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

Changing stuff: Reclaim the Streets, Desmond Tutu & the DWP

How do we make things change? Beyond the work of community-building in our neighbourhoods - nurturing places of encounter, building relationships of trust and friendship, connecting people together through their passions, gifts and skills - how do we engage in movements, networks, flows that stand any chance of changing the bigger stuff - systems, governments, widespread prejudices and attitudes, 'the powers that be'...?

I realise it's a big question. But it's one that a lot of people seem to be asking, reflecting on, writing about, talking about at the moment - and it feels urgent, exciting, and more than a little heady to try and enter that conversation.

I've recently been re-reading a quite brilliant book on 'Christianity and Contemporary Politics' by Luke Bretherton, in which he describes politics, within a 'Christian cosmopolitan vision', as involving:

"the formation of a common world of meaning and action within particular places. The formation of such a world entails, on the one hand, the breaking down of those structures and patterns of relationship that exclude vulnerable strangers from this common world and, on the other, the upholding of those structures and patterns of relationship that maintain this world as a common one."

We grow up, says Bretherton, within "concentric circles of relationship", with neighbours near and distant, and, from a Christian perspective, as we seek to love those neighbours we are orienting our relationships towards an "eschatological horizon of fulfillment" - the image is of "the gathering of all peoples to the messianic banquet that has already begun amid the fallen structures of the earthly city". And this "horizon of fulfillment", Bretherton suggests, "both draws in and constantly interrupts all attempts" to make a particular place either "idolatrously self-sufficient" or "totally encompassing" in terms of our "economic, political, and social relationships". So on the one hand, "various forms of nationalism and identity politics overvalue the particularity of a place (be it cultural or geographic)", while on the other hand, "liberal cosmopolitan, global conceptions of citizenship, and the reductive universalism of capitalism" undervalue the particularity of place. [Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, p.211]

I find Bretherton's reflections really helpful here, for a number of reasons: he refuses any simplistic polarities like 'now, bad; future, good'; he values and focuses on the importance of place; he embraces difference and seeks not sameness or unity but places where we can 'be-in-common'; and he holds on to an ultimate hope that isn't deferred indefinitely, but is already breaking into the here and now.

Into this 'frame', I find a lot of things beginning to 'fit'. I've blogged here and here at length on my suspicion of 'community resilience' language, as disabling our imagination, desire and agency to change things beyond the local. I'm also more and more persuaded that while 'resistance' language is helpful, to a point, the fact that it is inescapably defined by - even dependent on - the thing it is 'resisting', very quickly becomes problematic, again limiting the possibilities of our imagination, our desire, and our agency.

From an eschatological perspective, instead, we can turn things around and see what currently seems like the 'status quo' (e.g. global capitalism) as in fact 'resisting' that which is coming (i.e. in Christian terms, the peaceful and just kingdom of God). This is what I'm finding all over the place, in non-Christian language, in the writings around 'post-capitalist politics' (see e.g. J-K Gibson-Graham) and the Occupy movement, to name but two. And the resonances between these streams of thought and action, and those of the Christian tradition, intrigue and excite me.

Take, for example, Gibson-Graham's reflection on the 'Reclaim the Streets' (RTS) movement - 'short-lived', 'embodying the political value of interruption (as distinct from endurance)', but 'producing an affective shock wave that reverberates through the brittle architecture of established forms' of political agency and spatial governance. Quoting Rebecca Solnit, they cite RTS's 'incendiary carnival spirit, global Internet communications, and tactics of temporary victory [my italics]' as creating 'part of the vocabulary of what came next'.

I like the idea of RTS's 'tactics of temporary victory'. It reminds me of one of the most profound stories (for me) from the anti-apartheid movement, as told by Jim Wallis, veteran American Christian campaigner for social justice, about the great Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

"A political rally had just been canceled by the white government, so Bishop Tutu called for a worship service instead, inside the beautiful cathedral [of St George's, Cape Town]. The  power of apartheid was frighteningly evident in the numbers of riot police and armed soldiers massing outside the church. Inside, all along the cathedral walls, stood more police openly taping and writing down every comment made from the pulpit. When Tutu rose to speak, the atmosphere was tense indeed. He confidently proclaimed that the 'evil' and 'oppression' of the system of apartheid 'cannot prevail.' At that moment, the South African archbishop was probably one of the few people on the planet who actually believed that. 

