Beyond 'glass half full' - the politics of ABCD

For a couple of years now I've been a passionate advocate for asset-based approaches to community development (ABCD). I believe in ABCD partly because I'm a pragmatist - it seems to 'work' (slowly, with fragility, but surely, we're seeing evidence of 'community' springing up around us here in Hodge Hill, and that seems to be making all kinds of positive differences in the lives of those of us who live here, and are finding ourselves part of 'it') - and partly because I'm a theorist - ABCD resonates with some of my deepest principles, with the core of my theology, and seems to make a whole load of sense of some of the biggest challenges of the world that we seem to be living in today.

But I also have to acknowledge - and increasingly so, as I get increasingly passionate in advocating for it - the dangers that an ABCD approach brings to the surface, the tightropes it makes us walk. And a lot of those dangers, those tightropes, are political - with a small 'p', that is, beyond parties and voting and that stuff, to the way power is hoarded, distributed, channelled, at every level from the micropolitics of neighbourhoods to the macropolitics of the global economy.

These reflections have been brewing for a while, much of them in conversation with others. It feels timely to get them down in words, in the hope that the conversation draws in more voices, and the dangers and potential of ABCD can come to greater clarity.

1. The 'glass half full' is a statement of defiance

ABCD goes well beyond a kind of Pollyanna-ish, or Monty Pythnoesque, 'always looking on the bright side of life', but close to its heart is the image of the 'glass half full': approaching neighbourhoods and those who live within them not primarily as 'needs', as 'deficits', as 'problems', but as 'gifts', as 'assets', as holding within themselves huge creative power. For neighbourhoods like mine, this is powerful stuff - because people have, for far too long, both outside and within our neighbourhood, told the 'deficit' story: we're one of Iain Duncan-Smith's 'broken ghettos', apparently, 'workshy', 'scroungers', 'dependency culture', you name it. 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' asked Nathanael, brother of Philip, about Jesus. People have similar suspicions about neighbourhoods like mine. The labelling is so often stigmatising, and the stigmatising can - and does - crush and break people's spirits.

So an ABCD approach is, on a very foundational level, a gutsy, defiant, 'f*** off!' to those who would label and stigmatise us, and to that part of each of us that falls for those untruths. We have passion, knowledge, and gifts here, and we have each other, and in sharing our gifts together, we have so much more than we are told we have - and that is power! It was far from coincidental that the very first Firs & Bromford Community Passion Play, last year, reached its ending with a sung version of Maya Angelou's poem, 'Still I Rise':

"You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise."

2. ABCD is about community - and a dangerous vulnerability

It may sound obvious, but asset-based community development is first and foremost about building community. It needs to be said, however, because one of the risks of ABCD-language is it gets muddled up with 'asset-based', or 'strength-based', approaches more generally and, at its most simplistic, is seen as simply an expression of 'positive psychology'. At its worst, this confusion can seem to veer towards the politics of those who advocate 'individual responsibility', 'getting on your bike', and 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' - whether in work or financial security, health or education.

This is where the 'glass half full' can be misleading: beyond 'looking on the bright side', beyond looking for individuals' strengths rather than their weaknesses, ABCD affirms that we need community - we need each other, our neighbours, our fellow human beings. We need to share each other's gifts, but we also need to share each other's vulnerabilities, each other's wounds, each other's struggles. The 'half empty' half of the glass can also be, and often is, the thing that enables us to connect with those around us. And it is community, says ABCD, that enables us to do that connecting, that sharing, in a way that systems and institutions - let alone markets - fail miserably.

This invitation to community, to vulnerable sharing, is also somewhat political: money, as theologian Stanley Hauerwas is fond of saying, is what we rely on when we've forgotten what friends are. Those who live in expensive gated 'communities', secure behind their fences, are trying to protect themselves from the vulnerabilities of being human. Those of us who try our best to live a more vulnerable kind of 'community' challenge the rich and powerful to risk discovering their humanity. Who knows where that might lead?!

3. ABCD takes issue with the 'service industry' - public and private

"Perhaps, the major problem with public health’s uncritical adoption of asset-based approaches is that it fails to distinguish between a radical critique of welfare, one that is firmly linked to an analysis of neo-liberal economics and the neo-liberal attack on welfare, which by contrast, supports the further de-regulation of markets and withdrawal of the social rights of citizens. If the strength of the assets movement is that it has generated discussion about re-dressing the balance of power between the public sector, public services and local communities, its fatal weakness has been the failure to question the balance of power between public services, communities and corporate interests. As such, asset-based approaches sound the drum beat for the retreat of statutory, state provision of both public services and public health."[1]

Lynne Friedli, writing from a public health perspective (and addressing 'asset-based approaches' more generally than ABCD), offers a strong challenge to ABCD, highlighting one of its biggest dangers: it can be heard to be supporting, and indeed co-opted to support, the neo-liberal 'rolling back' of the State.

Rooted in the work of social critic Ivan Illich, ABCD does indeed shine a spotlight on the way institutions, once intended to help and empower people, have a habit of growing in size and complexity to the point where the 'service' that they 'offer' is, in fact, counter-productive in people's lives, reinforcing in people the very 'problems' that the institution claims to solve, sustaining people's dependence on the institution to feed the institution's dependence on a steady stream of 'needy' people. It is a dramatic, powerful critique, and, in everyday experience, it seems to hit home at least as often as it misses the mark. There is, in fact, much more that properly sits in the domain of 'what communities can do' for those living in them, than the 'service industry' has allowed us space to imagine.

But it is in the moves onwards from Illich's critique that the real battles are to be fought. It hardly needs stating that 'the private sector' does no better job of humanising the 'service industry' than 'the public sector' - in fact, when you add in the profit-seeking factor to the already toxic mix, the drive towards institutional counter-productivity - benefits for the institution at the expense of its 'clients' - merely accelerates beyond imagining. In fact, after years of neo-liberal, 'competition'-promoting government in Conservative, Labour, and Coalition flavours, it's now barely possible to distinguish 'public sector' from 'private sector' at all. However paternalistic in intent the post-war origins of the welfare state were, that sense of shared responsibility as a society for the welfare of the most vulnerable - and with it the acknowledgment that any of us might, at times, find ourselves living with such vulnerability and need - has been all but obliterated - and ABCD needs to position itself, and articulate itself, clearly as part of the challenge to that obliteration, rather than a colluding partner in it.

4. ABCD is about social justice

With Friedli's challenge ringing in our ears, we cannot possibly say that the State's withdrawal from communities, its withdrawal of its people, places and money, is somehow going to make everything better. To be sure, often what communities need to be able to function better is for the systems and institutions to 'get out of the way' - but the ideal of the 'Big Society', dreamt up in a cosy Oxfordshire village, with volunteers aplenty to 'man the pumps' of everything from the library to the fire station, has been shown to be a blatant cover for the accelerated redistribution of wealth, an 'asset stripping' which has enabled the rich to get even richer and forced the poor to get even poorer, abandoning the poorest communities to 'look after themselves'.

