Living abundantly within limits: resilience, ABCD & intentional community

There's an exciting feeling of 'things coming together' at the moment. I'm someone who gets excited easily, but this feels particularly significant. It's a convergence of different trains of thought, but also of different trajectories of action - and when the thinking and the doing start joining up, then I reckon it's worth taking quite seriously.

One of the bits of 'joined up doing' is around food. I've blogged several times here about the rise and rise of FoodBanks, and on some of the many dangers of embracing them with enthusiasm. Locally, one of the things we're trying to work out is how to link up the desperate - and politically disgraceful - need for emergency food provision with opportunities for those 'in need' to maintain (or rediscover) some dignity, pride, a sense of giftedness, and the possibility of being a valuable contribution within their community. Inspired in part by stories from 'The Stop' in Toronto and other initiatives closer to home, but perhaps even more so by some of the passionate and gifted local people who are wanting to work together to may our neighbourhood a better place, we're exploring on our estate how we can develop 'community gardening teams' to help people with their gardens, pass on gardening skills and wisdom, and start transforming patches of wasteland into attractive, wild and fruitful green spaces. We're exploring how we can connect up neighbours with gardens they can't care for, with neighbours who want to grow stuff but don't have the space. We're exploring how we can get Firs & Bromford growing fruit and veg in every available plot of land, to supply a regular 'farmers' market / cooperative shop / community cafe' with fresh produce, alongside home-made jams and freshly-baked bread, alongside healthy cooking and eating sessions, and bring-and-share community lunches featuring speciality dishes from our many different cultures. The plan is that those who temporarily find themselves in need of emergency food supplies can also find themselves much more permanently immersed in a thriving ecology of growing together and eating together, giving and receiving, learning and sharing.

This movement towards local food links up with some 'big thinking' being done in the interrelated and overlapping fields called 'transition', 'permaculture' and 'community resilience'. An incredibly important report was published a few weeks ago entitled 'Climate after growth: why environmentalists must embrace post-growth economics and community resilience'. It was co-written by Rob Hopkins, the inspirational founder of the Transition Network, which began not too many years ago in the Devon town of Totnes, and is now a global phenomenon. At the heart of the report is the (deeply political) argument that 'the nearly ubiquitous belief of our elected officials ... that addressing the climate crisis must come second to ensuring economic growth' is utterly 'wrongheaded', and for two reasons: firstly 'because it underestimates the severity of the climate crisis', and secondly 'because it presupposes the old economic "normal" of robust growth can be revived'. Instead, the authors argue, we have entered into an era of "new normals" - in terms of our energy supply and consumption (because 'the era of cheap and easy fossil fuels is over'), our climate (with dramatic changes and severe shocks becoming a rapidly-intensifying reality) and economics (because consistent growth is no longer possible, after the end of cheap oil, and with debt mountains growing ever-larger).

Adjusting to these 'new normals' requires 'one common strategy', they argue: building community resilience. In practice, this includes developing 'community-owned, distributed, renewable energy production', 'sustainable local food systems', 'new cooperative business models, sharing economies, re-skilling, and more'. All of these initiatives are 'inherently local', and start small, but are already 'spreading rapidly and creating tangible impacts'. 'Done right', say the authors, they can 'serve as the foundation of a whole new economy - an economy comprised of people and communities that thrive within the real limits of our beautiful but finite planet'.

It's hopeful language, and the initiatives described in the report and the many more found within the Transition Network are real embodiments of hope-in-action. Across the world, at a neighbourhood level, people are beginning to do what is necessary to live within the limits of 'what is possible' for the future of our planet, and for our generations to come. Although the initiatives are almost entirely happening 'from the grassroots', it is, in many ways, a movement 'from the outside-in': it begins with the urgent, global limits on what is possible for our planetary sustainability (energy, climate and economy), which shapes action at a local level. Thinking global, acting local.

A lot of this resonates with an approach I've explored here a lot, that of asset-based community development (ABCD). But there is, I think, a difference of direction. If the direction of 'transition' and 'resilience' is from the 'outside-in', from what is possible global to what is necessary locally, then the direction of ABCD is, in many ways, from the 'inside-out', from what is necessary (locally) to what is possible (locally) - thinking local, acting local. Our basic human needs for health and wellbeing, safety and security, raising flourishing children, and ageing and dying well - among others - are best met by, and within, our local communities, through neighbourly relationships and communal activity. ABCD points us to the abundant possibilities we discover within community, when we decide to do 'what is necessary' ourselves. This is not - emphatically not! - to say there is not a place for institutions, and for the state as the 'institution par excellence'. But it is to put those institutions in their place, to be clear about their limits. We cannot know what we need (in the way of support or 'expertise' from such institutions, professionals, systems), until we know what we already have. We need to start with the question, 'what can we as a community do for ourselves?' before we can ask the question 'what do we need other people to do with us, or for us?'.

Into this swirling mix of connections I need to drop another one. This may be the point where some readers have a knee-jerk reaction towards the door (or the 'close' button), but I'd plead with you to stay with me, if you possibly can. The 'third dimension' for me in this big 'join the dots' exercise is 'intentional, Christian community'. 'Intentional' in the sense that hopefully is reasonably obvious: not just 'doing church on Sundays', but a deep, reflective commitment to 'living in community', 24/7, and drawing on the depths of our faith tradition to shape and resource that 'living'. Here in Hodge Hill, we're exploring this 'intentionality' in a number of different ways.

As a church, we've just launched an 'offer' - to congregation members, and to those who count us as their friends and travelling-companions - of a twice-yearly conversation with a 'spiritual companion', to explore our own personal sense of 'life balance', to be thankful for where it feels 'good', and to identify areas where we'd appreciate some help, or where we'd like to try something new. The 7 'dimensions of spiritual well-being' that we've decided to structure these conversations around are:

1. CONNECTING, welcoming and listening - finding ways to connect with other people, to offer hospitality and welcome others, and to be people who listen with care and attention, to friends, neighbours and strangers
2. DOING (with and for others) - finding ways to share our God-given gifts and skills, alongside and for the benefit of others, as well as ways to encounter God's presence in the work of our daily lives - nurturing humility in service, and action-in-solidarity
3. Presence, healing and PEACE-MAKING - seeking God's 'shalom' (wholeness, peace, justice, and the integrity of the natural world) for our lives, our communities, and in our world, through our relationships, our actions, our choices and our lifestyle
4. GIVING & RECEIVING - finding opportunities to generously share our gifts, time and money with others, and to receive in gratitude from others
5. LEARNING - broadening our minds and our horizons, and learning new skills, and in particular, going deeper into the Bible and 'inhabiting' the Christian story, firing our imaginations in new ways
6. PRAYING - finding ways (which work for us, now) of holding ourselves, our lives, our neighbours and our world to God, and opening ourselves to be sustained, energised, inspired and challenged by God - a 'mindfulness' that renews and sustains our compassion
7. RESTING & PLAYING - finding spaces to have fun, recharge our batteries, be ourselves, and enjoy the company of others - including celebration and feasting - renewing and sustaining all that we are and all that we do!

