A Church for the Poor

Transforming the church to reach the poor in Britain today

Martin Charlesworth, Natalie Williams

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830772599
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Motivated by genuine concern, dedicated volunteers responded to the call to action and millions of pounds have been invested to support those most in need. However, the culture of many churches fails to attract those they are helping to the very faith that motivates this compassion. Even when people from poorer or working class backgrounds start on a journey of faith, many churches struggle to create an inclusive environment where they can feel welcomed and at home. With biblical insight and practical examples A Church for the Poor, by Martin Charlesworth and Natalie Williams, presents a vision of the church as a place where people from all sections of society can find a home and play a part. It is a call to rethink our traditions and transform the church to reach the poor in Britain today.

ONE

WHO ARE WE?

In many respects we are quite unlikely co-authors, perhaps even unlikely to be united in a shared passion and pursuit to see the church in the UK as a champion for the poor in our communities. We are very different people who live in very different places and who come from very different backgrounds. So we thought we’d start by telling you a little about who we are and what drives us.

Martin’s story

The more I think of it, the more I can say that I am one of the least likely people to be writing a book like this—or even to be involved in the issues it discusses.

I grew up in a secure middle class English home. My parents saved up to enable me to go to a private boarding school. I did well at school. I was an independent-minded teenager with strong opinions and a keen interest in exploring life and the world. I had little sense of weakness or need. Everything was going well.

Then something surprising happened. I was fifteen when one of my teachers told me that he was a Christian—in a personal and living kind of a way! This really was a surprise. I had not heard of such people before. My limited experience of the church had been formal and dry. In fact, I was drifting away from religion just at that very time and beginning to think about radical political ideas instead.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, my teacher patiently explained about the message of Jesus—his death, resurrection and offer of new spiritual life. Somehow I became intrigued. So I set myself a test. I would study the resurrection of Jesus to see if the evidence stood up to scrutiny. History was my favourite subject at the time and I was interested in evidence. To my surprise and wonder I found that the resurrection was hard to refute. Soon afterwards I became a Christian.

However, the faith I had been born into was focused on personal discipleship rather than church community life. Also, no one mentioned to me at the time anything about social justice or poverty or God’s concern for the marginalised. It is not that I didn’t theoretically believe those things were important, but they did not impinge on my life.

All this changed through a surprising invitation. While still at school, a friend recommended to me that I have a gap year and go to work for someone he knew in South Africa. That someone was a Dr Guy Daynes, a medical missionary from the UK, who was working in rural South Africa (Transkei). I arrived at the height of apartheid in 1978. Political tension was in the air. Racial injustices were there for all to see. Even on the overnight steam train I took on my arrival in Johannesburg to my destination station of Pietermaritzburg, I was forced to face the reality of a bitterly divided society: segregated rail carriages, racist sentiments from the soldier with whom I shared a sleeping compartment, homeless families sleeping rough near the railway stations.

Dr Daynes was committed to the health of some of the poorest citizens in South Africa—the rural poor. I worked alongside him and his patients in a remote rural hospital. I also travelled widely. I saw the poverty of the black townships, the social segregation of the cities, and the great wealth of so many white people. This all provoked so many questions and emotions. Perhaps the most distressing day I spent there was visiting the well-known Soweto township, on the edge of Johannesburg. Two years earlier Soweto had erupted into rioting and many had been killed or injured as the police suppressed the riot. It made headlines around the world. I had seen it on my TV screen in the UK—now I was there in person. Travelling through the township is an experience I shall never forget. There was so much poverty so close to the affluence of the white suburbs of nearby Johannesburg. Wealth and poverty can co-exist in such close proximity—anywhere in the world. We have to link those two worlds together.

What changed me the most was to see active racially integrated churches engaged with social justice and caring for the poor. Suddenly it became clear to me that the coming of God’s kingdom involved dealing directly with urgent human needs and social issues—as an outworking of our personal salvation and as a key part of discipleship.

By the time I came back to the UK I was a different person with a different outlook. I determined to live my Christian life always in the light of the urgent needs of the poor and marginalised. I have found many ways to do this over the years that have passed since then. It is that journey that led me to where I am now—writing this book.

Natalie’s story

My background is very different to Martin’s, yet I’ve still taken a somewhat circular route to discovering God’s heart for the poor.