Edgar Cahn, the founding father of timebanking, expresses the point with a necessary sharpness. Lamenting the way the 'brilliant work' of ABCD (in the USA) was being 'circumvented and perverted, used to get money without really altering professional practice or changing who got the dollars, who defined the problem, and who defined the response', Cahn exploded with anger at the 'obscene' way 'in which we were throwing away, destroying, degrading, or denigrating the most precious assets we have: human beings'. The core values of ABCD needed to be intertwined with a fundamental commitment to social justice:

"Assets became: No more throw-away people.  

Redefining work became: No more taking the contribution of women, children, families, immigrants for granted. No more free rides for the market economy extracted by subordination, discrimination, and exploitation.  

Reciprocity became: Stop creating dependencies; stop devaluing those whom you help while you profit from their troubles.  

Social capital became: No more disinvesting in families, neighbourhoods and communities. No more economic and social strip-mining." [2]

An angry No, then, intertwined with a hopeful, creative Yes. Not disinvestment, then, but changing the way we invest. Not abandonment by the State, but the State - at least so far as it embodies society's 'shared responsibility' and power-in-coordination - finding new ways to be present within neighbourhoods, ways that are infinitely more receptive, connective, and creative, than the familiar models of 'delivery' which so easily modulate into 'control'.

The three questions at the core of ABCD approaches, then, remain vital:

i. What can this community do for itself, with local people power? 

ii. What can this community do for itself, with some help and support from external agencies? 

iii. What does this community need external agencies to do for it (or perhaps better, alongside it)?

It's crucial to ask all three questions, of course - something the 'roll back' advocates would rather ignore. But the order of the questions is also crucial, because the 'default position' is to proceed from (iii) to (i), leaving local communities with the left-over scraps of activity once the external agencies have delivered on their own agendas and taken whatever rich pickings are to be had. A third caveat is also necessary: the questions need to be asked in each and every neighbourhood, and repeatedly over time, because the answers will vary greatly from place to place, and from year to year. There can be no nationwide prescription, as 'Big Society' implied - investment needs to be determined by local power and local need, and that, in itself, will require a radical redistribution of resources, people, and energy.

5. ABCD and 'progressive localism'

Having said that, I am increasingly convinced that there is something inescapably 'counter-State' about the evolving ABCD tradition. In the seemingly innocent language of 'progressive localism', some UK geographers are beginning to argue for, and discover already present around them, a 'counter-movement' to the aggressively 'anti-public', neoliberal 'austerity localism'. David Featherstone and colleagues outline four significant dimensions of such a counter-movement:

i. 'place-based organising' can, and does, challenge 'neatly bounded' conceptions of 'community' which spill out beyond the obviously 'local' (they offer the example of Gate Gourment workers in West London who were able to forge links of international solidarity, through the aviation industry, with workers in Norway and Denmark who refused to load meals onto aircraft bound for London) 

ii. rather than seeing globalisation as something 'done to' local communities in a simply 'top-down' way, local communities, workers, citizens can be seen to be 'active agents in shaping and negotiating such [globalizing] processes', 'challeng[ing] rather than entrench[ing] inequalities between and within places and regions' 

iii. these global linkages and connections can serve to highlight 'diverse forms of actually existing multiculturalism' that are present in localities and shape 'everyday practices of localism', challenging the chauvinistic rhetoric of politicians and media around race and migration

iv. progressive localisms 'can feed into broader social and political movements that aim to transform national and international policy frameworks' (the mobilisation of the living wage campaign from particular local communities in London is offered as an example) [3]

More recently, Andy Williams and colleagues from Exeter have argued that 'in amongst the neoliberal infrastructure' of localism, 'new ethical and political spaces' of 'resistance and experimentation' can be discovered, which work 'strategically, and even subversively, with the tools at hand'. Citing Foodbanks as a now notorious example of the neoliberal State apparently co-opting the people power in local communities, Williams et al argue:

i. 'the visible presence of Foodbanks has enabled structural critique of the processes underpinning food poverty in the UK' (by publishing data on usage, narratives detailing the reasons for usage, etc.) 

ii. 'spaces of care such as Foodbanks present a practical device through which citizens from myriad ideological perspectives can potentially experience a more positive identification with, and understanding of, the issues facing people with low-incomes' (the possibility of vulnerability leading to change that I suggested earlier) 

iii. 'these spaces of care can facilitate wider ethical-political alliances across voluntary organisations and protest groups' (similar to Featherstone et al's argument above) as part of an 'emergent public', 'a body able to advocate and represent itself and hold government to account'

Williams also, secondly, highlights research that suggests that 'the rationalities and technologies of neoliberal government at work in public, private and voluntary organisations can be performatively subverted from within'. 'Inside every civil servant is a citizen waiting to get out', as my friend and ABCD colleague Cormac Russell puts it, but perhaps they are not patiently 'waiting' as often as we think!

Thirdly, Williams points to examples of localism policies being embraced by local communities precisely in the cause of resisting the trends of neoliberalism: 'community take-overs of local facilities and amenities as social enterprises', 'strategic use of Local Enterprise Partnerships to direct economic development towards the growth of renewable and sustainable industries', 'harnessing the more open and deliberative nature of policy-making' that accompanies devolution 'to reject neoliberal models of individualised commodified care in favour of a more locally coproduced system of care-provision', and so on.

Finally, Williams highlights the emergence of groups which have created 'autonomous spaces', intentionally distanced from 'regulatory or financial relationships with government in order to pursue prefigurative, oppositional, and confrontational stances towards neoliberal logics'. They cite the example of Zacchaeus 2000 (Z2K), 'a London-based anti-poverty charity which provides free social, economic and legal assistance for low-income households affected by welfare reform and debt' which, alongside such support, has also been at the forefront of organising protests outside magistrate courts and other anti-cuts activism. While not entirely autonomous, as a registered charity, Z2K 'ventures directly into confrontation with state policy through its marriage of provision and protest'. [4]

It may be that I've deviated somewhat from directly discussing 'the politics of ABCD'. But I see in the developing discourse of 'progressive localism' a textured argument that allows us to take on board Lynne Friedli's challenge, but to go beyond a simple 'for or against neoliberal localism' dichotomy. In starting with the messy complexity of the local, with the diverse gifts and contestations of 'community', we are by no means restricted to the local, or to compliantly carrying out the wishes of neoliberal government. When people discover the power of face-to-face relationships with their neighbours, the possibilities of solidarities beyond the local, of challenge and resistance and re-shaping of wider structures, become more graspable. This is what Cormac is arguing, I think, in his excellent piece on an ABCD approach to local democracy, 'power from the people - power to the people'.

6. ABCD as (post)anarchism...?

I'm not sure it's been explicitly acknowledged anywhere, but there is, I would suggest, a distinctly anarchist streak to ABCD. In its emphasis on direct relationships of mutual care; on horizontal, associational life over against the hierarchical relationships of institutions; and on the 'common wealth' of local neighbourhoods, there is more than a resonance or two with anarchist politics - the development of 'autonomous zones' and experimental 'micropolitics' which 'prefigure' (i.e. begin living out in the present) a different kind of social order, beyond the State. Perhaps, following Saul Newman, Todd May and others, we might say the resonances are strongest with what is being described as postanarchism, which 'sees the state as a problem, but not the problem; it rejects the logic that would make any single point of resistance primary or central' and instead 'assumes power to be multiple and fluid, requiring more creative responses', which might well involve 'working more and more outside the state rather than strictly against it'. Interestingly - at least for me - that seems to bring us back to a place where some of the social practices of the Christian community might make a significant contribution. [5] But that, I think, is a reflection for another time...