Five of these are remarkably similar to, or certainly deeply resonant with, the '5 Ways to Wellbeing' promoted by the (non-faith-affiliated) new economics foundation: 'connect', 'be active', 'take notice', 'keep learning' and 'give'. They're things that are good for us - for all of us - and we think they happen to be good for our communities and our world too. Alongside this 'offer' of companionship, we've been exploring, for some time, the possibility of a 'community house', where people can come and live and 'do community together', while actively seeking to build relationships of trust and friendship with their neighbours, and nurture a place of hospitality and prayer. A place of both 'engagement' and 'retreat' - an experiment in 'living a balanced and connected life' in the midst of a busy, urban neighbourhood. As I've blogged recently, we've had our ups and downs with this dream, but we're beginning to see some real, concrete (well, brick and grass, at least) possibilities emerging - but also the possibility of deepening and broadening the 'dispersed' (rather than 'residential') community of those of us who already live and/or work locally, by exploring and developing a shared 'rule of life' which might connect our local (and sometimes more explicitly political) 'activism' with some spiritual, relational, earthed 'foundations', in a way that might just possibly prove attractive to other friends and travelling companions in other places.

Now I realise the content of these last few paragraphs may well feel, in the words of one of my closest friends, 'a bit of a left turn'. But for some of us, at least, this is where all the dots begin to join up: the global and the local, the human and the non-human worlds, the necessary and the possible, living within limits and living abundantly, the 'outside-in' and the 'inside-out'... 'Spirituality' is a notoriously woolly, slippery word, but if it describes something that is about the whole of our being and our living and our relating, that allows us to embrace tensions and contradictions and 'otherness' and new discoveries, that gives us a deep grounding that allows some kind of 'centre to hold' while 'things fall apart', then what I am talking about here is the beginning of a spirituality of resilience and community building. Just the beginning. There is plenty of work to be done to 'flesh it out', articulate it, and live it out thoroughly and painstakingly and fully. But a beginning is the only place we can start, and this is my beginning, and potentially a beginning for many of us in Hodge Hill, and perhaps even beyond.

There is, inevitably, at least one more thing to be said. And that is to reiterate the point that 'doing what is possible and what is necessary' at the local level is no kind of excuse to let governments and those invested in the world's money-systems off the hook. We need not just for local experiments to become infectious, but for a growing movement for the just redistribution of money, resources, power and value so that 'what is possible and what is necessary' can be done on national and global scales too.

I'm currently reading two books about 'revolution' (among many others!). One is by a Christian, Ray Simpson, the founder of the Community of Saint Aidan & Saint Hilda. Ray's book describes The Cowshed Revolution: a new society created by downwardly mobile Christians. Features of this 'new society' include:

1. a relational economy (rather than a selfish one)
2. a sense of continuity (between, in Edmund Burke's words, 'those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born')
3. a 'freedom that is accountable to natural justice' (where 'the market' is 'harnessed to social responsibility')
4. subsidiarity (the principle 'that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organisation which can be done just as well by a smaller and simpler organisation')
5. restorative justice 
6. land cannot be bought without taking into account the natural and human life it supports
7. the media celebrate the common good, not what degrades
8. social wrongdoers are named and shamed through public information procedures
9. those who model goodness are honoured

While Ray has gathered plenty of evidence of small-scale, largely Christian-rooted, experiments with this 'downwardly mobile' trajectory, there aren't many pointers to it 'taking root' more widely. My other book, on the other hand, is by social theorist Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, and it describes some recent, large-scale revolutions - however partial and faltering - and how real change has swept across nations, continents, and the planet itself. From Egypt to Occupy Wall Street, Castells analyses the dynamics of these revolutions, and identifies some common features:

• they are networked in multiple forms (not just electronically)
• they become a movement by occupying the urban space - 'challenging the disciplinary institutional order by reclaiming the space of the city for its citizens'
• movements are local and global at the same time
• movements are viral (because 'seeing and listening to protests somewhere else ... inspires mobilization because it triggers hope of the possibility of change')
• they are usually leaderless movements, horizontal and cooperative, where the transition from outrage to hope is accomplished by creating highly reflective 'spaces for deliberation'
• they are, at least in principle, non-violent movements
• they are rarely programmatic, but are aimed at changing the values of society, and so are political in a fundamental sense
• they generate their own form of 'timeless' time - on the one hand living day by day, 'not knowing when the eviction will come, organizing their living as if this could be the alternative society of their dreams'; on the other hand, 'in their debates and in their projects they refer to an unlimited horizon of possibilities of new forms of life and community emerging from the practice of the movement' - 'they live in the moment in terms of their experience, and they project their time in the future of history-making in terms of their anticipation'

As a Christian theologian and (at least would-be) community activist, Castells analysis excites me. It raises the possibility of thinking globally, acting locally, with the possibility of infectious, global consequences. It challenges me to sustain those reflective 'spaces for deliberation' among my friends, co-workers and neighbours, and to venture together into those urban spaces that need reclaiming for us citizens. And it highlights what we Christians call an 'eschatological' perspective, of seeking to 'live the future in the now' such that no experiment in 'doing things differently' is irrelevant.

The dots are joining up for me. I wonder how they join up for you...?

Children, Community & Sustainability in tough times (Part 2)

In Part 1, I outlined our 'instinctive' approaches - shaped by our current social and political climate and its dominant language of 'austerity', 'scarcity', anxiety and fear - to children, being human, 'community' and, particularly for voluntary organisations, 'sustainability'. Now I want to 'shift the focus', change the language, tell a different story - that might just shape a different, practical approach.

(If you're one of those, dear reader, whose natural instinct, when faced with apparently 'religious' language, is to get cross and/or turn off - I beg of you a little bit of patience - I'm not, by any means, suggesting that Christianity has, or is, 'the answer' to all our problems - I am simply starting the journey again from where I am - where we go, I hope you might find interesting, promising even.)

Shifting the Focus

"Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, ‘What were you arguing about on the way?’ But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the greatest.
       He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’
       Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’" (Mark 9:33-37)

This little story, right in the centre (the 'hinge', even) of Mark's gospel, is, I want to suggest, a big clue. Jesus' disciples, his followers, have been arguing: about who is the 'greatest'. They are anxiously competitive - it is as if 'greatness' is a scarce commodity that they desperately need some of - as much as possible, in fact. Suspicion, pre-emption, accumulation - all the 'core principles' of the 'fear business' are at work here.

So what does Jesus do? First, he sits down. Not as insignificant as it might seem. This is to be no stand-up row. Jesus presses the 'pause' button, he creates a 'breathing space', some 'time out' from the pressures of the economy of scarcity for reflection, face-to-face conversation. He diffuses the anxiety in the air.

And then... Then, he takes a little child, and places her or him 'among them' - in the centre. He shifts the focus, changes the conversation, points to a different centre around which thinking and talking and responding might be re-organised. And this 'different centre' is 'a little child' - in Jesus' society, quite literally a 'nobody' - one of the 'least', most marginal, most insignificant. And around this centre, Jesus weaves a new economy...

• It is a 'bottom-up' economy where it is 'the nobodies', first and foremost, who are understood to be of divine value.
• It is an 'abundant' economy - because there are more than enough 'nobodies' around, no scarce supply - and 'nobodies' who bring a wealth of gifts previously unseen and unimagined!
• It is a non-competitive economy, because it is not about 'who is the greatest', but simply 'whoever'.
• And it is a hospitable economy, because the 'way in' is not through accumulation of status (or money, or whatever), but through the simple practice of welcoming...