"Archbishop Tutu point[ed] his finger right at the police who were recording his words. 'You may be powerful, indeed very powerful, but you are not God!' And the God whom we serve, said Tutu, 'cannot be mocked!' 'You have already lost!' the diminutive preacher thundered. Then he came out from behind the pulpit and seemed to soften, flashing that signature Desmond Tutu smile. So - since they had already lost, as had just been made clear - South African's spiritual leader shouted with glee, 'We are inviting you to come and join the winning side!' The whole place erupted, the police seemed to scurry out, and the congregation rose up in triumphal dancing..." (Jim Wallis God's Politics)

What Bretherton calls the 'eschatological horizon' puts Reclaim the Streets' 'tactics of temporary victory' into hopeful, transformative perspective. Even 'short-lived interruptions' can be glimpses of the triumphal celebrations of Desmond Tutu's 'winning side', especially when the place of those 'interruptions' is hospitable enough to invite oppressors to 'cross the floor' and join those they have been oppressing, glimpses of the 'common world' which Bretherton describes as both real possibility and ongoing task.

Our work locally in Hodge Hill is rather more mundane than the confrontation in Cape Town cathedral, or the 'incendiary carnival spirit' of Reclaim the Streets. But if change doesn't begin where we are, then it doesn't happen, full stop. One of our dilemmas in the last little while has been how closely we associate our twice-weekly Open Door drop-in with the local JobCentrePlus, and the whole oppressively punitive DWP system within which JCP staff have to operate. We have, since we opened Open Door, welcomed quite a number of people who've been referred our way by JCP. And then, more recently, we've discovered that some people coming to us have been told their attendance is compulsory - in other words, if they don't come to us, they risk getting sanctioned.

What do we do with this? Nothing of what we're about wants to collude with the vicious, dehumanising system over which the DWP presides. But we'd rather people came to us than to some of the other places people get sent - one of our regulars contrasts us to a rather more corporate work club where, he says, "you're treated like dirt", pointed to a computer with barely an acknowledgement of your existence, let alone your humanity. We have been very intentional about trying to create a space where relationships work differently, where people are honoured and respected in their complexity and vulnerability, where people's gifts are celebrated and connected together as well as their needs met, and so on...

Resonances come from conversations with other people and places. We've heard recently of a Christian organisation that employs 'relational youth workers' in school settings, often taking 'referrals' of young people struggling within the school system, but seeking to create a very different kind of environment, where young people can be welcomed as gifts, rather than problems, and where friendships can be nurtured, rather than targets striven for. "In the system, but not of the system," is how the organisation describes their role, echoing an old formula from Christian theology.

And food banks too, while deeply ambivalent, are proving, in some places at least, to be the openings to relationships of mutual respect, friendship and reciprocity, and functioning to 'conscientize' often white, middle-class, naturally-Tory-leaning volunteers into an angry disgust at a political system that forces people into a desperate dependency on emergency food supplies.

What we're edging towards, I think, is a description of places, spaces, environments however temporary or fragile, where, to quote RS Thomas' wonderful poem, The Kingdom, "there are quite different things going on". Not separate from everyday, compromised, ambivalently messy reality, but in the midst of it - but "in the system and not of it" - 'threshold spaces', we might call them, from one world into another. This is language with which Christians are relatively familiar. We have been used to talking about it in relation to church buildings, and Christian worship. I want to suggest, picking up on the kind of messiness I tried to describe in my previous blogpost, that it's much less tidy than that. It is happening in spaces unrecognisable as 'church', in canvas encampments and midnight street-walking. It is happening among people who claim 'faith' and many, many who don't. But there is something profoundly eschatological, profoundly hopeful, about what is happening. And it is changing stuff - slowly, perhaps, but it's still changing stuff: one encounter, one relationship, one place at a time.

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?

Out of balance? On the theology and practice of farting around

Something has gone a bit out of whack. In my job.