Notes:

[1] Lynne Friedli, ‘“What we’ve tried, hasn’t worked”: the politics of assets based public health’, Critical Public Health, 23:2 (2013), pp.131-145

[2] Edgar Cahn, No More Throw-Away People (2000) p.29

[3] David Featherstone et al, ‘Progressive localism and the construction of political alternatives’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (2012), pp.177-182

[4] A Williams, M Goodwin & P Cloke, 'Neoliberalism, Big Society & Progressive Localism', Environment and Planning A (forthcoming 2014)

[5] Ted Troxell, ‘Christian Theory: Postanarchism, Theology, and John Howard Yoder’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 7:1 (2013), pp.37-60

On being a recovering hypocrite

I've been feeling a bit of a fraud recently.

On one side of this particularly uncomfortable coin are some real causes for celebration. (I would say 'pride', but that would be to give the game away too quickly, and probably - hopefully - to judge myself a little too harshly, which is at least sometimes a temptation I find myself falling into. So let's stick with 'celebration' for the moment...) The fact that the values, principles and practices of asset-based approaches to community-building (ABCD for short) have found their way to the agenda of the Church Urban Fund (a 'toolkit' for churches, in development) and, via a barn-storming speech from the Archbishop of York this week, the Church of England's General Synod, is something that I'm delighted about. That some of the stories of our accidental adoption of an ABCD approach here in Hodge Hill have made their way into these 'official' public domains - such as the story of our fabulous 'Unsung Heroes' event of March 2012 - is really encouraging for us here (and, yes, if I am proud of anything, then I'm certainly proud of the visionary, energetic, passionate, committed people that I live among and work alongside in these neighbourhoods, and within Hodge Hill Church's 'extended family'). And to lead a couple of workshops on ABCD at the CUF annual conference a couple of weeks ago, both fully booked, both full of energised, enthusiastic people saying 'yes, this makes sense', 'yes, we're doing this', 'yes, let's start connecting', and the like... well, that's given me real hope that we might just be onto something, and that there's energy for a real movement within church communities for this kind of approach - just as there obviously is in all kinds of other institutions, networks, and neighbourhoods, where our friends at Nurture Development, Barnwood Trust and others have already for some time been working hard and seeing all kinds of encouraging fruit.

But still I feel a bit of a fraud. And I think it's for a couple of reasons.

One reason is that (in the words of a wonderful story that I have both heard told and told myself a number of times now) when I've talked to people about the ABCD stuff, I've been really aware that "I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know." On a very important level, it's not rocket science. Starting with what people and neighbourhoods and communities have, instead of with what they lack, is not a complex idea. It's actually very easy to explain, and to get hold of. And to many, many people, it is simply common sense.

Another reason for my fraudulent feelings is slightly more complex and subtle. And that's the reality that, at least here in Hodge Hill, our 'putting into practice' of an ABCD approach has had its ups and downs, its stumbles and falterings; we've got it wrong as much as we've got it 'right'; it has taken large amounts of time and patience; and the 'big idea' has often been evidenced in very small-scale practical 'successes'. The various exciting things that we're able to say that we're doing here and now are, without exception I think, all quite fragile. There has, as yet, been no dramatic, widespread 'revolution' here. At best, there are some people - a very slowly growing number of people - who are able to tell a different story about their neighbourhood, about their church, and at least sometimes about themselves.

There is a bigger, deeper reason underneath both of these, though...

I recently bought a book which quite grandly entitles itself as 'The Intentional Christian Community Handbook'. I tend to be rather wary of anything that proclaims to be 'The... Handbook'. The thing that redeemed this book, at least as far as its cover went, was the subtitle: 'For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus'. That works a lot better for me. I can recognise in myself an Idealist, a Hypocrite, and a Wannabe: a Wannabe disciple of Jesus; and a Wannabe asset-based community builder.

The thing about the asset-based stuff is that, while on the one hand it is 'common sense', our 'common sense' as a society, as institutions, as neighbourhoods, as individuals, has all too often been co-opted, distorted, marginalised, in the interests of what I've begun to call (with shades of Old Testament prophet frustration) the 'idolatries' of money and of 'service-provision systems'. We have bought into the 'big lies' that money is the thing that, more than anything else, determines what is of value and what isn't, and that, more than anything else, enables us to achieve what we most desire - when, in fact, the things that are of most value, and that we desire most of all - love, friendship, community, for example - can't be achieved with money at all. We have bought into the 'big lie' that the things that we most need are best provided by comprehensive systems - and that the way we should relate to those systems is as 'clients', 'customers', or 'consumers'. We have allowed ourselves to be convinced that what we most need for our safety and security is police; that what we most need for our health and wellbeing is doctors; that what we most need for our children to learn and grow and flourish is schools; that what we most need in our ageing and dying is care homes...

Now I realise I'm treading on dangerous territory - that I risk being misunderstood as, or coopted into, advocating the 'austerity agenda' of our present coalition government: that we can't afford to sustain these creakingly ineffective public service machines and we'd be much better off just letting the market provide us with what we want, and letting the 'Big Society' get on with doing its job without the interfering State getting in the way. Please don't misunderstand me. I don't believe the current regime has the best interests of people in neighbourhoods like mine at its heart at all, but the best interests of the companies that will make vast profits from taking over what were once 'public services' and offering those services to those who can afford them, and can afford the luxury - or at least the imagined luxury - of 'choice'. I don't believe that the 'Big Society' will suddenly spring up in neighbourhoods like mine, while the ever-shrinking, asset-stripping State disinvests in them, and allows our once 'common wealth' constantly to 'trickle up' towards the '1%' of the country's super-rich and super-powerful.

But I do think we need weaning off our addictions. We need to rediscover our vast 'common wealth' as truly common, but we need weaning off our addiction to believing money on its own is 'the answer' to any question, when the answer is almost always love, care, friendship and community. And likewise, we - 'professionals' and 'clients' alike - need weaning off our addiction to the kind of 'service provision' that defines people in terms of their lacks, deficiencies, needs and pathologies; that isolates them from each other and from their networks and communities; that creates and sustains dependencies on 'experts' and 'systems' that, in turn, need a steady stream of the 'needy' to justify and sustain their own existence - that have to position themselves as 'the answer' to questions they themselves have defined, when, again, the answer is almost always love, care, friendship and community.

So my own feeling of being a fraud goes deeper, I think. I am not only a fraud and a hypocrite, but also a recovering addict. If I'm keen to be part of growing a movement around asset-based values, principles and practices, then I think what I'm discovering is that we're a movement of recovering addicts, who have got as far as acknowledging that we've got an addiction and are wanting to change.

Two recent books are helping me begin to get a handle on what I'm trying to say here. One is by Christian community worker Dave Andrews, Out And Out: Way-Out Community Work; the other is by the Franciscan priest and founder of the 'Center for Action and Contemplation', Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. Dave Andrews draws heavily on Rohr's book, and both, as you might have guessed, draw heavily on the insights from the 12 Steps movement which began in the 1930s as Alcoholics Anonymous, and now has millions of individuals across the world attending meetings every week.