"People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them:
      ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’
      And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them. " (Mark 10:13-16)

A different response: CHILDREN

These two 'little stories' together paint a very different picture of 'what a child is' - economically, emotionally, socially and politically, morally and spiritually - to that of the 'dominant story' we explored in Part 1. Here, we discover children as:

• God-given gifts - not 'burdens' or 'commodities'
• Made in God's image, so 'fully human' - not 'non-adults' but, 'in it together with us'
• 'Companion disciples' - like us adults, caught up in what we sometimes call 'sin', neither 'innocent' nor 'feral', but bound up with us in dynamics and structures that dehumanise, alienate, induce shame and fear... but understanding this 'caught-up-ness' not as requiring 'punishment', but 'discipleship' - so again, like us adults, and with us adults, learning to 'fall and get up, fall and get up' (as a monk once described the way of faith), learning to detach ourselves from our addictions, learning patiently how to love and live for others...
• Among 'the least', so, in fact, 'the greatest' - as 'the least' in the economy of scarcity, signs of - judgments on- the state of the world as it is, and how we treat the world's most vulnerable; as 'the greatest' in the new economy, signs of divine presence, objects of our reverence, care and service
• Agents, teachers, hosts, 'model citizens' of this 'new economy' that Jesus calls 'the kingdom of God' - not 'blank sheets' or 'empty vessels' to be filled, but innately spiritual, and instinctive, natural leaders and subversives who might just - if we pay attention - show us how to live in the economy of abundance ('unless you change and become like...'). 'Play' is one of the vital clues here - but we'll come back to that a little later.

Just some local 'snippets' to ground these ideas...

Firstly, our 'Good Childhood Conversations', facilitated by the Children's Society in one of our local secondary schools, and down at 'The Hub' on our estate, listened to hundreds of local children talking about 'what all children and young people need for a good life', 'what sops children and young people having a good life', and 'what could be changed to make life better for all children and young people'. The earthed 'practical wisdom' gathered in their responses is still feeding our planning and visioning a year on - and they are conversations we're committed to continuing.

Secondly, the 'Youth Know Your Neighbourhood' programme we've developed here has helped young people to map and photograph their neighbourhood, gather statistical information about it, visit local institutions and interview key 'community leaders', with the aim of gathering hopes and dreams, challenges and frustrations, wisdom and possibilities, not just for 'places and provision for young people' locally, but for the common good of the neighbourhood as a whole. These young people have developed their skills and potential as community leaders - not just of the future, but of the present.

And thirdly, the 'Bromford Dreams' cube, an amazing collaboration with international graffiti artist Mohammed 'Aerosol' Ali, enabled some of our local lads who are sometimes labelled 'NEET', seen as being right on the 'edges' of community and society, to give expression not just to their experiences of alienation, but to a profound 'earthed spirituality', crossing divisions of faith and culture, with bold proclamations: 'no struggle - no progress', 'value life' and 'more than money'...

A different response: 'COMMUNITY'

"It takes a village to raise a child", we say (although we're often not very good at practising it). But we discover too that it takes a child to grow a community. With our 'shift in focus', taking an imaginative leap into an economy not of scarcity but abundance, we discover communities like my own not as 'deprived', 'needy', and 'broken', but as places of profound giftedness. As we learn to discover the giftedness of little children and the other 'least ones', we begin to unearth the heart-passions, the head-knowledge, the hand-skills of our neighbours. We discover that our communities have within them the gifts they need to nurture and 'raise' our children, to care for our elderly, to create safe environments around us, to enable all of us to be healthy and flourishing. The language in the business (and we're talking the 'abundance business' now, which is far from 'business' in any conventional sense) is 'Asset-Based Community Development' - it's as easy as ABCD...!

We discover also, in the new economy, that 'community' can be a place generous enough, hospitable enough, to even include us, the 'professionals', the 'outsiders' - so long as we are willing to let go of the baggage of 'providing services' and 'meeting needs' that so often encumbers us, and discover a way of working - a way of being, in fact - that is much more about 'forging solidarities', or even, simply, 'making friends'. If we do so dare, though, we discover the possibility of co-opting the insidious political language about community, and re-framing it within the new economy: we discover 'community' as a place that embraces (and where we can embrace) our own 'troubledness' (a deep-in-the-gut 'troubledness' we see in the Jesus of the gospels when he is moved to compassion, and even anger); and also our own 'brokenness' - our individual brokenness as a gift to share and to connect us with others, and our brokenness as communities and society, as an invitation for reconciliation, rather than 'fixing'.

A different response: BEING HUMAN

'Whoever does not receive... like a little child...' says Jesus. We discover, in this new economy, an insight which those who are described as having 'disabilities' (physical or intellectual), and those who spend time in their company, know all too well: that “despite our tendencies to value autonomy, freedom and independence, the empirical evidence is that human beings are dependent on one another in all things, even to become persons: ‘I am because we are.” (John Swinton, ‘Who is the God we worship?’)

Embracing our dependence and interdependence, then, we begin to practise something that we might call receptivity. It is, perhaps, the very opposite of the 'initiatives' and 'strategies' that we are so plagued by, from governments, and within our voluntary organisations (and churches!). To repeat a description I've used again and again in this blog, we're talking about learning the art of 'over-accepting':

“In improvised jazz, the musicians in the group are practised at listening carefully to each other. Anything any of the musicians play we might call an ‘offer’ – a snippet of tune, a clever harmony, even a wrong note or two. And the other musicians make choices, in every moment: to ‘block’ an offer – ignore it, write it off as a mistake, or simply pursue their own thread of music unaffected by the other musicians; or to ‘accept’ an offer – to echo it, develop it, creatively run with what they’ve heard from their fellow musicians to make something more of it. The best improvisers are those with the daring and creativity to ‘overaccept’ all offers – to take even what might have been a mistake or a crashing discord, and develop into something musically new, different, beautiful, exciting.”

 I'll illustrate the idea of 'over-accepting' in a moment, but there's one more dimension of 'being human' in this 'new economy' that I want to highlight first.

A different response: 'SUSTAINABILITY'

Learning a different approach to children, to 'community' and to 'being human', the question of sustainability inescapably becomes: sustainability for whom? For us as organisations? Or for the communities we claim to 'serve'? I am reminded of the powerful, challenging words of Aboriginal women activists from Australia in the 1970s:

“If you have come here to help us, you are wasting our time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with ours, then let us work together.”

If our liberation is truly bound up with those in the communities in which, with which, we work - if we are not in the 'meeting needs' business but in the 'forging solidarities' business - then I suggest we as organisations, as professionals, as workers, ditch the kind of competitive, scarcity-economy 'sustainability' practices of suspicion, accumulation and pre-emption, for the 'abundant-economy' practice of being overwhelmed. David Ford, who introduced us to the idea of 'multiple overwhelmings' in Part 1, goes on to suggest this:

“the wisest way to cope [with being multiply overwhelmed] is not to try to avoid being overwhelmed, and certainly not to expect to be in control of everything; rather it is to live amidst the overwhelmings in a way that lets one of them be the overwhelming that shapes the others. That is the “home” or “school” in which the practicalities of coping can be learnt.” (David Ford, The Shape of Living, p.xxv)

I want to suggest that we need to learn four dimensions of 'being overwhelmed', which will then shape our responses to all the other overwhelmings we're facing now and in the future:

1. Being overwhelmed by STRANGERS - practising hospitality but also learning to receive it; discovering that those we once called 'service users' or even 'customers' can actually (need to actually) become 'friends'; and learning the vulnerable, costly, power-yielding art of working in partnership
2. Being overwhelmed by GIFTS - practising gratitude, and discovering that the gifts are all around us; learning the art of generosity, and especially of throwing a good feast; and re-learning (taught by our children, often) the habits of joy, laughter, and play
3. Being overwhelmed by BROKENNESS - our own and our neighbours - finding our guts stirred with compassion, our hearts fired towards solidarity; 'hearing to speech' the laments, and placing our bodies in the places of protest

How are these working out in Hodge Hill?

