Fuzzy Church

Gospel and Culture in the North of England

Nigel Rooms, Elli Wort

• Publisher: Sacristy Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789591699
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What does the good news of Jesus look like in the North of England? Is there such a thing as a "northern gospel"?

Rooms and Wort analyse what the North actually is, and why we need to study our context if we want to understand more about God and God's ways. They look at the current religious climate in the North where many churches are closing. They explore how their detailed research among northern churches demonstrates a gospel characterized by fragility and freedom, but full of authenticity, community and humour. They describe "fuzzy" churches where the boundaries of the church and its worship are less fixed and where there is more of a flow between churches and their world. They discover that closing churches might provide the "compost" for what God is doing next.

Chapter 2

The North and Northernness: Defining context and culture

The North exists; it “is”. The North is a “thing”, a present reality. Very few people living in contemporary England, we imagine, would dispute these statements, whether it is “up here” or “up there” for them. And yet the North as a reality presents many conceptual difficulties and questions. Where does it begin and end? Who defines it, insiders or outsiders? If the North is a reality, what about Northernness—is that just as real or figment of the imagination? And if it is real what does it consist of? How come the North, and its associated Northernness, are so freighted with mostly negative connotations in national consciousness (if there be such a thing) and what might be done about that? And is its existence any help at all in addressing the often harsh realities it signifies? Where, if anywhere in the existence of the North and what comes with it in our imaginations, might there be good news, a gospel?

We touched on many of these questions in the earlier publication Northern Gospel, Northern Church (Wakefield & Rooms, 2016) and established some baselines that are repeated briefly here. At the same time, we’ll be strengthening and developing our responses to such questions from a wider range of sources and literature in addition to data from the research we undertook.

Location and history

Where the North is, is a much more difficult question than it might at first seem. The Portico Prize for literature has been described as the “Booker of the North”. It is named after the independent Portico Library in Manchester where I met Rachel Mann, one of its previous judges, for a discussion about it and the North in general, as background research for this book. In a further conversation with Thom Keep, the librarian, he described the relaunching of the prize in 2019 and a change in the criteria for submissions. He noted the insurmountable difficulty of deciding whether a particular book came “from the North” or was somehow located there. Writers from Yorkshire would ask if they were counted in! More seriously, applications also came from the borderlands between the North and the Midlands. A decision was made that the prize is now awarded (fascinatingly for our purposes) “for the book that best evokes the spirit of the North of England”.1

It is worth noting that physical geology and geography play their part in the creation of the North. As Russell (2004: 22) points out, the vast majority of land over 2000ft in England is found from Derbyshire northwards. The northern, eastern and western borders of the North are fairly simple to note given the Scottish border and extensive coastlines. More problematical is where the southern boundary lies, as we saw above. Overall the nature of the land in the South and East of England and its associated weather patterns make it suitable for certain types of agricultural land use and settlement which are different to those to the North and West. Rivers too make significant barriers, at least in historical perspective. In my own view, the River Trent is an important marker of the N-S divide, though others work with the Mersey-Humber axis. For example, Russell distinguishes between the “far” and the “near” North and plumps for “seven counties” roughly north of the Humber-Mersey line (see his map, 2004: xii). All of our churches that we surveyed and researched were north of the Trent and the vast majority were in Russell’s seven counties.

We noted in the previous work on the North (Wakefield & Rooms, 2016: 3–9) that human geographers, such as Danny Dorling, draw the N-S line in England between the Bristol Channel and the Wash since national inequalities, including life expectancy, are delineated on that axis. It roughly equates with the original “barrier” the Romans created in England against the North—the Fosse Way, which connected a series of defensive structures together (Jewell, 1994: 11) and runs from Exeter to Lincoln. In discussing the North, it is easy to overlook other regions such as the Midlands and the South-West. Nevertheless, as Russell notes (2014: 18), even on his tighter definition of the North, it is still the largest region in England, containing about one third of the land mass and population. As such it demands our attention over and above other regions.

As part of the preparation for this research I interviewed the historian, Michael Wood, who is perhaps best known for his televised storytelling of the history of England through archaeological work in one village in Leicestershire, Kibworth. Much of what he noted with me is underlined in historical depth by Helen Jewell’s work (1994), and I summarize it very briefly here (for a longer reflection on the historical ebbs and flows of the power of the North see Gavin Wakefield’s essay, pp. 55ff in Northern Gospel). In fact, it is worth beginning with Jewell’s initial conclusion: “Analysis of the political, economic and social material indicates that the north-south divide is literally as old as the hills, and has real manifestations throughout recorded history” (1994: 6, my italics).

So, for more than a thousand years of its history, from Roman times the North was never subject to its southern neighbours, and it was therefore set apart. In an interesting aside, Michael Wood pointed out important migratory influences on the North over history on an East-West axis via, for instance, the Vikings to the East and much later Irish immigration to the West. The Venerable Bede writing in the North East (Jewell, 1994: 208) begins to codify a difference between northern and southern power blocs (while never travelling to the South!) which continues throughout the medieval period. However, the country as a whole, when it unites as a national entity before and after the Norman invasion, is increasingly dominated by the South (1994: 210), and while there are exceptions, these generally prove the rule. Sometimes used as a buffer against the Scots even further north, the North becomes somewhat redundant with the Union in the seventeenth century. This seems significant to us right up to today, given strong evidence that the South would rather ignore the North, unless it really must engage, e.g. at election time or in times of crisis such as the recent COVID-19 epidemic. We suggest this is an aspect of what we are going to call “othering”, which we will need to return to later. The North’s resurgence from a low point begins in the Industrial Revolution, at least in economic terms, while the rather derogatory term “provincial” comes into use in relation to London (Russell, 2004: 25). The South’s dominance in defining language and culture solidifies from the 1890s onwards, with some brief flickering of a renaissance for the North on occasion in the twentieth century (2004: 28). By the end of that century, full industrial decline is being realized and today’s inequalities are confirmed in many and varied ways.