I don't have much first hand experience of the 12 Steps movement, and I'm only beginning to digest the insights from Andrews and Rohr. But I have a hunch that they're on to something really important, for all of us - and particularly for those of us who are people of faith, and those of us who are committed to building community starting with what we have, and not what we lack. I'll try and share what I'm learning, as this journey continues, but I think what I'm wanting to do here is throw open the invitation to others - to you, whoever you are - to join in the conversation. I think we need, need perhaps quite urgently, to start addressing our addictions. And to do that, we need each other.

So, anyone for therapy? Shall we do it together?

The Good Samaritan & the FoodBank: it's not about 'do', it's about 'who'

I was recently privileged, along with my sister and brother clergy from Birmingham Diocese, to listen to the Director of Christian Aid, Loretta Minghella, talk to us on 'Grace and Justice', on the very morning that the G8 leaders were drafting their communique on global tax justice. It was a privilege, particularly, to hear someone in such a vital public role 'think in public' through the complexity of responding to a political agreement which would always, inevitably, be a compromise between global justice and vested interests, an 'attempt' which would always also be a 'falling short'. How to respond with 'grace', but also with an undiminished longing for justice?

But Loretta's talk begin in much more intimate territory - with the death of her brother. Anthony Minghella is known to many as an accomplished film director - 'The English Patient' among his most well-known works. But for Loretta, Anthony was first and foremost her brother. His death, 'premature' if that word means anything, left her, as the death of a loved one leaves any of us, with a deep sense of the loss of a unique, irreplaceable human being. But in that realisation, for Loretta, emerged the more universal insight that each person, whoever and wherever they are in the world, is similarly unique, irreplaceable. And it was in that insight, borne out of intimate love and loss, that her passionate commitment to global justice came to life.

This morning, we heard one of the most over-familiar stories of the Christian Scriptures: the Good Samaritan. Its familiarity has bred in us something even worse than contempt: indifference. But we should try to return to it with fresh eyes, to rediscover its shock value, to let it challenge us afresh. The lawyer comes to Jesus to 'test' him: "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" he asks. He knows the law, and he knows it well: "Love the Lord your God with everything that you are, and Love your neighbour as yourself." Simple to say, demanding, impossible even, to achieve. So he asks a supplementary question: "Ah yes," we hear him saying, "but who is my neighbour?" He is after clarification, definition, boundaries, limits.

And Jesus tells him that story. The one about the priest and the Levite, the good, holy Jews - who pass by on the other side of the road from the man dying in the ditch. And the Samaritan who stops and helps. The 'good Samaritan', we call him - a synonym for kindness, neighbourliness, responsible, active citizenship - the epitome, perhaps, of the 'Big Society'.

The perennial danger with the story is that we take from it only Jesus' final words: "Go, and do likewise." The trouble is, of course, that that's really not the most important thing. The story's not about 'do' - it's about 'who?' It's about a Samaritan: the outsider, the foreigner, the deviant, the enemy, the one 'we' (putting ourselves in the shoes of the good Jews hearing the story for the first time) are most suspicious of, most despise, most go out of our way to avoid. This is 'my neighbour' for that good Jewish lawyer: the one he can't even bring himself to name.

There is renewed excitement, in some quarters, at the moment, about the possibilities for "the Church" (which is often unquestioningly translated as "the Church of England", and that in itself is an issue) to take on the 'provision' of some vital 'services' from the State, as the State withdraws under the cover of 'austerity', or 'localism', or some other guise of neoliberal ideology. One of the latest sparks of excitement came with the launch, at Lambeth Palace last week, of a new report from ResPublica, 'Holistic Mission: Social Action and the Church of England'. The good old CofE, the report argues, with its army of (largely middle-class) volunteers, can provide services and meet needs in ways more holistic, more local, and more personal, than any institution of the State.

This is dangerous, seductive stuff. The seduction is in the possibility not just of being 'useful', but of being 'special', being 'effective', being 'needed'. Many in the CofE mourn the loss of such epithets, and would jump at the chance to recover them. It is much of the attraction (as I've argued here before) of the FoodBank franchise, celebrated by David Cameron as 'the Big Society in action'. We can be society's 'Good Samaritans' once again.

But that is to completely misread the story. Because it's not about 'do', it's about 'who'. It is a challenge to recognise the outsider, the foreigner, the deviant, the enemy, the one 'we' are most suspicious of, most despise, most go out of our way to avoid... as our neighbour. And not just as one who presents to us with 'needs' to be met - but as one who we need, because it is us, it turns out, who are lying half-dead in the ditch.

And that is the truly dangerous message of the gospel. Because it destroys all our carefully-constructed 'professional boundaries', class divisions, 'meritocratic hierarchies', gated communities and financially-entangled 'securities'. It reveals for the dehumanising heresy it is the project of creating our society as a 'hostile environment' for outsiders, and for insiders too who don't fit the current economic model of the 'good' (meaning financially productive) citizen. It refuses our attempts at putting 'pragmatic' limits on who we count as our neighbours, and instead throws us into the limitless ocean of impossible neighbour-love, in which every single unique, irreplaceable human being is swimming. This truly dangerous message is the real 'holistic mission' of the church, if only it would dare to embrace it. And it's not going to make any government happy if it does.



[I'm indebted to Ivan Illich's reading of the Good Samaritan for much of the thinking behind this piece. You can hear him talking about it here, and there's also an excellent introduction to it here. I'm grateful, as ever, to Cormac Russell of ABCD Europe for pointing me in the direction of Illich.]

We need a new kind of Opposition

"[Community Organising] is best understood as a means by which to formulate and embody a contradiction to any given instance of injustice. ... Political actions for Alinsky are simultaneously to declare the unjust way to be untrue and to present a possible alternative through which all may flourish. Alinsky’s insistence on having a constructive alternative means that the declaration of a “No” to something is always premised on the prior celebration and upholding of a “Yes” to another way, a way in which both oppressor and oppressed are invited to participate."[1]

We urgently need a new kind of Opposition in Britain.

No alternative?

In the aftermath of the death of an old Prime Minister, it is clearer than ever that the three main political parties are, with minor variations, Thatcher's children. Most disappointingly, the self-proclaimed 'One Nation Labour' party have offered no coherent, imaginative alternative to the dominant neo-liberal narrative which governs this country for the ever-increasing wealth of the richest, depending on the anxiety of those who are told they are the 'squeezed middle' (see my earlier post on this pernicious language game), and marginalising and stigmatising the poorest.

Iain Duncan Smith, demonstrating unapologetically to the world his near-total 'empathy deficit', proclaims breezily that he could live off £53 a week, and yet has no intention of proving it, while Liam Byrne, his opposite number, would not even dare challenge him, because he has positioned himself in a no-win corner, trying to play the Right at their own game, suggesting merely that 'people who put more in' to the welfare system 'should expect to get more out' - a policy that neither has any economic grounding in the practice of other kinds of insurance policy, nor any serious capacity to provide a safety net for those most precarious and vulnerable.

At the same time, trade union leaders anxiously warn Ed Miliband against contemplating scrapping Trident, the multi-billion pound psychological fiction of the nation's power and security, impotent against terrorism, and utterly ineffective against the kind of nuclear escalation we are currently being scared about with North Korea. £25 billion for 13,000 jobs - that's roughly £2 million per job, which is by all accounts a rather large amount of money which could be invested in a more creative, and less destructive (in many, many senses), job creation scheme.