'Hodge Hill Unsung Heroes' invited local people to nominate friends, neighbours, local workers, as 'unsung heroes' who'd shown compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope in who they were, or what they did. We were overwhelmed with nominees - 97 in all - and gathered them all together for a party, with food, drink, and awards presented by the Lord Mayor. We shared their stories, and asked each of them: 'if you could find 2 or 3 other people to join you, what would you start in your neighbourhood?' Strangers became friends, feasting and laughter abounded, we were overwhelmed by people's gifts, and the energy of (and indeed the left-over money from) the event overflowed into new connections, new ventures, in the months that followed: a Nigerian Independence Day event and a little catering business; a local theatre group who've already done a panto and a Passion Play (more of that in a moment); to name but two...

'Open Door' is a weekly, volunteer-run 'drop-in' on a Saturday morning, for a couple of hours. People might be sent from the Job Centre, or just wandered past, and we can help them write CVs, access the internet, search for jobs. But much more importantly, when they come in through the open door they are met with a smile, a warm welcome, a cup of tea and some toast - and a fellow-human being who is not interested in what they haven't got, but in what they have. Our first conversations at Open Door are about people's passions, gifts, knowledge and practical skills. The kind of stuff that might be on their CVs - but often, in fact, stuff they'd never dreamed of mentioning, but in fact comes to the heart of what meaningful, worthwhile activity looks like for them. And out of Open Door we're just developing Time Banking - linking up people's skills and offers of time, with other people's needs - building relationships, drawing out people's gifts, affirming their dignity, growing community, getting things done, and... living out a different kind of economy, where all have gifts aplenty, and an hour of one person's time is valued equally with an hour of someone else's.

Our community lunches are a monthly thing, again with an open door to all-comers - workers and residents, young and old, of all faiths and none - to come together, bring and share and eat and drink and talk and laugh together. And just a little bit of 'work' together: each month, we invite people to think about the things, the people, the gifts, the moments that they are thankful for. Not - at least in this space - the moans and the grumbles and the struggles. There's sometimes a short pause while people think. But every time, the flood gates seem to open, and one thing comes out after another. For friends and family. For opportunities. For a new day. For good-enough health. For neighbours. For sunshine. And on it goes...

And lastly, the Passion Play. I've written here already about how it came about, and how it turned out, but for me it is one of our best examples of letting ourselves be overwhelmed by the gifts of our neighbours - of a stranger turned friend; of engaging in a riskily creative partnership; of deep, mutual generosity; of play and exploration; of much laughter; of giving voice to some of the laments of an estate which, deep in its collective memory, has felt abandoned time and time again; and of discovering, in the ashes, a sense of hope and possibility which, even in its fragility, is just as overwhelming - and shapes and energises our journey onwards from the crucifixion scene under the pillars of the M6.

Which leads me to one last dimension of our 'being overwhelmed'...

4. Being overwhelmed by THIS PLACE, THESE PEOPLE

Remember the words of the Aboriginal activists: “If you have come here to help us, you are wasting our time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with ours, then let us work together.”

'Sustainability' is ultimately a concern not for our own organisations, but for the community or communities we have committed ourselves to. In another 'dark age', another age of 'multiple overwhelmings', St Benedict created monastic communities shaped by three vows: 'stability', 'obedience' and 'conversion'.

'Stability', first of all, meant committing to this place, these people, for life. And letting our commitment to this place, these people, shape everything that we do and decide. Here in Hodge Hill, whenever we have recruited a new worker, we've asked them, in the clearest possible terms, to consider moving to live here - to see the 'offer' not just as a job, but as a life-commitment - to put down roots, get to know neighbours, make friends, raise children here, use the local shops, and so on. On Friday nights, a growing group of us meet together, with our kids, to eat and talk and pray (very simply) together - to feast and light candles and laugh and cry together. Into the future, we're longing / hoping / praying to find a house locally that we can develop for people to come and live in, to work (either paid or as a volunteer) locally, to build relationships of trust and friendship with their neighbours, and to offer a place of hospitality, sanctuary, listening and prayer - meeting people at points of need, maybe, but a place committed to discovering, unlocking, and being overwhelmed by the gifts of those who come across the doorway.

'Obedience' for Benedict meant, at root, listening to each other, attentively, carefully. And 'conversion', rather than something that happens in a moment, was a lifelong journey of surprise, change and growth. Benedictine communities were - and are - places of sanctuary, solidarity, support and spirituality.

This is the kind of 'sustainability' that we aspire to here in Hodge Hill. It can be one of the most valuable - if often well hidden! - gifts the local church has to rediscover, and offer, to the wider neighbourhood. It is lived out from day to day in natural, un-forced inter-generational relationships; in spaces for both conversation and silence; in moments to enter into awe and wonder; in opportunities for thanksgiving, generosity and liberation from 'stuff'; in spaces that offer enough safety to be able to take risks, to grieve and fail, and to discover hope and forgiveness; in doorways into a different economy, where power is turned inside-out and upside-down, where there is both time and space to rest, to grow trust, to feast and - most importantly - to play. No less than the great 20th C theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher said "children play - adults practise". What he meant, I think, is that we adults are all too often obsessed with results, with goals, with objectives, with targets. We think meaningful activity needs to have a purpose beyond itself (Liz Truss's recent comments about pre-school provision being an excellent example). Children know a different wisdom: play is an end in itself - we play for its own sake, for its own delight. As we re-learn to play, we find ourselves wandering straight into the 'new economy' - that which Jesus sometimes calls 'the kingdom of God'...

Children, Community & Sustainability in tough times (Part 1)

Here's a fuller version of my talk last week to the Christian Child Care Forum. (The link to the PowerPoint slides is here.)

This diagram, from Children England's recent report 'Perfect Storms', says so much. For those of us who work in the so-called 'voluntary sector', the interrelatedness of savage funding cuts, increased costs (for people and households, as well as for us as organisations), and increased demand for services creates a vicious spiral of intensifying needs and pressures.

As theologian David Ford puts it so well, we find ourselves living with 'multiple overwhelmings':

“the consequences of multiple overwhelming create more intensive overwhelming... The personal and the political interact, so do the local and the global, the economic and the cultural. It is like a vast, multi-levelled ecology in which everything is somehow related to everything else.” (David Ford, The Shape of Living [1997], p.xvi, xx)

We're living in a climate - economic, political, social - of scarcity, anxiety, and fear: for our organisations, for our children, for our communities, and for our society...

So how do we respond? I want to sketch out two possible responses: a first, instinctive response (shaped by the dominant language and ways of thinking within our society), and a second, counter-intuitive response (shaped by a reading of a central story within the Christian faith, concerning children, adults, and Jesus).

A first response: 'SUSTAINABILITY'

“In dystopian times we are driven not just further into ‘scarcity thinking’, but risk becoming entrapped in ‘survival thinking’, where the dominant perspective is that life is dangerous, with hyper alertness to danger and risk. The inclination, therefore, is to exercise defensive tactics with even more intensity and to resort to the anxiety-ridden tactic of accumulating resources.” (Ann Morisy, Bothered & Bewildered: Enacting Hope in Troubled Times, p.62)

Ann Morisy expresses so well that 'instinctive' response we have, within an 'economy of scarcity', that we imagine will enable us to be 'sustainable'. Scott Bader-Saye, in a challenging book entitled Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear, develops this theme into 3 dimensions, or 'core principles' of the 'fear business':

1. ACCUMULATION: 'save for a rainy day'
2. SUSPICION: 'don't talk to strangers'
3. PRE-EMPTION: 'do unto others before they do unto you'

These are the 'mottos' of the 'fear business' - and it takes only a little self-reflection to see how much they govern our daily lives, our habits, our patterns of thinking and responding. They are deeply ingrained in each and every one of us - and in the way our organisations instinctively function.

