, and the answer was no [laughter], so what I would like to do is, I would like to present a cautionary tale or a story about what happens when the corporate theological reflection of the Church fails to understand what happens in local congregations. Now this is about urban regeneration; what is urban regeneration? Well urban generation really starts from its opposite, the idea that poverty was something to be ameliorated rather than eradicated, and in the UK, certainly in England, the history of attempting to ameliorate poverty ties the Church and the state very closely together. From its inception in about 1534, the Church of England was one of the main vehicles in which relief for the poor was given by the Government. This wasnt anything like in modern welfare state, in theres an 18th century protest song called Sons of Freedom that says if a man is out of work, his parish pay is small enough to starve his family, his children and all, and its funny enough that the Church of England remained a major source of philanthropy throughout its history and certainly in the Victorian era where the main middle class hobby was philanthropy, a lot of the money for the alleviation of the conditions of the poor was given through the Church, and this idea that poverty should be alleviated rather than eradicated stayed up with the Church and Government until really the middle of the 20th century in the UK. When people looked at the condition of the poor, what they decided most of all in the beginning of the 20th century is that the poor needed new housing, and what they did, they decided to bulldoze the very Dickensian slum tenements and move people or even forcefully move people into new housing estates and new blocks of flats and at the end of the second world war, the Government decided that in order to improve the condition of the poor, they not only needed to improve housing, but they needed to improve peoples level of health and education and their security, so what they did is they founded a system which gave people universal free public health care, they gave them guaranteed right of pensions for all and they made sure people had the facility to be properly educated, and what they found that after putting all of these things in place, is that people didnt get any less poor, poverty was remarkably persistent, and what they decided was that in the areas that were the poorest, they had to change everything, not merely offer amelioration of the symptoms of poverty, and this is where urban regeneration comes in, it is the attempt to target specific areas and change their infrastructure so that poverty is essentially eradiated, or if not eradicated, significantly improved, and this is something that in the latter half of the 20th century the Church of England has attempted to get on board with, because its historical role as a provider of welfare from the state was taken away from it. Now urbanisation took the Church of England mostly by surprise, it was founded in a mostly rural environment where people would have lived in villages of about 200 people, there were a few large cities, but they understood the work of the Church to be a work of a Priest who was looking after a congregation of, well not a congregation, a parish, in a geographical area of about 200 people, and amazingly it wasnt until the 1950s that the Church of England started to realise that the UK had become urbanised. The immigration from abroad and migration from the countryside into the cities really took the Church by surprise. It wasnt until the 1970s that the Church actually thought that it needed to have some kind of theological and practical corporate response to urbanisation in the UK, and this led to the 1985 report Faith in the City and Faith in the City was quite a remarkable report; it quoted liberation theology, it called for the radical redistribution of the historic resources of the Church, all of the money it had from land and property it had acquired over hundreds of years so that parishes in poor neighbourhoods could be properly equipped and more radically, most radically of all, it criticised the Government, and the impact of this Report was huge, and there are people still working in councils and in Government today who remember the impact this Report made upon their practice. However, it made less impact on the Church who after all, they decided they werent too keen about redistributing their historical resource into the poor and the Government dismissed it has Marxist propaganda, and its interesting because actually the radicalism of the Report doesnt come from a commitment to Marxism, it comes through following good practice in urban regeneration. In 1979, the outgoing Labour Government commissioned a report into health and poverty, it was named after its Chairman, Douglas Black, it was called The Black Report, it was revolutionary. It said that essentially, ill health was caused by poverty, and not the other way round. It said that you are likely to be poor if you live in a poor environment and your health will suffer as a consequence. If you live in a poor area, you have less access to public transport; people are less likely to run a bus route through where you live. You are less likely to have good access to local shops where you can by good food and interestingly, even though you have a universal healthcare system, people are remarkably reticent to build large clinics, specialist centres and hospitals in poor areas. Poverty is essentially, environmental; its about where you live. Now, the Conservative Government who took over from the Labour Government didnt like this Report one bit. They believed that ill health created poverty. If you were sick, you couldnt work, and generations of poverty could be explained essentially by bad genetics; sick people had sick children. Now although this seemed somewhat draconian, remember that in its early part, the Conservative Government actually created unemployment in certain areas of the UK that reached 90%, which is the highest ever recorded in the developed world, and on top of that, it told people in those areas that if they wanted a job, all they had to do was travel a bit further to get work. The Conservative Government actually suppressed The Black Report, it actually destroyed copies. It wasnt until 1997 when the Conservative Government was replaced by a Labour Government that the ideas of The Black Report came into common use and