And while the passionate anger of so many of us finds something of a voice in anti-cuts protests, the distortion of language by the decision-makers that uses the apparently reasonable-sounding word 'reform' for something which in practice is little more than 'ruthless slashing', means that those on the other side of the picket line have already had the game taken away from them, left to doggedly 'defend public services' against the crashing waves of the 'There Is No Alternative' ('TINA') argument - while often having to admit, with an air of some desperation, that they find it hard to imagine any alternative beyond 'keep going as we are'.

Glimpses of imaginative possibility

To be fair, there are glimpses of imaginative possibility around. UK Uncut at its best does what the 'Occupy' movement does at its best - occupying public (and often 'private') spaces and creating within them, at least temporarily, an 'alternative economy': 'bailing into the banks and setting up libraries, forests, hospitals, schools, playgrounds, leisure centres and everything else that needs saving'. These 'micro-actions' ring more than a few bells with Alinsky's 'embodied contradictions' described in the quote with which I began - they open up a crack of possibility in the dominant 'TINA' discourse - but they are all too easily dismissed as 'stunts' without serious credibility...

...which, of course, is how Iain Duncan-Smith labelled the petition, at the time of writing just shy of half a million signatories, which challenges him to put his money where his mouth is, and attempt to live off that £53 a week that he so casually claimed he could do, for a year. But I would suggest the 'stunt' is actually something much more serious - something that might even herald a new kind of political 'Opposition'.

Bridging the 'empathy deficit'

If poverty is, as Alastair McIntosh defines it, 'a form of violence that comes from a deficit of empathy between those who have much and those who have little', then we need a new kind of politician: not the comfortable millionnaires (whether Tory, LibDem or Labour) living in their gated mansions and pronouncing about people about whom they have learnt little, and from whom they have learnt even less, but courageous human beings who are prepared to bridge the 'empathy gaps' and root themselves in the communities that, in conventional language, are 'the least well off' - and by 'root themselves', I mean live and move and educate their children and do their shopping and so on. Perhaps we need to make it compulsory for MPs to work part-time - and spend the rest of their week volunteering with local voluntary organisations - enabling them, in passing, to get a better grip on the challenges faced by those of us in the so-called Third (or 'Tired') Sector...?

But the empathy deficit is, of course, not just an issue for MPs. They may occasionally be opinion-shapers, but they're also so often opinion-seekers, desperately trying to speak the language they think the majority (so often the slimmest and most precarious of majorities) of the country want to hear. We are a deeply divided country, and the fact that politicians of all shades pander to the so-called 'squeezed middle', and marginalise and stigmatise those on the lowest incomes, only highlights the problem. What can we do about it? The brilliantly practical, passionately 'heart-broken' blog post last week from Sara Kewly is a great place to start - but it's for the people who already care, who are, like us, already heart-broken. What about the rest? What is going to challenge the 'divide and rule' politics of the professional politicians, and the finger-pointing casual fascism of the Daily Mail and its ilk?

Community Organising

Community Organising is one 'way forward'. In another superb discussion piece from the past week, Cormac Russell and friends from the ABCD Europe network remind us that collective, direct action can be the 'opening of the door' to negotiation and building a shared vision, the shared 'Yes' to which the Bretherton quote points. As Cormac puts it so persuasively:

"the biggest challenge then for our leaders and us, is not to organize the protest of all protests, or in framing the heads of negotiation for a better social contract, or even to orate the grandest of all dreams. It is in the slow, and humble convening of a conversation where every voice can be heard, including the ones that don’t share our ‘dream’, until a shared vision can be hued from the confusion, frustration, conscientization, possibilities and potential, that combine to make us who we are."

Here in Birmingham, the building of a broad-based alliance of schools, trade unions and faith-based organisations is not just about growing a power base that those 'in power' will not be able to ignore - it is about bridging those divides on which those 'in power' often subtly depend. It is not just about building a new kind of 'Opposition' - it is about building a new kind of society in the process.

Re-defining 'work'

But we need to push our imaginations further. Perhaps it is not just MPs who should work part-time and spend part of their week outside their comfort zones. In this job-strapped society, perhaps we really could limit the working week for all, share the work around, and lure people into civic engagement with their newly-found 'spare time'? Those at the bottom of the income ladder would need to be paid a decent living wage of course. And those at the 'top' would discover, through time banking perhaps, that an hour of their time is worth no more - but also no less - than an hour of the time of those who clean their offices and make their coffees. Perhaps we might also be able to more explicitly 'value' the time given by so many to caring: for children, for elderly relatives, for friends and relatives with illnesses and disabilities, for neighbours, for their communities, for the environment we all share...? Perhaps we might be weaned off our addiction to 'paid work' as the only solution for human idleness and society's poverty, and - as I've suggested before here - broaden the definition of 'work' to include everything that makes for a livelihood, nurtures healthy and supportive relationships, and enables discovery and growth in 'vocation'?

At a wedding of a friend and colleague yesterday, full of wonderful people who care deeply about their neighbours, their communities and their world, I got into a conversation with an old friend about 'the welfare problem'. What do we do with the young men that he works with, in their late teens and early 20s, who, challenging backgrounds and unpromising contexts notwithstanding, can't see the point of getting up before mid-day because the JSA they're on gives them a comfortable disposable income? Beyond the simplistic 'carrot or stick' question, how do we crack it? My friend's first suggestion was to ban X Factor, Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire, and any other TV programme that seduces us into imagining the 'lifestyle of our dreams' will simply fall into our lap. My immediate thought was that we might also need to ban all those people who fill the so-called 'news', for whom the 'lifestyle of our dreams' has, in fact, very much fallen into their laps - including many of our politicians, bankers and 'celebrities' - simply because of where, and to whom, they were born.

'Aspiration' - but not as we know it

But just as pernicious is the 'a' word so beloved of our professional politicians, all heirs of Thatcher: the aspiration of the individual, the aspiration for 'social mobility' (always 'upward') - not the aspiration for a different kind of society. And that is what we really, desperately need now. Not a 'Big' society, that patches up public services cuts with voluntary action, while the private sector creams off the profit-making bits. But a more connected, empathetic society, where we are encouraged, and enabled, to 'walk in each other's shoes' as a routine part of life - and where the first thing we ask of politicians is who they are listening to (and, incidentally, where Iain Duncan-Smith tries to live on £53 a week and realises, as he fails to do so, that no one in the UK can, for any sustained length of time, with even the most basic level of well-being). And a more citizen-led society, where we regularly hold our politicians to account with not just the ballot box, but in conversations at the school gate, and the Job Centre, and the local supermarket; and where the first question we ask of public services is not how much they cost, but how they are supporting local people to build healthy, flourishing communities for themselves.

We need a new kind of 'Opposition' urgently. And if Her Majesty's Opposition are not going to provide it, then the people of the so-called United Kingdom are going to have to do it ourselves.

---

[1] Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics, Chichester: John Wiley, 2010, p.79

Birmingham: from 'apocalypse now' to compassionate city?