A first response: 'COMMUNITY'

The 'economy of scarcity' also shapes the way we see and respond to our local communities - especially when we approach them as 'organisations' (or, indeed, as politicians). Communities like my own in Hodge Hill are all too often seen through the lenses of 'needs analysis' and IMD rankings (how deprived are you? what's lacking here? what are the 'service needs'?). We find ourselves described by politicians (and by those who unconsciously absorb, or are co-opted into, the political rhetoric) as 'broken communities', as embodying a 'dependency culture'. And even the best, most 'compassionate' organisations, articulate a deep concern for 'troubled families' (which all too easily slips into 'troublesome') and 'social exclusion' (while failing to ask who is doing the 'excluding'). When the Daily Mail describes my neighbourhood as the '7th most workshy estate' in the country, it fails to notice the vast numbers of my neighbours who depend on benefits because they work long hours for a less-than-living wage. When politicians describe my community as 'broken', they fail to notice that the fault lines of 'brokenness' run deep through our society as a whole.

A first response: 'BEING HUMAN'

At the core of the 'economy of scarcity', but largely unarticulated, is an understanding of what it means to be a human being. What it means to be valued as human, treated with full dignity as a fully 'included' member of society. The understanding seems to go a little like this...

To be fully human, you must be an individual (or a 'family'), who makes a net positive contribution to the country's economic well-being [thank you New Labour for the language here], a contribution which must be:

• Financial (no other kind of contribution really matters) 
• Direct (ignoring contributions which indirectly have a positive financial impact - e.g. caring for neighbours so that the state doesn't have to pick up the bill)
• Current (you may have paid tax and NI for most of your lifetime, but if you're out of work now, you really don't count)

These contributions are made through:

• Working (only paid work, obviously)
• Consuming (you are more valuable the more you consume)
• Tax-paying (for most of us, anyway - if you're really rich, then we'll let you off)
• 'Investing' (a rather vaguely-defined option for those rich enough not to pay tax)

If that picture has some accuracy to it, what about those who don't fit into its description of 'fully human'? What about, for example, children...?

A first response: CHILDREN

Over the last couple of centuries (from the 18th through to mid-20th), we've been through a seismic shift in our understandings of childhood and children. This is no more than a sketch (and I owe much to American child theologian Bonnie Miller McLemore), but broadly it looks something like this:

• ECONOMICALLY, children have moved from being seen as 'little adults' (if subordinate), 'workers' essential to the livelihood of the household, to 'little consumers', useless, if anything financially draining to the household (and at best 'commodities' to be 'invested' in)
• EMOTIONALLY, this shift from 'necessity' to 'useless' has been accompanied by a corresponding 'psychological compensation' - children came to be seen as 'emotionally priceless' objects of love (at least within the private sphere)
• SOCIALLY & POLITICALLY, children have shifted from being part of the sphere of adult activity (if perhaps 'seen but not heard') into a separate, privatised realm of home and school ('Children's Centres' being a great exemplar); and a sentimentalising of ones own children and child-rearing has gone hand-in-hand with an indifference to 'other people's children'
• MORALLY & SPIRITUALLY, an old understanding of children entering the world bearing the marks of, and entangled in the distortions of, 'original sin' (albeit seen as something needing to be suppressed and controlled, but something shared with adults!) was replaced by a view of children as 'blank slates', morally neutral, even 'innocent' - and 'vulnerable', with responsibility pushed onto 'the world', 'consumerism', 'parenting', etc.

In recent years, I would suggest these trends have intensified...

• ECONOMICALLY, we're now being told children are a burden on the state (witness proposals to limit child benefit for families with more than two children)
• EMOTIONALLY, the 'fear business' is training us to see children as either 'at risk' (and therefore needing vast investment in 'protection') or 'antisocial' (which is defined as criminal, and therefore needs 'policing')
• SOCIALLY & POLITICALLY, the contradictory impulses are just as sharp: on the one hand, the 'privatisation' of childhood is taken to its logical extreme, throwing schools to the mercy of market forces, where some (schools and children) 'win' and others are abandoned to lose; on the other hand, as in recent pronouncements from Liz Truss, a junior Education Minister, about pre-school provision, and Michael Gove's rewriting of the history curriculum, the state seeks, or demands, increasing control over, and structuring of, 'what children need' (to learn).
• MORALLY & SPIRITUALLY, again there is a split by 'class' and socio-economic status: we are sold a dichotomy between 'good', 'hard-working' (well-paid) families, and 'troubled' (read 'troublesome' or even 'feral' (under-paid, under-employed) children and families. This is the return of 'original sin', inescapable by birth - with a crucial exception. It is no longer universal. It is only about 'them', and not about 'us'.

That's a sketch, a caricature perhaps, of where we seem to have got to - of our instinctive, media-shaped responses to children, to being human, to community, and to 'sustainability' for organisations that seek to work with children (and perhaps other '3rd sector' organisations too).

Part 2 will seek to shift our focus, and change our response...

Children, Community & Sustainability in tough times

I was asked to 'do some theology' for the Christian Child Care Forum annual conference, which met yesterday in Birmingham, focusing on the theme of 'Surviving or Thriving'. The Forum includes a number of big national children's charities with Christian roots, as well as a number of smaller, more local ones.

I've uploaded the slides from my presentation here.

When I have some time in the next little while, I want to write a fuller version of the talk, which I'll post on this blog.

On 'Social Inclusion' and professional addicts

"We don't need more joined-up thinking - we need therapy." That was the core of my contribution to the launch of Birmingham's White Paper on Social Inclusion on Tuesday. It got a laugh. Which was nice. I envy the ability of professional comedians and know that I can never be one. But I was actually quite serious.

I've written here quite recently about the big questions we need to ask of the language of 'social inclusion' - even if we may genuinely believe our hearts are in the right places, even if we may be passionately working to tackle financial and social inequalities in our city and our country.

But Birmingham's White Paper has a bigger language problem. At its heart is a call 'to work together and take a different approach'. To explain that 'different approach', it uses the fine language of moving from a 'deficit-based' to an 'asset-based' approach, of 'evidence-based' and 'targeted' work, 'early intervention', 'outward facing services', 'utilising co-production in the design and delivery of services', 'collaboration and partnership working', 'public procurement' and a 'social inclusion champion's network'.

The trouble is, when the group of 40 people I was co-facilitating (about a quarter of those present) got together, to start turning these fine words into concrete actions, it became clear quite quickly that very few of them had much of a sense of what the words actually meant. My co-facilitator and I began with what we thought might be quite a quick exercise to 'translate' the jargon into more meaningful language, and were met with significant numbers of blank and quizzical faces. So... if the 'great and the good' of the statutory and voluntary sectors in Birmingham don't understand the 'different approach', how on earth is it going to filter out to the colleagues they work with every day, let alone what I hesitate to call the 'ordinary citizens' of Birmingham?

The problem emerged with even sharper clarity when we set to tackle the 'case studies'. There's a bit of a story behind the case studies themselves - they were themselves on their fourth draft, having begun as pretty desperate stories of desperately needy (dare I say 'troubled') individuals, depicted in isolation from any conceivable 'assets' (internal or external), networks of support, or resourceful neighbourhoods. As they were though, our groups were able to identify some of the 'assets' that were mentioned explicitly, and imagine (with my slightly subversive encouragement) a few that weren't, but could have been. But when we moved to the question of 'what needs to happen?', the dominant reaction was fascinating, if predictable. 'We need to get a CAF in place.' The Common Assessment Framework: a paradigm of 'joined-up thinking'; a multi-agency meeting of professionals with different areas of concern and expertise, getting together (perhaps with the mother of the child in question), to formulate an action plan. Of course. We would be neglecting our duties if we didn't.