common parlance. In 2006 the Church of England commissioned a successor report to the 1985 report, Faith in the City and they called it, originally, Faithful Cities, and it did what its predecessor did, it followed good practice in urban regeneration. Now the new Labour Government , realising that poverty was complex, and was caused by a number of factors, essentially decided that the best way of going about making the condition for poor people better was to do two things; first of all it was to form partnership with local community groups with private businesses in order to deliver a wide range of services to poor communities, and it also said that in order to make peoples lives better in poor areas, you not only had to change the material environment surrounding them, you also had to change the social environment. It was observed that just as people have a wealth capital, an amount of money at their disposal, lives are also shaped by the social capital, the investment of their neighbours in their lives, so if you were in a poor area, the amount that people go and visit each other, people knowing their neighbours, people getting involved in community groups, these things actually made a difference to peoples outcomes in their daily lives. If people know their neighbours, people are less afraid of crime, they go out more, they get the health benefit from exercise, they feel less stressed, theyre less liable to heart disease, to heart attacks, and so the Government pushed the idea that social capital needed to be built in poor neighbourhoods, and the Church in Faithful Cities leaped on this idea, and they said, actually as the state Church, the established Church, we can contribute our own form of social capital to poor neighbourhoods, and they called this Faithful Capital, a distinct Christian type of social capital, and their basis for this idea that they could contribute to society was a theology of covenant; they said that just as God had a covenant with Israel, the Church of England has a covenant with British society, and they said out of their embeddedness in society, that they were there already, they are exactly the kind of people a Government wanting to form partnerships with local community should partner with, and this partnership takes the form of delivering services to their local community. The Church in its report Faithful Cities doesnt say much about the corporate body of the Church, it takes about training Priests so they work well in urban areas, it talks about maintaining funding for Churches in deprived areas, it doesnt talk much about the corporate nature of the Church. What it does do is talk about the nature of local congregations and it says that local congregations are essentially gatherings of volunteers who, motivated by faith can help offer services to the local communities, and there is some evidence for that; Churches do things, they run mother and toddler groups, they run lunch clubs for the elderly, they run counselling groups for the bereaved, and the Church said well, theres good evidence we have from previous reports that the Church can do this and do this very well, and they cited two particular reports, one by the William Temple Foundation, which was a three year, quite exhaustive study of Churches in Manchester, which reported in part, that Churches were able to offer services to their local community. It also quoted the Aston Business School Report of 2005, which said the same thing about Churches in Birmingham, and it said, on the basis of our theology of covenant, and on the basis that Churches can, evidently, deliver services for their local community, Churches should get involved in partnership with Government to deliver large services to their local community. Now large services in local community are things like drop in centres for the elderly, they are things like after school clubs which are funded by the Government, even things like community nursing can be funded through schools, and they said, this would be beneficial for local communities who would have more services, it would also be beneficial for the Church because the Church would get funding, and the Church funding could be used to maintain Church overheads and adapt Church buildings so that it better suited their local community, and they said ultimately, local Churches could become financially self sufficient by entering partnership with Government and getting Government funding. And they really harped on about this; in 2008 they reported, they had a wonderful report that came out and said, yes, the Church can do this. In 2009, and addressed to General Sidolph, they said, well actually we havent been able to do this. And what they said is we had a problem, theres a financial recession and the Government is less likely to give the Church money. The reality of it, I think, is slightly different and I think there are two areas which Id like to talk to you about. I think first of all the type of theology that the Church has framed its Report with, is questionable and second of all, its understanding of the work of local congregations is flawed. Now first of all I want to talk about theology. You could be mistaken for thinking that the two reports Faith in the City and Faithful Cities have very little in common, despite the fact that they are meant to be successor Reports. One of them talks about liberation theology and challenging the state, the other talks about entering in partnership and covenant with British society and by extension, the state, to do things for local communities. Its not so much that the Church of England copped out and went from being theologically radical to theologically conservative; in fact that Church that produced Faith in the City in 1985 was often derided as being the Conservative Party at prayer. I think it is more the case that the dialogue which they framed their theology has changed from being an articulate political theology to a public theology. Now I think public theology attempts to frame the discourse of the Church theology in terms of the discourse of society and certainly the big theological question of Faithful Cities is what makes a good city, and the answer is, a good city is one that nurtures people and the Church has a commitment to be engaged in this nurture. Its not bad theology, but there is a problem if good theology fails to take into account, the context in which it is done and it fails to take into account