I've blogged here before about the devastating budget cuts that have been forced on Birmingham City Council, and the beginnings of a response. There is a growing body of comment and opinion (including this piece from Left Foot Forward) that also highlights the injustice of the situation cities like Birmingham find themselves in. But I want to dig just a little deeper into that 'how do we respond?' question - in a way that dangerously mixes politics and theology so as to quite possibly alienate and/or bemuse many readers who would rather swing one way or the other...

Apocalyptic predictions and Advent: the 'big picture' and the 'little stories'

So 'the end of local government as we know it' is beginning. The 'jaws of doom' are beginning to bite. But there is much more to come. The imaginations of Birmingham citizens are beginning to be filled with 'Les Miserables'-like images of closed-down libraries and leisure centres, rubbish piling up on the streets, isolated older people abandoned by the 'social care' system, and a 'youth service' that is merely a distant memory - not to mention thousands pushed below the poverty line and cut loose from financial support by brutal changes in the system that was, once upon a time, called 'social security'.

All of this stuff, as I've also pointed out here before, is what we might call 'apocalyptic'. It's the kind of dark and threatening future, the 'doom and gloom' in a quite literal sense, that we Christians sometimes encounter in our Scriptures, particularly in the Advent season leading up to Christmas. But as Sir Albert Bore, Birmingham City Council's lucky leader, and others know all too well, there's no need to be a religious nut to take this stuff seriously. It feels like an all-too-real possibility in the not-too-distant future, for many of us.

When Jesus in the gospels does 'apocalyptic', however - and this goes for the early Christian writers who were at the very beginning of trying to make sense of his 'good news' too - there is a clear, consistent theme: be realistic about this stuff, don't be in denial... but don't get seduced by it, sucked into its glare with morbid fascination. Instead, shift the scale and focus of your attention. Look from the threatening 'big picture' to the smallest human scale possible: to the relationships and care and attention and compassion and friendship between individual human people. Look to those for a different way of seeing 'reality' - for a 'counter-story' that challenges the dominant narrative, for the cracks in the 'big picture', for a different future opening up in the almost-invisible.

Anything but 'Big Society': some 'C' words for the Council...

This, I find myself repeating often, is anything but 'Big Society'. This is no top-down narrative of impossible ideals conveniently imposed as a cover for systematic, unjust, dehumanising cuts. The doom and gloom of the big picture needs to be seen with heart-breaking clarity, and lamented with passion. Birmingham's future is looking pretty bleak at this point in time, and there are non-inevitable decisions and systems of the powerful that are responsible for that. Our leaders in Birmingham City Council - and any of us that find ourselves with some kind of leadership at a local level - need to be utterly honest and realistic about this.

But the counter-story can - must - nevertheless be told, and lived. And alongside the micro, hyper-local, Birmingham City Council have it within their power to tell and live such a counter-story too...

At this point in Birmingham's story, we have gone well beyond needing a 'competent' city council, as if somehow, so long as 'they' do it well, we can sit back and let it happen. We certainly don't need a 'consultative' city council, if that means 'them' deciding what to do and then asking 'us' if that's OK. Or even asking 'us' what to do and thereby drawing 'us' into responsibility for decisions that will never, given the big picture, be 'OK'.

I've found myself in conversations within and around BCC, exploring what it might mean for Birmingham to become a 'co-operative' council, 'working with' other organisations and local residents to make things happen more effectively than if the council tried doing stuff on their own. But I fear that is too timid a position to be exploring at this point in time.

Co-production: a challenge and a cry

I've also been in a number of conversations around the city where the term 'co-production' has been used. It has normally, in those conversations, meant some kind of significant involvement of 'service users' in designing, and - more ambitiously - 'delivering' the services that they use. In a more radical sense, the good people in the Chamberlain Forum have used the term with more depth and clarity to remind us that co-production is always already going on in local communities: we - individually and together - take at least some responsibility for our health, for example, through the decisions we make, the activities we participate in, the support we give each other. It is not for 'service providers' to come into neighbourhoods and 'introduce co-production'. At best, 'service providers' can try to strengthen what is there already - and not obstruct it or co-opt it for the ends of their own organisations and systems.

Edgar Cahn, who developed the idea of 'Time Banking' in the USA, and must take a lot of the credit for developing the idea of 'co-production' too, found himself in the late '90s shifting his tone from 'promoting' the values of co-production (seeing people as assets; redefining work to include anything human beings do to make human beings, families and neighbourhoods flourish; replacing one-way 'services' with two-way reciprocity; and investing in the 'social capital' of communities) to a passionate lament that the way things are is not the way things should be:

Assets became: No more throw-away people.

Redefining work became: No more taking the contribution of women, children, families, immigrants for granted. No more free rides for the market economy extracted by subordination, discrimination, and exploitation.

Reciprocity became: Stop creating dependencies; stop devaluing those whom you help while you profit from their troubles.

Social capital became: No more disinvesting in families, neighbourhoods and communities. No more economic and social strip-mining.[1]

So 'co-production' gets us as far as the cry of 'no more...'. It would be interesting to hear Council officers and elected Councillors beginning to inhabit such language from day to day.

But language urgently needs to turn into action, and good language is the kind of language that readily makes that shift to 'doing things'. I'm not sure the language of 'co-production' can cut it in these demanding times. But I wonder if 'compassion' just might.

Birmingham: the 'compassionate city'?

What might happen, if Birmingham as a city was disarmingly honest about how tough life is going to be in the next few years, how many taken-for-granted 'services' will no longer be provided - but at the same time, began to tell and live out a powerful counter-story (to the ConDem government's 'there is no alternative') of a compassionate city?

How about if Birmingham as a city took over control of its Job Centres and refused to allow the merciless 'benefit penalties' to be imposed for those who haven't met the demands of the Work Programme due to sickness or disability, caring for family or neighbours, or doing valuable voluntary work in their neighbourhoods and communities?

How about if Birmingham kicked out the farcical Atos assessments, and introduced a new, more compassionate process which deals face-to-face with people as human beings rather than boxes to be ticked?

How about if Birmingham commits to becoming a genuine 'city of sanctuary' for those seeking asylum, welcoming them as gifts to the city, whatever the UK Border Agency might be told to think?

How about if Brummies from our multitude of backgrounds, in our multitude of languages, cultures and faiths, could speak proudly of a city where neighbours young and old care compassionately for each other, even - or especially - when the systems that we used to rely on for 'care' are crumbling around us?

We could be, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have suggested just today, a 'policy laboratory' - experimenting at the cutting edge of our rapidly-changing society. But more than that, we could be a place which tells and lives a different story to the heartless, divisive, scapegoating stories that are churned out daily from this government and its comfortable friends in the media.

I've talked quite a bit about the city council in this - we do, after all, still look to them and their 'leader' for some kind of leadership.

But of course it isn't about them. It's about us. It starts and ends with us. Birmingham, the compassionate city? What can you or I do tomorrow to start making it so...?

---

[1]Cahn 2000:29

On the evils of food banks...

I am involved in setting up a local Food Bank. It's a great project...