I grew up in a very working class family. By the government’s definition of relative poverty as a household where the income is below 60 percent of the national median, we were poor. I didn’t really know it at the time, though there were signs of it. I had free school meals for a few years at primary school, we didn’t go on holidays abroad but to Pontin’s every other year, my dad went from job to job (frozen food store manager to double-glazing salesman to taxi driver) before a back injury put him out of work and onto benefits. I wanted violin lessons when I was a young child but was told we couldn’t afford it. And I remember my parents agreeing to let me go on a secondary school trip to Spain but finding half-way through the instalments that they were unable to pay, so my grandparents stepped in to cover the costs.

However, it wasn’t until I went to university (the first person in my extended family to do so) that I realised my experience wasn’t the same as everyone else’s. When fellow students were shocked that I hadn’t owned a passport or been on a plane until a few days before my twenty-second birthday, I was surprised. I hadn’t even thought about it, let alone considered that it was unusual compared to my peers.

There were other ways in which I did know my experiences were different. I was sixteen when my parents split up, and I could count my friends from single parent families on one hand, even though I went to the poorest performing secondary school in a seaside town well known for its levels of deprivation.

When I became a Christian, at fifteen, I started to be more aware of my background, but mostly in terms of seeing how my life had in all likelihood been diverted down a different path. For example, many of the girls in my tutor group had their first child before they hit twenty. I’m sure I would have done likewise.

However, I also noticed social settings in which I felt uncomfortable—being invited to someone’s house for dinner was a new experience, with multiple opportunities for anxiety. For example, when food was put onto the table in different serving bowls and I was told to help myself first, as the guest, I didn’t really know what to do and wished the hosts would go first so I could copy them.

There were many similar situations, some I’ve only reflected on with hindsight. I know that God has used them to shape my current views on class and poverty, but I cannot in all honesty say that they made me particularly compassionate or kind-hearted towards people in need.

As I became an adult, I became more aware of how I was shaped by certain experiences. For example, when I got myself into huge amounts of debt and didn’t know where to turn; when I lived and worked as a journalist in Beijing for a year; or when I worked in my hometown for a local partnership of the police, council, fire service and others. The latter, in particular, was where I started to feel a deepening concern about people trapped in poverty, especially where there was a lack of hope for real transformation. It was in that role that I started to feel increasingly disturbed about injustice and about how media and political narratives can so easily shape our views. I saw that they can subtly and overtly mould our preconceptions (at best) and prejudices (at worst). And it was in that job that I started to notice that no one, at the time, seemed to be asking what the church had to say about deep-rooted, long-established problems in local communities.

All of these experiences have influenced me, but over the last few years I have made a concentrated effort to study the Bible to see if there is a Christian perspective on poverty, even when the causes of it are far from simple. As a result, a journey has started in my heart (and will no doubt continue for a long time) towards increased mercy, generosity, compassion, kindness and love. My attitudes have changed. Aspects of my lifestyle have changed. I’m a work in progress, but at this point in time I’m more passionate than I’ve ever been that the church not only has a vital role to play in alleviating poverty and supporting people out of poverty, but that it actually has the vital role in these things. It is the hope of the world; the only ‘organisation’ that offers real, absolute and lasting change. So it must do and be all that it is supposed to do and be. We hope this book can help many churches on that journey.

PART ONE

A church for the poor—setting the scene

TWO

WHO ARE THE POOR? AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

Poverty—the debate

A generation of UK children will suffer in poverty. Suddenly that’s normal.

The Guardian, November 2016

Scandal of Benefits Britain: 6-bed mansion for sponger family of 12 … and YOU pay!

Daily Star, October 2013

Britain’s divided decade: the rich are 64% richer than before the recession, while the poor are 57% poorer.

The Independent, March 2015

Half of households receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes.

The Telegraph, June 2015

Child poverty in Britain is causing ‘social apartheid’.

The Observer, August 2013

Revealed: The real number of Britons mired in poverty is HALF the official total …

Daily Mail, May 2015

It’s not difficult to find excuses to avoid helping the poor in Britain today, even for Christians. Spend time chatting to people in your street or your church about poverty, and it won’t be long before someone pipes up that there’s no real poverty here, or that we should only help those who didn’t get themselves into the mess they’re in now.

Poverty in Britain is a hotly debated subject. There is no shortage of opinion or emotion. The media regularly weigh into the discussion with sensational stories. Stigmatisation of the poor is on the rise.1 The political parties are deeply divided in their analysis of both the problem and the possible solutions. Then, to complicate matters further, the devolved governments of the country have rarely seen eye-to-eye with Westminster on social policy and welfare issues. Alongside this, the charity sector has frequently and firmly raised its voice of concern or protest over key political policies.