the position of the Church that creates it. Now John Howard Yoda did something quite interesting, he said the very good theological question, what would Jesus do, can ultimately serve bad ends if you do not understand the person asking the question already has theological and political commitments that may themselves be very un-Christ like, and its the same with public theology, its certainly the same for a Church which has an incredibly close relationship to the state and an incredible close relationship to power; these things cannot go unquestioned. The Church of England is still defacto of the Church of the state, its Bishops sit in the House of Lords, it blesses the nuclear weapons of the British state, it sends to Chaplains to fight in wars, and it also provides legitimation for the state; it sanctifies the Monarch and the Monarch gives the consent for Parliament to be formed. This needs to be questioned. Also what needs to be questioned is the political assumptions that the Church of England imbibes by following urban regeneration discourse by taking ideas from secular society, because these ideas, these ideas of urban regeneration have their own politics, and their politics are not necessarily compatible with the Christian message. The idea of social capital, which on the surface sounds a good idea. Its perfectly provable; if you go to an area and people know their neighbours better, even though they are as deprived as quite a similar area, people in the area where people know their neighbours will actually have a better life, they will get on better; they will feel better about themselves, and their community. However, building social capital can obscure the need to financially invest in poor communities. If you say that building social capital adds resilience to poor communities, you can use that as a reason not to invest financially in poor communities. You can also use it to ignore the wider picture of the society in which poor neighbourhoods suffer by being at the bottom of an economic pile. If you dont have to change the pile; if you can just change the people, you dont have to change the situation that makes them poor in the first place. Also the idea of partnership which the Church is very keen on is not necessarily one that was without problems. Partnership sounds all fine and good when its with your local happy community group who want to do things for their local people, its more problematic if partnership also involves partnership with private corporations which it invariably does. Local council housing gets pulled down and private housing gets put in its place and gentrification happens. The same with providing local facilities, you may have an old leisure centre that gets flattened, someone builds a nice new private health club, you can say, look, people have access to a bigger health club, but now of course they have to pay a membership fee. Also theres a great deal of empirical evidence that when local communities are asked to be involved in urban regeneration through partnership, their opinions are almost universally ignored. And the discourse of public theology needs to be very wary of enshrining questionable political ideas into the content of its theology. But by far the most significant problem of Faithful Cities is corporate reflection on the life of the Church doesnt reflect the lived experienced of local congregations. Now I said earlier that the Report addresses and quotes two previous pieces of very good empirical research by the William Temple Foundation and The Aston Business School. Unfortunately it rather misquotes them. Both Reports say that there are Churches in which people come together as an entire local congregation to do things for their local community; it also says there are plenty of Churches in which thats not the case. And peaked by that question, I decided to do some research of my own. I looked at two Dioceses which are next to each other, the Diocese of Birmingham which is an urban Diocese and the Diocese of Worcester which is a rural Diocese with some urban areas. Now as a bit of background; the poverty in Birmingham is well known and it is relatively easy to get funding for projects in Birmingham which tackle poverty, In Worcestershire where areas of poverty are much smaller, it is almost impossible to get Government funding to do something about those areas, but in both areas, and talking to parish Priests, and Ive interviewed about 25 so far and I hope to interview about 40 from each Diocese, they didnt find their congregations coming together to offer services for the local community. A small core group might give their time to run the local lunch club, but that was the same core group that also do the flower arranging and put the chairs out on a Sunday morning, it was the same people, the same small group of people offering their services again and again. In fact, most people in the Church would rather go and visit their neighbours, be Governors in a local school, and express their Christianity through their own self chosen act of discipleship than do something on behalf of the local Church, and when they did their self chosen acts of discipleship, which really showed the Christian message, they didnt do it on behalf of the local Church, not consciously, they did it just because they were either trying to be good Christians or most of the time, just trying to be good neighbours, and they found that in Churches where there were larger community projects of the type that Faithful Cities recommends, actually the core of volunteers who run these projects arent even from the Churches themselves, theyre from the local communities, theyre from people who want to get involved and give something back to the communities and theres very little reference to the Church in that. The activities, the large scale activities that these local Churches ran werent articulately part of the mission of the Church, they were just something the Church did and Churches actually reported that the larger the project and the more Government funding they got, the harder it was to talk a language of mission, it was harder to talk a language of Christian love and compassion, what they had to do instead was talk a language of community in order to get funding from the Government, and one guy who I interviewed said that there was a Church project that had been running for 40 years and it actually significantly detrimentally impacted its