• Churches are working together that hitherto have not even spoken to each other.
• Ministers who might sometimes be preoccupied with more introspective tasks are giving time and energy to something that meets a genuine need in their wider local communities.
• Volunteers are putting up their hands enthusiastically to get involved.
• Congregation members are already keen to buy a bit more food in their weekly shop, to bring to church to donate to the food bank.
• 'Secular' partners locally think we're doing 'a good thing' - and consequently seem more inclined to think 'we' might be 'a good thing' too.
• We face, ahead of us, a golden opportunity to work alongside, and to be alongside, neighbours whom we know but have had little contact with, and strangers who might, in the process, become friends.
• And best of all, we feel good. We're 'plugging a gap', 'coming to the rescue'. We, the old archaic, strange old Christian church are doing something useful.

All of these, in one way or another, are good things. But they also have the seeds of unspeakable evil. The fact that, on the surface, and even a little underneath, this looks and feels like 'a good thing'; the fact that good things will inevitably come out of it - these can, if we're not careful, seduce us into thinking we are invested in an enterprise of the highest good.

But we are not. We are responding to the callous dismantling by a powerful and detached government, of the 'social contract' that preserves an element of compassion within the mechanics of the state, and that ensures that the most vulnerable in our society do not slip through the net. We are concealing what is going on. We are sticking plasters over great fissures opening up in our society. We are slipping the ultimately disempowering practice of 'charity' into chasms that, ultimately, only justice, truth and reconciliation can bridge.

I will keep working with my sisters and brothers on the developing food bank here, because I do not want to participate in the sin of passively watching my neighbours going hungry. But I refuse to participate in the even greater sin of celebrating the 'opportunity' of colluding with an evil, socially destructive government, either by silence, or in words of mis-placed hope.

'The end of local government as we know it' - response to Birmingham City Council's budget consultation

Birmingham City Council are facing what the Council leader recently described as 'the end of local government as we know it'. Here's my response to BCC's consultation on their 2012-13 budget. You can see the proposals, and respond too, at: http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/budgetviews

To whom it may concern:

I’m grateful for the opportunity to respond through the Budget Consultation process, and I hope many other Birmingham citizens have also done so.

My response is largely around the general principles (what you call ‘the wider service delivery issues’ in the document) rather than the particularities of individual budget lines.

I’m sure cliches have already been over-used in this conversation, but I’m afraid the cliche that springs to mind is about ‘rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic’. It is becoming increasingly clear that the figures, projected into the future, mean not only that so-called ‘salami slicing’ of services is an ineffective response, but even that an approach that ‘preserves’ some services while cutting others will not be going far enough. Albert Bore’s description of ‘the end of local government as we know it’ is correct, and what is needed is a radically different approach to local government. Rather than ‘restructuring the building’, I would suggest, what is needed, unavoidably, is to begin the work of imagining what might be built, what seeds planted and nurtured, in the rubble that is left behind.

1) Who will be able to think the unthinkable?

I would humbly suggest that those best-equipped to do this imagining might include some council members and officers with an ability to think far enough ‘outside the box’, but that the pressures of working within the current system may well mean that many will find that just too difficult. Those of us who work in what is often called the ‘Third’ (and sometimes, more recently, the ‘Tired’) Sector have, I would suggest, a wealth of experience not simply in surviving on a shoestring, but on the kind of creative reinvention that is needed for Birmingham.

My first suggestion, then, would be an urgent need, not for another consultation exercise, or polite listening, but for getting the right people in rooms, together, with a blank sheet of paper, across all the areas and departments in which the Council currently provides, or aspires to provide, some kind of service – to re-imagine what kind of support will be needed for Birmingham to survive, and ideally thrive. As a concrete example, I would want to highlight the work of the Chamberlain Forum as being ideally placed to enable such thinking to happen and develop.

2) A radical approach that starts with neighbourhoods

The traditional model of ‘service provision’ is almost dead. That will, inevitably, mean huge losses, both in terms of council employees but also in terms of what local neighbourhoods will no longer benefit from. I would suggest, however, that in the crisis there is also an opportunity, and it is an opportunity to rediscover ourselves as a city, begin with our local neighbourhoods. There are many things that are ‘provided’ as ‘services’ that neighbourhoods are actually, with adequate resourcing, much better at doing themselves. There is clear evidence, for example, that the most significant factors that make people feel safe and secure is not police presence, but the levels of trust between neighbours, and the frequency with which people in a neighbourhood gather together outdoors. There is also clear evidence that the wellbeing of the most vulnerable people – children & young people, older people, and adults in between – is maximised not within institutions, but within communities of mutual care.

What I’m suggesting here is not ‘big society’ – a policy that looks for all the world like a smokescreen for massive cuts in public services, with nothing positive to replace them apart from some patronising moral exhortations emanating from comfortable Oxfordshire villages. It is also not simply about ‘devolving to District Committees’, as if that somehow solves anything – merely displacing the same old problems to a lower level on the chain (something that central government have been doing very ‘successfully’ themselves, as Birmingham can testify).

What I am suggesting needs resourcing. But it needs a kind of resourcing that is utterly different from ‘service provision’. It also, helpfully, can be done very effectively with rather less money. It is not about ‘neighbourhood management’, although that was a very good initiative in this direction. There will, after all, be rather less services for communities to manage or commission. This is about community development. Paid people, in each local neighbourhood (and ‘local’ means ‘local’ here – if it’s not within walking distance, it’s not ‘local’) of the city, who are trained and skilled in connecting people, building relationships, growing trust, nurturing friendships, drawing out people’s skills and confidence and knowledge and passions. It is, as the Social Cohesion Inquiry has at least begun to realise about identifying, unlocking, and connecting the ‘assets’ within people and communities so often labelled in ‘deficit’ terms – but using them to grow things from the grassroots, not to support a creaking, disintegrating, top-down structure.

Again, it is often the 3rd Sector that knows better than most how to do this. But even ‘we’ are often so tied in to the ‘service provision’ mentality that we fail to do what needs doing most.

Yes, Birmingham needs infrastructure, and it would be easy and obvious for the City Council to focus on that. But Birmingham needs strong, resilient and caring communities more. If we’re asking the hardest questions about what BCC spends its money on, I would argue this has to come first, before anything else – because everything else will flow from this. BCC is in the best possible position to commission the recruitment, training, and support of such a network of community developers – and it will pay dividends. The evidence from a programme such as ‘Near Neighbours’ in significant sections of the city would back this up.

There is, of course, an ‘equality’ question in all of this. Clearly some neighbourhoods will need more ‘intense’ work, others will require a ‘lighter touch’. There are measures around that will help with that judgement, but they may not be the traditional ‘deprivation’ indices. Levels of social capital, social infrastructure, and formal/informal co-production (again, see Chamberlain Forum’s work in this area) will be the key indicators.

3) Relationship with central government

As an outsider to the workings of ‘government’, I can only imagine what goes on behind the scenes in the relationship between local and central government. I would suggest, however, that we are again moving into radically new terrain in that relationship. While central government slashes and burns local government’s powers and budget (especially in authorities like Birmingham, particularly dependent on central funding), ‘responsibility’ (for picking up the pieces) is devolved to local level like never before.

It must surely be time for cities like Birmingham to find creative ways to vocally and powerfully resist the central government agenda and its impact on our communities, especially where it hits the poorest and most vulnerable. It may be an uncomfortable alliance, but I would suggest Birmingham City Council might find a whole new strength in forging links with groups as diverse as Citizens UK and UK Uncut, to make the people power of Birmingham known in the corridors of Westminster.