I love my job, and most of what I find myself doing from day to day I find pretty life-giving and fulfilling. In my more optimistic moments, I hang onto the hope that at least some of what I do might make a bit of positive difference to the little bits of world that I come into contact with. But I've been thinking more and more recently (the imminent approach of the annual 'ministerial development review' has helped this reflection) that the balance has gone a bit wonky.

I've been vicar in Hodge Hill for a little over 3 years now. Having learnt something from how I began previous jobs, and the wisdom of others (particularly a little but incisively insightful book by Stephen Cottrell, now Bishop of Chelmsford), I was determined to try not to 'hit the ground running' but to 'hit the ground kneeling' (as the title of Bishop Stephen's book puts it). And I certainly tried. In a really valuable transition period between jobs, I spent a good deal of time visiting key congregation members, listening to them tell their stories, and hearing them share their hopes and dreams for the future. And in the first year of the post here, we spent a lot of time as a congregation reflecting on our strengths and weaknesses, the opportunities and threats ahead of us, and on our sense of purpose, vision and values as 'church' in Hodge Hill. Out of this emerged our vision statement - 'Growing Loving Community, in the love of God, with all our neighbours, across Hodge Hill' - and our 5 core values of compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope. Much more than attractive words on paper, these have really shaped our life together, and have turned out to be fertile common ground for shared activity with many of our friends, neighbours and travelling companions both locally and beyond.

In that first year too, a team of us from church went on a journey called 'Know Your Church - Know Your Neighbourhood', which led us to visit many local places and institutions, and listen to people in those places share their own hopes and dreams, their challenges and frustrations, their passions and stories - in ways that were inspiring and moving, which were shot through with the compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope which we had identified as signs of God at work, and which offered all kinds of invitations to journey together, and work together, for the good of our neighbourhoods.

But of course the listening and reflecting inevitably, necessarily, turns into action. We have started doing stuff. All kinds of interesting, exciting, hopefully good and worthwhile stuff. A brilliant 'unsung heroes' celebration. A 'play cafe' for under 5s and their carers. A twice-weekly drop-in which offers a warm welcome and a cuppa, and also the chance to help people connect to the Internet, search for jobs, and connect with their neighbours through TimeBanking and volunteering. A weekly, bring and share community lunch. A community choir. Outdoor 'cuppa' sessions at school gates and bus stops to strike up conversations, turn strangers into friends, and connect people, activities and groups together. A women's group bringing together a dozen different nationalities. A bike-focused social enterprise. A community passion play. And much more through our involvement, in all kinds of different ways, with other local groups and partnerships...

When people have asked me more recently how it's going, my reply has been something along the lines of "it's all really exciting, but there's just a bit too much of it". That's a reflection on my involvement and entanglements, rather than on the neighbourhood as a whole - of course it's fabulous that things are taking off and flourishing locally, and as more and more people get involved, the energy just grows. There's a real energy and vitality amongst the church congregation too, and while we don't, thankfully, seem to be a church where just a small group of people do everything, I do find myself keeping a careful eye that people aren't overcommitting and risking burnout. But looking in the mirror, as one individual human being within church and neighbourhood, somewhere along the line I find my own diary has become full to overflowing with stuff: activities, events, and... yes, lots of meetings.

It's the meetings that are particularly challenging. Not that any of them are unimportant. Few of them are even particularly tedious. Many are vital places where strategic planning and decision-making happen. They're also, at the risk of stating the obvious, places where people meet, where relationships can develop, connections can be made, visions deepened and enlarged. But it is sometimes in the meetings, particularly, that I find myself wondering, "should I really be here?".

I'm reminded of a conversation some time ago with the Australian Christian community activist Dave Andrews, who drew our attention to the Yiddish distinction between 'maching' and 'schmoozing' - the former being the time we spend together in task-focused, strategic mode, that most 'meetings' are made of; the latter that more relaxed, unfocused time where friendships are mostly made and deepened, and where new possibilities and ideas and connections have the time and space to emerge, unforced and unexpected. I have an increasingly concerning sense that I'm spending much more of my time 'maching' than 'schmoozing' - a sure indicator is a sense of hurriedness between meetings, turning up at the last minute and leaving the moment it has finished, so that even the time that 'meetings' offer for 'schmoozing' is missed.