Then there are the churches. This is the surprising and unexpected story of the early twenty-first century. Just when secularists and cynics were expecting the apparently declining church to sail off into the sunset, it has done the exact opposite! Churches have mobilised themselves in an extraordinary way in recent years to address issues of poverty and need across the country. The foodbank movement has been at the forefront of this activism as it has spread with great speed across the UK in the years following the financial crisis of 2008-09. So pervasive have been church-based foodbanks that commentators and politicians have coined the phrase ‘Foodbank Britain’ to describe the present state of need and deprivation across the UK. Domestic poverty is now a central political issue. In the 2015 general election campaign, BBC commentator Jeremy Paxman sensationally asked the Prime Minister, David Cameron, as his opening question in a pre-election interview: ‘Prime Minister, how many foodbanks are there in Britain?’ Such a question would have been inconceivable even five years earlier when foodbanks were hardly known. Domestic poverty is now a hot issue firmly at the centre of public debate.

However, if we cast our minds back just a few years we quickly realise this hasn’t always been the case. At the turn of the twenty-first century our country was awash with millennial optimism. All the talk was of ambitious schemes to tackle the huge problems of poverty in the wider world—especially the developing nations. Those were the days of the ‘Millennium Development goals’.2 They were the days when popular campaigns focused on cancelling the unpayable debts of poorer nations, tackling environmental degradation worldwide, maximising international aid and curtailing the power of multi-national companies to exploit poorer nations. Poverty issues back home in the UK seemed relatively small and did not capture the public imagination at the time. Political leaders then were optimistic about making inroads into domestic poverty through robust government interventions.

The national mood has changed significantly since those years around the turn of the century. The main focus has moved decisively and suddenly from the developing world to our own backyard here in Britain. Why has there been such a big change in such a short time?

It all goes back to the dramatic events of those dark days in the summer and autumn of 2008 when the Western world experienced a sudden and critical economic shock—‘the credit crunch’. Those who watched news bulletins at that time will recall the extraordinary announcements of well-known banks closing, of eye-wateringly large government bailouts, of anxious building society investors queuing in the streets waiting to withdraw their money, of crisis meetings of central bankers, and of statements of reassurance from nervous politicians. The overheating of the banking system and the over-extension of credit facilities nearly brought the whole economic system crashing down as banks were unable to meet their obligations and literally ran out of cash reserves. The system survived—but only just. Last minute political actions across the Western world just about held the system together—but at great long-term cost.

Soon ‘the credit crunch’ turned into ‘the financial crisis’. Then recession followed. This was an economic turning point in the UK. Government debts soared spectacularly, heavy job losses spread, the housing market came under extreme pressure, businesses were starved of loan capital, government budgets began to be drastically cut. It was a huge change with significant impacts on all parts of UK society. The financial crisis of 2008-09 was not a brief economic blip. Rather, it was a systemic failure with serious long-term consequences. The biggest issue overall has been the severely reduced financial capacity of central governments due to unprecedented levels of peacetime sovereign debt. This indebtedness will take decades to deal with. Thus, we entered suddenly into a new economic era. Few saw it coming, but we all have to live with the consequences.

The consequences of the fallout from the financial crash have been felt much more severely at the bottom end of the economic scale in Britain. This is easily forgotten by the relatively economically secure and affluent majority of Britons. There has been a significant ‘squeeze’ on people in the middle, leading Prime Minister Theresa May to identify this group as ‘just about managing’ (or ‘JAMs’) in 2016. However, the big issue for us as we consider poverty is that the economic turbulence arising from the financial crisis of 2008-09 led to major and seemingly permanent changes in social policy that have seriously impacted the weakest and poorest in Britain. We were suddenly catapulted into an ‘age of austerity’.

What were the main changes? Firstly, huge budget cuts for local government funding, leading in time to drastic cuts in public services. Secondly, major welfare reforms with resultant benefits cuts for many and the significant increase in sanctioning recipients of benefits. Areas such as national security and education have been prioritised over welfare. Thirdly, a rethinking of whose responsibility it is to help people out of poverty—government, local community, charities, or individuals themselves? This ret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• About the authors
• About Jubilee+
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Who are we?
• Part One: A church for the poor—setting the scene
• Part Two: A church for the poor—the practicalities
• References