In conclusion, I appreciate these may well be answers to questions that you haven’t quite been asking, and that as answers go they may be either beyond what feels currently imaginable, or too vague to be of use. Whatever happens, please have the courage to not allow the vested interests and impoverished imaginations of those who wish to preserve their own small patch of ‘status quo’ to, if not win the day, at least paralyse any possibility of meaningful action. The ship is sinking, and we need to be hard at work making the best possible lifeboats.

With warmest wishes,

Revd Al Barrett

Church of England Priest, Hodge Hill Church
(St Philip & St James C of E in partnership with Hodge Hill URC)
"Growing Loving Community... in the love of God ♥ with all our neighbours ♥ across Hodge Hill"

Changing the world from a tent… (Midnight Mass sermon 2011)

 

(I’m going to begin and end with poems by other people.
All the muddled stuff in the middle is my own. So...)

‘This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future's
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.’

(BC–AD, by U A Fanthorpe)

A tent
appeared, in the middle of this church
just before Advent,
the sign over its opening,
‘Welcome
to the Kingdom of God’.

If you’re going to turn the world
upside-down
you could do worse than begin
with a tent.

From Egypt’s Tahrir Square
to Wall Street
and the City of London,
tents have been springing up:
canvas occupations
of places
the powerful thought they had
under control;
makeshift villages
where only tanks
or tourists
or money-changers
on fantasy salaries
were supposed to feel at home;
places
where the rich got richer,
where power concentrated,
where the poor were sent away empty
and brushed into the shadows,
suddenly had tents
popping up
and minds
opening up
and questions
bubbling up
and hope
springing up
that there is –
despite the evidence –
an alternative
and we can
imagine it
and even
begin to live it
here and now
from our village
of tents.

We have had toddlers
in our tent here.
Busy making
their own little world,
free
from the order
and conventions
and sometimes
disapproving looks
and anxious parental whispers
of ‘grown-up’
worship.

And we should not
have been
surprised.

Isaiah for one
caught a glimpse
of wolves and lambs,
calves and lions,
babies and snakes
playing together,
and led by a little child.
A recipe
for parental anxiety
if ever there was one.

And Jesus,
‘grown-up’
allegedly,
told his followers,
arguing again
about who would be the greatest,
that unless they became
like little children
they would not even enter
the kingdom of heaven.

Yes.
If you’re going to turn the world
upside-down
you could do worse than begin
with a tent.

Or a stable.

We have had a stable here too.
With a real baby -
a girl -
and battle-hardened
teachers
who had to bend low
to get through
the stable door
have been dumbfounded
by children
struck
by awe
and wonder
and peace
and a sense
that something exciting
new
and different
was happening
here
and that they
the children
and even the teachers
were somehow
part of it.

And we should not
have been
surprised.

If you’re going to turn the world
upside-down
you could do worse than begin
with a tent.

Or a stable.

Or a seed in a womb.

Mary
deep inside her
knew
a new song
bubbling up
a new hope
springing up -
despite the evidence –
a new world
opening up
where the little ones
had been raised up
the hungry
filled up
and the rich
and the powerful
tripped up
brought down
sent away
emptied out.
And so Mary knew
and sang
and set out
and now
here we are
at the opening
the threshold
the doorway
to the Kingdom
of God.

The womb
the stable
the tent.

Not
a big space
a big idea
a big project
least of all
a big society.

A little space
no bigger
than the eye
of a needle.

A little space
where heaven
and earth,
past
and future,
old
and new,
meet
in wordless,
fragile,
vulnerable
flesh.
A little space
shared
with cows
and sheep
and weary shift-workers
and tired travellers
and a teenage mum
who knows
the world
has just turned
upside-down
and has dared
to open herself
to be part
of it.

‘It’s a long way off,’
said the poet
of the Kingdom,
‘but inside it,
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

(RS Thomas, ‘The Kingdom’)

A Graceful Death, Big Society, and the mundane littleness of love

I'm a wordy person, but sometimes the words take a while to come. We went as a family into Birmingham yesterday to see 'A Graceful Death', an amazing exhibition of paintings by the extraordinary Antonia Rolls. At its heart is a set of paintings of the last few weeks, days and final day of the life of Antonia's own partner, Steve - and of herself, as she begins the journey of loss and living 'after Steve'. The exhibition has since grown to include others who have been near the end of their lives, and those who they have left behind.

Looking at the pictures, and reading the stories, was a profoundly moving experience. The gracefulness - and in some pictures, golden glory - of the journey through death, somehow shines out of, and surrounding, the inescapably tissue-delicate fragility and raw vulnerability of the dying person. And in the pictures of bereavement, the absence, the isolation, is stark. A triptych of pictures moves from Antonia sitting on one of two chairs, near a pair of Steve's slippers, to two empty chairs with the slippers, to just the slippers on their own, in one corner of a gaping, empty space.

But it was a tiny, simple diptych that lodged itself in my head and heart. One of Antonia's self-portraits: on the left, a solitary, lonely figure; on the right, the same, but with a teapot and a cup of tea. A mundane moment, physical action, of familiarity and continuity, of survival and self-care, of resilience - even of hope, as Antonia describes it herself.

Why was I so drawn to this one? So seemingly trivial, unemotional, alongside the much bigger, more dramatically profound, images of dying and death itself? Perhaps a bit of a personal connection - most of my own encounters with death are in conversations with bereaved family-members; 'what do i do now?' is often one of the questions I'm trying to help them wrestle with; and yes, we do get through a fair amount of tea, as we talk through everything from the emotionally cataclysmic to the most mundane detail.

But I want to speak up here for the vital importance of the mundane detail in the bigger picture.

On the road between our house and church, there is a house with a garden wall. A man - white, possibly Eastern European, in his 60s, quite possibly single - is out there most days, if it's dry, patiently restoring the wall with a painstaking attention to detail. A true labour of love. I've passed him many times, on foot or in the car. I've smiled. But it was only recently, with Rafi on his bike, that we stopped, because my 3-year-old son decided to, to admire the man's handiwork. And it was only when we stopped, and tried to begin a conversation, that we discovered that the man was deaf. So with makeshift sign language, we told him we thought his wall was great. And the broadest of smiles cracked across his face. From impressionistic labels and background scenery, that man began to emerge for me as a neighbour I could learn to love.

“In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.” Mother Teresa hits the nail squarely on the head. We can only ever love, not in big generalities, but in and through the little details of life. And it's the little details that nurture and sustain our relationships, and nurture and sustain us when those relationships are lost or broken.

In a seminar this week, on 'Urban Ministry in a Climate of Austerity and Unrest', there was hardly any talk of 'big projects', and much talk of small 'micro-actions' of enacted hope, of 'everyday faithfulness', of 'mundane holiness'. This is the domain not just of the possible, the realistic, in these tough times, but of the vitally necessary. What we need to keep going are relationships of trust, friendship, love. Real, genuine community. And that's where 'Big Society' is fatally flawed. Because it's not about 'big', it can't be. We should have learned by now that 'big' is to be treated with serious suspicion. We are learning now that 'big' does anything but love - quite the opposite, in fact. We need to re-focus on 'little'. And that may well often start with a cup of tea...