We decided, recently, in Hodge Hill that we would not, at least at this point in time, become a member of Citizens UK in Birmingham, part of the worldwide broad-based community organizing movement. Some of that was about our capacity, some of it was a deeper unease about something that felt like it was being just a little bit too rushed. But there is much in the methods of Community Organizing that is nevertheless valuable, not least in its emphasis on regular 'one-to-one' conversations that seek to listen carefully, and reach into the depths of people's passions and energies.

One of our guiding principles in Hodge Hill has been what I've called 'overacceptance': the willingness to say 'Yes' to other people's invitations and offers and to seek creatively to join in making something more of those invitations and offers. In many ways it's the opposite of the 'initiatives' that are the constant temptation of churches and community organisations - it's not about 'taking the initiative' ourselves, but about responding receptively to others. It demands much more humility and patience. But it can still, I'm reflecting here, end up in a busyness and a superabundance of 'meetings' that looks very similar to the cumulative effect of endless 'initiatives'.

I'm reminded, again, of some hard-won wisdom from radical democrat, Romand Coles. Although Coles describes himself as 'not a member of any church', he is fascinated with what resources the Christian tradition potentially offers to the venture of developing grassroots, community-based, radical democracy. He engages with in particular with Mennonite theologians John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, and Sam Wells, an Anglican priest influenced strongly by Hauerwas. Wells in particular develops the themes of improvisation and 'overacceptance' that I've drawn on heavily. While Coles finds much to value in the 'creative receptivity' of 'overacceptance', he also identifies the temptation to a certain hurriedness, in what he calls ‘the theatrical / dramatic imperative to “keep the story going”’. Alongside such creative receptivity, he argues, we need to hold onto that vital ‘ethical capacity’ of ‘[n]ot knowing what to say and knowing one does not know – perhaps for a very long time’. Beyond the choice of either ‘blocking' (saying No) or 'overaccepting’ (the creative 'Yes, and...'), Coles suggests there lies ‘a host of other crucial capacities’ including ‘radical patience, stillness, “acting out of the deepest silence,” sitting around on front porches with no plan of action and resisting imperatives for quick improvisations,’ ‘asking the other(s) questions,’ and ‘allow[ing] ourselves to be called into question in ways that perturb our energies’ and temptations to remain in control. We discover, says Coles, ‘long pausing as frequently the most profound ethical art in difficult situations. We cultivate arts of pregnant waiting.’

I find Coles' suggestive insights - from his own deeply lived experience of community organising - profoundly helpful and challenging. They form the beginning, for me, of a theology and practice of the value of 'farting around'. Or, to use slightly more theological language, of the value of 'being present' as much as, if not more than, 'being active' in community. There's a pragmatic argument for it - that it's necessary, that it works - which I suspect is why community organising places so much value on its 'one-to-ones'. But there's also a 'spiritual' argument for it, which perhaps comes closer to my current sense of unease and imbalance.

I struggle to say No to 'meetings', or to pull out of roles which demand a lot of them. A lot of my struggle comes out of an anxiety about not wanting to let people down, or not wanting to be seen as 'retreating' from or devaluing things that are important. I suspect there's a bit of a dose of imagined indispensability too, which is particularly dangerous, and often not half as true as I - or my co-workers - imagine it to be. I struggle too because, as I said earlier, the 'meetings' are also often a great opportunity for the 'schmoozing' as well as the 'maching' - and can, at their best, be places of great creativity and deep insight.

One of the core questions for me has become, "what is my distinctive contribution to this piece of work / group / meeting?" If the answer to that question comes anywhere near 'nothing', or indeed 'everything', then that is the time for me to be deeply concerned, and to do something serious about it. I'm sure it's not just vicars who fall into the trap of imagining we are omnicompetent, or have to be everywhere, but I know we are particularly bad at it. 