Thank heavens for one lone voice (I was trying to be a good facilitator and keep relatively quiet). 'Don't you think, maybe, for the mum, a room full of professionals deciding what they were going to do for her, might actually be quite the opposite of enabling co-production to happen...?' The shock. The immediate, gut-rooted resistance. The sudden sense of threat and defensiveness. 'What do you mean? This is what we have to do!' The lone voice describes an alternative approach. Identify who the key people are in the person's life: gran, friends, neighbours, maybe. Bring them together. Allow them - including the mum, crucially - to come up with a plan that draws on their own strengths and resourcefulness - but also calls on professionals for specific support where that is needed. Again, defensiveness. 'But you can't do that! You never know what they might come up with!' Yes. Quite.

There was a sense, in our group, of just scratching the surface of an alternative possibility that was about as far away from immediate grasp as learning a whole different language. But there was, at the very least, a desire there to do just that - and that gave me just a little hope. Our session finished with one group member voicing a want and need to get together and 'learn more about this "asset-based" thing, and try and work out how we put it into practice' - with nods of agreement from many others.

The other small sign of hope was the contribution from a relatively young man from a theatre group. He'd been listening intently, and spoke relatively late in the conversation. What the boy in the case study needed, he suggested, was something to spark his imagination: to glimpse the possibility that family, and life, didn't have to be like this, could be different, more... He was dead right, of course. But I think he spoke for us - and of us - as a group of 'professionals' too. What we needed was some imagination: to glimpse the possibility that the people we 'do to', or 'work with', are more than our default definitions of them, more than a bundle of issues and needs and problems.

We also needed, as I think was clear as the conversation unfolded, the gift of patience. So often we are governed by a sense of urgency, and urgency pushes us into default responses. Our group work itself was testimony to the time and effort needed for the more creative, the more imaginative, the more 'asset-based', 'co-productive' response to emerge. But our systems and professional processes are not geared to giving that time and effort and patience. And as money gets tighter, as 'efficiency' becomes even more dominant, that time and effort and patience will be in even shorter supply.

Finally, our conversations highlighted the need for humility. It's not, I suspect, a word much used by, or associated with, many of the professions of my colleagues in that room. To be honest, us clergy aren't particularly good at it either - although it should at least be in our vocabulary. But the kind of humility emerging as a need within our conversations was that of letting go of our identities as 'providers', to encounter our 'clients' not as 'clients', but as fellow citizens, as fellow human beings. Realising that the answers, ultimately, come from them rather than us. Acknowledging that we have needs too, and limitations, and anxieties - that too often we dare not admit to anyone, least of all those people we work with.

I think (and I'm probably speaking as a priest first and a community development practitioner second) that to discover those things in our conversation is probably the greatest thing we could have achieved with an hour and a half of group work. It doesn't really resemble the 'action plan' which was the objective we were given as facilitators. But it does, I'd suggest, invite a moment of profound pausing within a process which, however well-intentioned, has the danger of careering like a juggernaut towards its stated end-point, but missing its actual goals completely.

The language of 'asset-based', 'co-production' approaches is good language - even if rather technical. I've lived and breathed it for much of the past year and written about it here and here. We need to recognise, however, that it stands in tension with some of the other aspects of the 'different approach' that Birmingham's White Paper advocates: 'targeting' particularly - which so easily allows us to slip back into defining people by their needs and problems and focusing on the worst, in isolation from their wholeness as human beings, their support networks, and their communities. The trouble is, particularly when money is tight, money controls everything - even how we look at and approach people. We have to ruthlessly prioritise, so we 'target' those who have least money - and we approach them as if they have least of everything.

We also need to recognise that we can get every professional in the city signed up to 'asset-based', 'co-production' language, and it can make not a scrap of difference on the ground. We are addicted to our need to 'provide services' - our very identity depends on it. We have convinced ourselves (because the evidence seems to suggest it) that if we do not 'provide services' then we will be failing the most vulnerable in our society. And that is, of course, true. But what we struggle to even contemplate is the possibility that, weaned off our professional addiction, we might be liberated to approach those we genuinely care about most, not just as 'vulnerable' but as 'gifted' human beings, not just as 'isolated' and 'excluded' but as already embedded in networks of care and support, however fragile and fractious they might often be.

This is anything but neoliberal 'Big Society'. It's not abandoning people and communities to 'sort themselves out' and letting market forces have their way. This 'different approach' needs real investment of real money. But it needs more: it needs investment of imagination, patience and humility by the professionals and the decision-makers who, let's be honest, have the biggest stake in it.

The alternative - clinging on to our professional learnt behaviour and problematising and pathologising those people and communities in the grip of poverty as 'needy' and 'troubled' - is just a stone's throw from the demonising, the scapegoating, the excluding, and the ruthless abandonment of the most vulnerable, in which our current government is so deeply engaged.

As a manifesto, the Birmingham White Paper has much to commend it. My fear is that it is dangerously close to being an Emperor, parading around to general acclaim, but with barely a shred of actual, tangible, clothing. The vital first steps for an addict include not just wanting to change, but admitting you have an addiction. What we need is not more 'joined-up thinking'. We need addiction therapy. And urgently.

Making sense of 'mission', Hodge Hill style

On a recent training day for a colleague I'm currently supervising, we were presented with the following model for the 'journey of discipleship'...

And it set me thinking. Actually, first it set me seething, and then I started thinking. Now, I could spend paragraphs detailing every detail of what's wrong with it, but that would be pretty unedifying stuff. Much more interesting, I think, is to begin to articulate constructive alternatives. But to do so, a little bit of critique is probably a prior necessity...

Firstly, there's the implied - actually, fairly explicit - hierarchy. The goal of discipleship, apparently, is to become part of an 'army' of 'leaders'. Now, my reading of the gospels can sometimes be a bit eccentric, but I'm really not sure where the descriptions of Jesus' calls to his disciples might suggest such a thing. Peter on the beach, post-crucifixion-resurrection, might be invited to 'feed my sheep' - but he's still called to 'follow me', and there ain't much evidence of him joining an 'army'.

Secondly, there's what it assumes about church. That somehow it's a body of concentric circles, the 'leaders' being in the middle. In real life, of course, church is a collection of overlapping groups and contexts, and where we might find ourselves 'leading' in one context, we would do well to realise in a different context that we come as 'visitor'.

Which leads me on to a more critical flaw. The suggestion that when you're 'outside' it's all about 'receiving', and when you're 'inside' you make a shift to 'giving'. What assumptions is this making?

For a start, pretty obviously it's working with a 'deficit' model of faith: people 'outside' the faith community (the 'dry bones', no less!) are 'lacking' something, which they then 'receive', and are then equipped to 'give' to others. Biblical scholars might point us to the 'handing over' of which Paul talks (with reference to the beginnings of the practice of sharing bread and wine in remembrance of Jesus) - but it should also be noted in that context that the same word for 'handing over' is used of Judas' betrayal of Jesus. We would do well to remember that what we imagine we are 'passing on' in faithfulness, we may well also be 'betraying' in the process. The implication also that those of us 'inside' somehow stop 'receiving' seems to suggest that, in actual fact, 'discipleship', the art of following Jesus, really stops once you're 'in'.

What it says about human beings, then, I find more than a little scary. Prayer, conversation, social action, even parties, are merely the 'preparatory' stuff for Christian faith. Once you've 'got it', it's all about the hard work of 'training', 'giving', 'specialising' and 'leading'. 'The glory of God,' to misquote Irenaeus, is not 'humanity fully alive,' but 'individuals trained up to lead.'