Churches relationship with the local community. What happened, it became professionalised, from being a small group run by Church volunteers, they had an entire day care centre, all of the staff were now professional, because in order to maintain Government funding, they needed professionally accredited workers. The only interaction he said, his entire congregation how had with their local community was that a few people from the congregation was on the board of Governors for the community project. Priests also raised issues as to the short term nature of funding in order; all projects you can get funding for are short term and he said there was something incompatible with that with a long term commitment to an area. Somebody said something quite remarkable, he said that Government projects focus on outputs, things that can be measured, the number of people who come through your doors and use your community centres, the number of people who stop using drugs as part of your rehab programme, and thats very different from outputs; the ultimate goal of people with changed lives and somebody said that the kingdom of God, really if its anything is ultimately its an outcome, its a vision of changed life and theres very little idea of outputs, of how you get there to the kingdom of God. And also the misunderstanding of how members of local congregations engage in urban regeneration hits Priests particularly hard. Theres a lot of role confusion, theyre saying not only do I have to pastor to the needs of my community, I have to be an unpaid regeneration worker. One person said that its very difficult to go round ministering to the needs of the community if youre the only person who is the key holder for the local community centre because you have got to sit there and you have got to answer the phones and lock up and unlock after people. He also said that the work they do on behalf of their congregations isnt necessarily that well appreciated. Theres one very sad story and of course it involves rain, all sad stories involve rain but there was one Priest arranged this large community project and on the opening day, there was people from the City Council and the only person from the Church in the rain, standing there, was her. The work the Priests do on behalf of the congregations is not necessarily appreciated by those congregations. And the question of involvement becomes more acute the more poor the congregation. If you are in a congregation where people have low literacy levels or where English is a second language, their ability to enter into a complex programme where you have to fill in funding applications and negotiate with the council is limited, and in those situations it becomes the Priest, is the only person in the community who can engage in that kind of regeneration work. Now that is not only practically problematic, there are also some ecclesiological problems, which come from that, and Ill deal with the practical problems first. Essentially in that kind of situation, the poorer you are the less likely you are to receive funding from Government. If you are in a wealthy congregation, your congregation includes people such as Doctors, Lawyers, Hospital Administrators, people who can help the Priest fill in complex Government forms and theyre also the kind of people who know people on the council, and its often the question of not you know, what you know, its who you know. And of course if you are in a poorer congregation you are unlikely to have those people as part of your make up, and what happens in this system if congregations are asked to be financially self sufficient by seeking funding through Government, is that wealthy congregations will become far better equipped than poor congregations and this adds to a situation in which wealthy congregations are already far better equipped than poorer congregations. If you are in a wealthy congregation, you are far more likely to be able to pay for, not only one Priest, which is a bit of a luxury in the Church of England; you can pay for additional Clergy. You are also far more likely to attract non-stipendiary Clergy and lay workers. There was an interesting study in the Diocese of Birmingham that said that Readers who are authorised lay Ministers in the Church of England come almost exclusively from a middle class background, and even when they are attached to poor Churches, they dont come from the poor areas themselves, but they commute in, theyre wealthy people who come in and commute into a poor area. There is already an unfair distribution of resources. Now this is a critical problem in terms of sustaining the Church in poor areas. It is also an ecclesiological problem because in Church of England understanding, the local Church isnt the local congregation, its the Diocese, and its the Diocese who are responsible for funding local congregations. If you essentially subvert this by saying that local congregations are responsible for their own funding, you subvert the ecclesiology of the Church of England, it goes from being Episcopal to being congregational, and theres nothing wrong with congregational ecclesiology, its a question that I wonder whether or not actually fits inside the self understanding the Church of England has as a Church and there is a very real danger at the moment with this change, asking Churches to be financially self sufficient. Wealthy Churches are becoming more and more concerned that they are paying out their money to support poor Churches. If this continues and if the model suggested by Faithful Cities is adopted, you will end up with a divided Church, a well equipped Church for the rich, and a poorly equipped Church for the poor. And I want to suggest that by failing to understand local congregations, the Church has created a mistaken view of the Church which not only enshrines a bad understanding, but also mediates bad practice, not only in terms of seeking funding for urban regenerations, but also in its ecclesiology and the corporate understanding of the Church of England needs to be based on an empirical understanding of local congregations and it needs to be thoroughly politically aware of its collective place in society, and without doing this the Church is in danger of unconsciously being on the side of the wealthy and ignoring the needs of the poor, and if its okay, and looking at the time, thats probably a good place to stop. 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