I spend much more of my time in and around my neighbourhood than I do in church and doing 'churchy' stuff. Rarely do I regret that aspect of my 'life balance'. But I am increasingly aware that part of my vocation as a priest, as well as community builder / connector / development worker (although I am something of that as well), is to cultivate Coles' 'art of pregnant waiting', that 'radical patience, stillness' that allows those deeper connections, harder questions, less obvious possibilities, to surface. There is something deeply spiritual about this role, if not remotely exclusively Christian or priestly. I think I am able to write and talk about it with more ease and naturalness than I am, as yet, able to practise it. But I know it's important, vital even - and it might just be the one thing that I really need to do...

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...?

Don't run across the rug: FoodBanks, Alpha and other franchises

On one of those rare evenings when both Janey (my wife) and I were at home together, with a bit of time to spare, we were chatting over dinner, reflecting on our respective days. Janey had taken Adia, our 2-year-old, to a well-known franchised music session for toddlers. It had been alright, Janey commented, but over-structured, with little space for the children's own ideas, creativity and spontaneity. At the end of the session, a parent of one of the many lively children in the class went across to the 'teacher' and nervously apologised: "I'm really sorry she ran across the rug". The material in the middle of the circle, apparently, was only for the designated dolls of the franchise, not for children to run across.

We reflected together on the contrast between that, and our own 'Play Cafe' which we've been running locally for the last two years. We've been blessed with a professional musician for a significant amount of that time, and one who is particularly gifted in encouraging, building children's (and adults'!) confidence, and 'taking on' all kinds of spontaneous and crazy suggestions, interruptions and contributions, and enabling them to turn into something unexpectedly, unimaginably wonderful, in which everyone feels included, and to which even the most non-conformist children (and adults!) feel like they have made a significant contribution. There was something about that franchised music session and its hapless (if permanently smiley), slavishly rule-enforcing (and, we guess, slavishly rule-following) 'teacher', that was the polar opposite of our experience at Play Cafe. For children who will otherwise get no experience of making music together, it was 'alright' - but it was far from enabling the potential of children, adults, and even the 'teacher' herself, to flourish. It relied not on drawing out the best gifts and skills of those present (including the 'teacher'), but on one person following a given set of procedures as consistently as possible, and effectively 'passing on' these procedures to her students.

It struck me, as we talked, that this is how most franchises seem to work. Another contrast might be between the rigidly-prescriptive Alpha course (based on a set of videos, and some structured questions for the conversation which follows), and something we've started doing here in Hodge Hill that we call 'Doubting Aloud' - taking an issue, a question, a 'wondering', and/or a 'struggle' (already a contribution from the group, rather than a programme decided in advance), and teasing it out together over a couple of hours, sharing our own experiences, resonances, questions, wonderings and struggles, bringing insights, where they seem appropriate, from Christian tradition and other sources of wisdom - not to find an 'answer', or a consensus, but at the very least to find some language to articulate our 'wrestlings' with a little more clarity. And clarity we have often found, in the most richly diverse sense, often with dissonances and contradictions remaining (or newly discovered), but horizons broadened, commitments deepened, explorations re-energised.

I've written before here and here about food banks, and some of the problems I have with them - and particularly with the Christian churches' enthusiasm to grasp them as an 'opportunity', or 'necessary response' to our present dire political and social climate. I find myself wondering how much the 'franchise' model (and there's a particularly hefty franchise that has almost a monopoly on the 'foodbank business') is part of the problem. I don't doubt the goodness and commitment and compassion of those who have set up, and volunteered in, the many and growing food banks around the country - but I do wonder how much 'the rules' of the franchise create a rigidity that necessarily squeezes out the possibility of those who come to use the food bank coming with something to contribute, with questions and challenges for 'the system', with gifts - however apparently 'awkward' - which might result in unexpected, reciprocal, transformative relationships that 'go somewhere', rather than the grim transactions of unquestioning, desperate dependency which 'the system' currently seems to be perpetuating and multiplying.