So much for the critique (and don't even get me started on 'slipping God in' covertly somewhere between the first benign 'social event' and the full-on 'enquirers' course'...). What about the reconstruction for our context here in Hodge Hill?

Well, I'm not sure whether to begin at the 'beginning' or the 'end'. And that's perhaps the first constructive point. I don't think discipleship is a neat, linear journey. As a journey into a mystery - the Mystery - there's a hell of a lot of 'one step forwards, two steps back', of circling around, and of going off on tangents that turn out to be heading straight into the open arms of God.

Which means, secondly, that those we might class as apparently 'outside' the furthest fringes of 'church' (and even the boundaries between 'inside' and 'outside' are so much more fuzzy than we're sometimes led to believe) might well often be closer to God than we are ourselves. So let's ditch the deficit model. It stinks. Especially in neighbourhoods like ours here in Hodge Hill, where people are all-too-used to being told, and treated as if, they are 'lacking', 'needy', 'deprived' and 'dependent'. Let's start working on the 'asset' - or 'giftedness' - model of human beings - that each woman, man or child we encounter has within them passions, gifts and skills, knowledge and wisdom, faith, that are integral to them bearing God's image and impress, and which they breathe with the breath of the Spirit.

So thirdly, our idea of mission here is to discover the places of common ground that turn out to be holy ground. Looking, as we do here, for evidence of compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope, as signs of God's kingdom springing up around us, we find ourselves as much guests as hosts, as much invited as inviters. The holy ground is by no means within our control, our familiarity, or even our understanding - we discover it as seekers, visitors, disciples - and in it, on it, we discover our neighbours and their giftedness.

Of course, we may have a role, sometimes, in co-creating spaces where the gifts and skills and faith of others are drawn out and enabled to flourish - what I've labelled 'over-accepting' in other blog posts here - but funnily enough, those co-created spaces are also the places where our own gifts and skills and faith are drawn out and enabled to flourish. And those spaces, where trust has been built sufficiently, might be spaces where we can share our 'whys?' and the stories of our roots and our longings - but we have found here that we have got to know our own stories better, more fully, through working, being, waiting, talking, listening alongside others very different to us.

Oh, and in case it's not obvious, prayer and conversation, parties and social action (let's rephrase that as 'action in solidarity', or 'making change happen together') happen in those first encounters, but also just happen to be hallmarks of what we sometimes call 'the kingdom of God'. They're what being a disciple, being human, being fully alive, are all about.

Want an example? I'll post a blog in just a moment on the amazing, evolving, Firs & Bromford Community Passion Play. As examples go, it's about as good as it gets.

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...?

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[1]Cahn 2000:29

Why did Jesus die? (A rather political answer)

(A sermon for Lent 3B, 11/3/12, at Hodge Hill Church)

The longer I go on as a parent, the more I realise that children’s questions need to be taken with utter seriousness.

In the last few years of my previous job, every Easter we’d invite classes of primary school children to church to ‘experience’ the Easter story. And at the end of every session, there’d be at least one child who asked the same question: ‘why did Jesus die?’

And every time, it was clear that the traditional answer – ‘to save us from our sins’, or something similar – just didn’t work. Just try it – with the nearest child to hand. I’m willing to bet that, like me, the succession of ‘why?’ questions that follows ends up in a great tangled mess, with you saying things that either don’t make any sense, or that you actually have great trouble believing yourself.

The thing is, that’s just not the kind of ‘why?’ question that the children are really asking. When they ask, ‘why did Jesus die?’, they’re asking, ‘what did he do to get him crucified? Especially,’ and you can almost see the cogs whirring in their heads, ‘as we’d been led to believe by you grown-ups that he was ever so nice and kind and good and well-behaved…?!’

It really is a much more interesting question. And if we dare to explore it, it inevitably brings us to today’s gospel reading [John 2:13-22]...

If you want a short answer (and forgive me for descending into the ‘vernacular’ for a moment), then Jesus died because he pissed people off. Powerful people especially, but also what our politicians today fondly call ‘ordinary, hard-working people’ too – people, that is, a bit like you and me.

But I’m guessing you’re interested in a slightly longer answer. Jesus died, I suggest, because of three things he did...

1. Jesus made friends with the wrong kind of people

• Just think of the kind of people Jesus shared meals with, and called to follow him: the ‘tax-collectors and sinners’, in the gospels’ words; the hot-headed freedom fighters, the uneducated fishermen.
• Just think of the kind of people he touched: the lepers, the ‘demon-possessed’, the sick, the dead – all those officially deemed ‘unclean’.
• Just think of the kind of people he talked to with respect: children, women, foreigners…

Jesus made friends with the wrong kind of people – and that made the ‘respectable’ and ‘religious’ types uneasy. Envious. Angry…

And then we get to today’s reading…

2. Jesus went right to the heart of his nation’s power and turned it upside-down

Why the Temple?

• It was the place not just of religious power, but of political power too.
• It was a place built by the rich & powerful, on the backs of the poor & powerless.
• It was a place caught up in ‘the market’ – where ‘transactions’ were the rules of the game: having to buy God’s favour with costly sacrifices, having to pay the extortionate Temple tax every year, and getting ripped off by the money-changers in the process.
• And it was a place that excluded. Its walls and courtyards made a series of concentric rings, like the skins of an onion, designed to keep at arm’s length, or outside completely, those who couldn’t afford its prices, those who were deemed ‘unclean’, women, disabled people, foreigners… exactly those people who Jesus called his friends.

That’s why Jesus came to the Temple. And he got angry. And he placed himself, his body, right in the middle of its business, literally ‘in harm’s way’, to face down and challenge, to disrupt its ‘business as usual’, to clear a space for something completely different to happen…

• A bit like 81-year-old Shirley, who chained herself to the railings outside the House of Lords, angry at the government’s selling off the NHS to private companies.
• Or the chain of wheelchair-users blocking Oxford Circus, angry at savage cuts to disability living allowance.
• Or like the Occupy London Stock Exchange camp, until a couple of weeks ago outside St Paul’s Cathedral, angry at the power of international markets to make the rich richer and the poor powerless. And like the Christians who were dragged from the cathedral steps by Police as they knelt in prayer on the night of the camp’s eviction.
• Or like Chris, Martin & Susan, 3 Roman Catholics who cut through the fence of the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire last year, and fixed a sign to it saying ‘open for disarmament – all welcome’…

Jesus dared to challenge, to disrupt ‘business as usual’, to put himself – his body – literally in harm’s way, fully knowing what the consequences would be. And he cleared a space, for something completely different to happen...

Listen to these words of St. Augustine of Hippo, 4th Century teacher of the faith: "Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage: Anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."

I’d want to add a third ‘daughter’ – Imagination – to see what a different world might look like. A glimpse of the possible – of the kingdom of God.

It’s no coincidence that just before today’s gospel reading, just before Jesus comes to the Temple, he’s making the wine flow freely at the wedding in Cana, ‘the first of Jesus’ signs’, as John calls it. Which brings me to my third reason why Jesus died…

3. Jesus played by different rules – or better, he started a completely different game – and the powerful just didn’t ‘get’ it…

• At Cana, Jesus shows the power of celebration – using the stone jugs for water for the rituals of purification, to pour out the best wine anyone had ever tasted.
• At Cana, Jesus changed the game from ‘run out’, ‘not enough’, to ‘overflowing’, ‘too much!’. Suddenly we’re in a different ‘economy’ – one of gift, grace, abundant generosity.
• And at Cana, Jesus showed us a different society – where no one is left out, no one is deemed ‘unclean’ or ‘underserving’, no one is excluded because they can’t afford it… and no one is in charge of who gets what…

So why did Jesus die?