We could build up more and more evidence for the existence of the North from geography, history and sociology, but our interest here is in what all this actually means. And here, as we noted when we set out, things become even more slippery.

Northernness

In discussing Northernness several issues arise straight away. The first is around how we define culture (thankfully we know some more about this now from the previous chapter, though there are differences between context and culture). Culture is the place we presume we are in when moving from the reality of a geographical region to what that means for the values, behaviour and lived experience of the people who make up that region.

This question around culture is made even more complex since, as we’ll see, a lot of what is said about Northernness is at best developed from its relationship with the South and at worst delineated and even proscribed by people from the South. Addressing that question will raise further issues around how to understand and what to do about the power imbalance between the two regions.

Social and cultural anthropologists who study human behaviour have obviously thought a lot about culture since it emerged as a unifying idea for a number of behavioural phenomena in the nineteenth century. Inevitably it has come under much critique in the last fifty or so years, especially in relation to what is known as “essentialism”. This is the mistaken idea that any given entity has unchanging and fixed properties which are its real true essence. The anthropologist Matthew Engelke (2017: 54) therefore says, when thinking about culture, that it is “not bounded in place; not fixed in time; not neat and tidy”. In relation to Northernness, we can see immediately that this critique fits, since the imagination and behaviours associated with it can travel far and wide, it has certainly changed somewhat over time, and it is mixed up messily with many other cultural influences. The North of England is also part of the global Western consumerist world, is related to national traits within Englishness and there are other important effects upon its people, not least around the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race and class. For readers unfamiliar with this idea, intersectionality is the way in which people’s identities or the “social categories” that are ascribed to them interact and cross over with each other with the effect of multiplying or reducing their privilege, discrimination or disadvantage.

It is important therefore at this juncture to point out that the North is not synonymous, in an essentialist way, with the white working-class male—even though research shows this is a common trope associated with it (Milestone, 2016). Kate Fox, who we’ll return to later, interviewed the performance artist Lemn Sissay for some research and she relates the conversation (Fox, 2017: 77):

He told me that he didn’t fit the “white, male” narrative of Manchester and didn’t look like the version of it usually sold to the rest of the country. He asked, “So what happens when a young black man comes to Manchester and makes his name in poetry across the country and across different parts of the world? He still doesn’t fit with the Manchester narrative, you know? So ergo, he’s a threat to it.”

There is a black community in Liverpool that can trace its roots back at least ten generations to the eighteenth century.2 Significant populations of people of South Asian origin are notable right across the North and African-Caribbean ex-miners are being celebrated in a community project from Nottingham northwards.3 Sheffield-based not-for-profit group Our Mel seeks to explore “cultural identity, Black history and what it means to be a person of colour in Britain today” and is therefore interacting with what it means to be black and Northern.4

The question this raises is whether there is anything at all that we can then talk about which constitutes Northernness, since accusations of essentialism do seem to fly about amongst those who write about it. Indeed, we ourselves in setting out with, as we discovered, our rather naïve research question could be accused of the same thing, in which case through an “excellent failure” we will hopefully be able to learn a great deal. It might be worth laying out a few positions on this question that we have come across in the literature and then work out what a reasonable stance of our own might be.

Russell quotes Donald Horne from a 1969 publication, God is an Englishman, which is interesting since it might be the only time that the Christian religion is dealt with in relation to Northernness (in this case in Britain as a whole) in the literature that we have come across:

In the Northern Metaphor Britain is pragmatic, empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific, serious and believes in struggle . . . In the Southern Metaphor Britain is romantic, illogical, muddled, divinely lucky, Anglican, aristocratic, traditional, frivolous, and believes in order and tradition (Russell, 2004: 26, italics in the original).

Russell himself creates a three-column list (2004: 37) which recognizes the difference between cultural production about the North and the South, describes the northern self-image and how Northerners imagine the South. We think this is a helpful approach, and we reproduce here some, not all, of his table, giving a round ten characteristics overall that can be compared across the three perspectives.

External (especially southern) images of the North	Northern self-image	Northern images of the South
Truculent / carrying chip on shoulder	Independent	Subservient
Rude / lacking social graces	Blunt / straight-talking	Evasive / duplicitous
Hardworking	Hardworking / physically tough	Effete / wasteful / absorbing efforts and energy of the rest of country
Over-competitive / ungentlemanly	Competitive	Dilettante / lacking spirit
Philistine / unpolished, albeit highly musical	Practical / productive	Snobbish / wasteful / superficial
Mean	Careful with money	Wasteful
Homely	Friendly/Hospitable	Unfriendly / unsociable
Parochial	Proud of roots and identity	Cosmopolitan / rootless
Working class	Meritocratic / egalitarian	Nepotistic / elitist
Humorous if crude	Humorous / witty	Quick-witted but overly fond of double-entendre

We have plenty of evidence for what is being described here from our research, and we now offer a few illustrative examples from interviews with public figures and the research focus groups in the seven churches we visited.

I think we might add honesty to line 2 after an anecdote from the Bishop of Burnley, Philip North, whom I interviewed on the subject of Northernness. He moved to that positi...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• A note about referencing and style
• Preface
• “Something’s happening”: Gospel and culture in northern churches
• God, gospel, context and culture
• The North and Northernness: Defining context and culture
• After Christendom: It’s the end of the world as we know it
• Research findings: Fragility and freedom in the fuzzy Church
• “Let me take you by the hand . . . ”
• Towards a northern contextual theology: The compost of the future Church
• Joining in the dance
• Brief anonymized description of the churches researched
• Bibliography