• Because he made friends with the wrong kind of people
• Because he went right to the nation’s centre of power and dared to disrupt its ‘business as usual’
• And because he started a new game that those in power just didn’t ‘get’...

And what about us?

• Here in Hodge Hill, we might well feel a long way from the centres of power in our country. Even in England’s ‘second city’, we might well feel rather on the edge of things. But there may well, in the coming years, be places in our own community, lines in the sand right here in Hodge Hill, that will demand our presence, our bodies, to stand or kneel in solidarity with our neighbours, and against the forces which seek to exclude, deprive and demean them.
• And in the mean time, let’s get on with making friends, as Jesus did, with all the ‘wrong’ kinds of people, the kind of people our current government apparently class as not worthy of respect or value, but who our God counts, and knows, and loves as made in his image. Let’s find opportunities, through what we do as a church, and through who we meet as neighbours, to cross boundaries, open arms, share meals, make friends, break down divides…
• And as we edge closer to Easter, let’s use these days of Lent, and beyond, to get trained up in the utterly different game that we call ‘the kingdom of God’, where passion and compassion, gift and abundant generosity, vulnerability and trust, celebration and friendship are the only rules we need – and where, like a seed that has been dead and buried, hope springs up and blossoms from seemingly barren ground.

Common Wealth: CHRISTIANS RESIST THE CUTS - EXPOSE THE BIG SOCIET...

Common Wealth: CHRISTIANS RESIST THE CUTS - EXPOSE THE BIG SOCIET...: "A Group of Christians - activists, ministers and theologians - have issued a statement calling upon Christians to unite with others in the m..."

Do the poor have a right to live in expensive areas?

Yes. That’s the catchy headline of a discussion piece on the BBC News website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11674864) that caught my eye yesterday. “The row over housing benefit has led to warnings of ‘social cleansing’,” it begins. “But can those on low incomes really have an entitlement to stay in expensive localities?”

Enter Shaun Bailey – a youth worker (curiously), and the unsuccessful Conservative parliamentary candidate for Hammersmith: "You can talk about your right to live in the community where you grew up, but where do you get the right to spend other people's money? I'd love to live in Buckingham Palace but I can't afford it," he adds. "The flipside of having a right to stay somewhere is that people aren't prepared to move around. The middle class have always been prepared to go all over the country to find work."

And then there’s Lynsey Hanley, author of ‘Estates: An Intimate History’, which ain’t half bad as books go, chronicling, as the article puts it, “the ghettoisation, social breakdown and increased pressure on services that resulted from moving the working class to peripheral housing schemes… Gentrification,” she argues, “has caused many low-income households to suffer pricing them out of communities that they once called their own.”

But look closely at her contra-argument to Bailey’s… “[Hanley] argues the poor have every right to live in wealthy areas - because the wealthy rely on them more than they admit: ‘We need these people to do many of the minimum-wage jobs on which we depend - cleaning, catering, retail and so on… If you take away housing benefit and shift them out, this country's high transport costs mean they'll have no incentive to come into our cities to work. What I'd say to David Cameron is: come back to me when the minimum wage is £12 an hour.’"

My first reaction was to cheer Hanley’s last sentence. And then the cheer got stuck in my throat. It was the “we need these people” that did it. But let’s first wind back a bit, to the premise of the article in Bailey’s comments…

1. ‘Rights’ and the housing market

‘Do the poor have a right to live in expensive areas?’ the article asks. But why should ‘place’, let alone ‘home’, be defined first and foremost by the capricious and pernicious whims of the housing market? Why should the fact that ‘the market’ has sent house prices through the roof in a particular area mean that people who have called that place ‘home’ no longer have a right to do so?

When Article 17 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”, did it imagine an exception clause to allow for ‘the housing market’? Or perhaps those who rent have no such rights?

2. Mobility vs. Stability

For Bailey, though, there is also a societal duty to remember: we should “[be] prepared to go all over the country to find work”, apparently. And work that can pay for, not the house you might want to call ‘home’, but simply the house you can afford, presumably (I don’t think the circular logic’s mine, here).

But more than that, it seems that being prepared to move to ‘find work’ (read: being a productive cog in the economic machine) trumps any value there might be in “staying somewhere” – like, rootedness in identity, stability in relationships, trust between neighbours, any kind of depth to a sense of community, commitment to a particular piece of earth, for example. All things that should be in the bloodstream of Christians, for whom the Benedictine vow of ‘stability’ – the commitment to finding God among these unlikely people in this unpromising place – sums up much of the incarnational gospel.

3. “We need these people”

But lastly, back to Lynsey Hanley’s throat-sticking phrase. “We” – the middle-classes, obviously. “These people” – that section of society whose purpose in life, apparently, is to do the minimum-wage jobs on which “we” depend. So we need them living close by, says Hanley, or they won’t bother coming to sell us sandwiches and suits and clean our offices.

I’m not going to labour (sic) here over the whole system of assumptions that assigns ridiculously different ‘wage values’ to different forms of work, although that surely needs questioning more than ever, in the world of sky-high salaries for footballers and (even failed) bankers.

What I want to pull apart here is the assumption that some people (“these people”) should be defined – in both their ‘purpose’ and their capacity to call some place ‘home’ – solely in terms of the ‘needs’ of some other people (Hanley’s “we”) – while the latter group apparently get away with defining their own ‘purpose’ and place called ‘home’.

I want to say to Lynsey Hanley: “these people” are not means to my middle-class ends, they are my next-door neighbours, they are my co-workers in our neighbourhood, they are among my friends. “Their” purpose, just as mine, is to grow into our identities as beloved children of God, who has chosen to move into our neighbourhood and call it ‘home’. And our homes (the places where we learn to ‘dwell in love’) and our neighbourhoods (our schools for loving others) must always trump the so-called ‘needs’ and whims of ‘the market’.

So I’ll concede this to Hanley: “we” middle-class professionals might “need these people” – but not as a definition of their identity, but of ours – “we” need “them”, because they are the neighbours that we need to learn to love. While they remain strangers, and not friends, we are failing to love. And while they remain at a distance, rather than next-door or around the corner, our opportunities to learn to love them are pretty slim.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (recently author of The Wisdom of Stability, among other things) suggests that Hanley’s “we”, the world’s rich, should get serious about “loving our enemies”, the poor. It’s shocking, at first listen. But let’s get real about this. What do you call people you do your best to avoid and distance yourself from? What do you call people you don’t look on as equals? What do you call people you implicitly blame for any misfortunes you perceive yourself to suffer? What do you call people you talk about ‘getting tough on’, or ‘cracking down on’? What do you call people you see as competition for scarce resources that you would rather have to yourself?

“Love your neighbour” is in danger of fitting in all-too-cosily with David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ rhetoric – at least while the middle-classes sit comfortably with a narrow view of their neighbours as the nice family who live in the equally-nice house next-door.

“Love your enemy” is much more dangerous. It dares to highlight the relationships we would rather ignore, or define in distanced, economic terms – rather than in real, mutually vulnerable, face-to-face encounter. The relationships where power is seriously unequal, where mutual suspicion reigns. ‘Love’ here becomes anything but cosy and comfortable. It cries out for a courage that overcomes distance, a humility that re-balances power, a vulnerability that seeks to nurture reconciliation and mutual trust.

The good news of the gospel is that it is just possible for enemies to become friends. The one who made his home among the poorest invites us all into a kingdom – a common wealth – where, beyond anxiety, we discover there is more than enough for all, and where we can delight in making our homes together, enjoying the company of a glorious array of strange and wonderful, God-created neighbours. The invitation is also a challenge to us all: if we dare, we can choose to move in right now.