The alternative? I've tried to describe it, or at least gesture towards it, repeatedly in this blog - it is perhaps what this blog is all about. I've repeatedly used the improvisational language of 'over-accepting', and have tried to flesh out what that looks like in practice in Hodge Hill. It also goes under the name of 'asset-based community development' (or ABCD), and I've talked about that a lot here too. But I'm increasingly realising that to truly understand what this might be, we need to sharpen our understanding of what it isn't. And it's not a franchise, and can never be. It's not a model to replicate, it's a call to conversion.

We had a dream: on hope deferred, and the connecting power of lament

We had a dream. Timely words, in the wake of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous speech. Timely perhaps, but the mood is one not of energised hope, but of crushing disappointment.

We had a dream: a dream of a 'community house' on our estate in east Birmingham; a place of community-within-community, where people would commit to 'doing community' in the deepest sense - living together, sharing the work of keeping the house going, pooling their income (vulnerable stuff!), and even more vulnerable, sharing their lives with each other with a level of intimacy that only comes when you regularly have to share a kitchen, a bathroom, a living space, and a generous dose of your soul, with all its ups and downs and rough edges, with other living, breathing, fragile, messy, human beings. And then 'doing community' in the wider sense too - getting to know and making friends with the neighbours around them, and opening their home outwards as a place of hospitality - with a really decent kitchen and an even bigger living/eating room, a place where big and small conversations could happen, and a place where people could, if they wanted or needed to, pause and pray.

That was our dream.

And we'd find the perfect place. It had been empty for the last 3 or 4 years. Before that, it had been the local clinic for families to come and meet with midwives and health visitors. A house that, with some work and investment, could accommodate 6 bedrooms upstairs, and a big kitchen, a huge living space, and one or two smaller rooms downstairs.

And even better, our bold and imaginative church council had found the money. From the sale of our old church site, with all the shock and loss and grief that had gone with that - but which has also released a great deal of vision, and energy, and passion for becoming again a church truly rooted in, and connected across, its local neighbourhoods - a vision of 'growing loving community, in the love of God, with all our neighbours, across Hodge Hill'. From that loss, possibilities have emerged and been grasped, and our church council had committed a really substantial amount of that sale money to this new venture.

And so yesterday morning, with dreams and visions, hopes and possibilities bubbling up inside us and bursting to come out, seven of us went to the auction. It had been a journey at least three years in the making. We'd waited a year and a bit for Birmingham City Council to do an 'options appraisal' on the old clinic building. We'd come within a hair's breadth of the Council agreeing to do a 'community asset transfer' on the building, in recognition of the potentially huge social impact of the plans we'd put to them. But money concerns had won the day, and they'd decided to auction it off to the highest bidder instead. We'd done our sums. It seemed pretty clear to us that a property developer wouldn't make any money on it, buying to convert into houses or flats to sell on again. We went with a lot of hope, and a banker's draft.

The auction was a bit like having your team get to the cup final, but the match only lasting 2 minutes. Our hearts were in our throats. We got into the bidding... but very quickly, the price went way beyond what we could afford, or justify for the building. It was sold to a property developer, for almost twice the auctioneers' guide price - a crazy price, that left even our agent lost for words.

In the blow of a hammer, our dreams and visions, our hopes and possibilities, were shattered. We left quickly, nothing to wait around for, and went away to drown our sorrows together in mugs of tea.

I was absolutely exhausted, drained. I still am today, 24 hours later. It feels in many ways like a bereavement. Echoes return to me of those two disciples of Jesus heading wearily back home to Emmaus after the events of Good Friday - "we had hoped..." they say, sharing with a stranger their shattered dreams, with the melancholy confusion of those who can't see any way ahead, any future worth contemplating. I suspect many of my companions at the auction felt similarly, and many more who had been waiting at the end of a phone for some news from us.

I still feel deeply sad. There's some anger bubbling away too, linked to some 'if only's... If only Birmingham City Council had stuck with their glimpse of a community-centred vision, held on to the possibilities of a building they owned as a real community asset, and not given in to the all-too-obvious pressure to raise money wherever they can - at the expense, ironically, of the communities they are meant to be serving. Because the money the Council gets from the sale, they will use to pay off debts from compensation claims, claims that have arisen because of the Council's discriminatory pay policy for many years - another 'if only'... And even bigger than particular decisions, by particular councillors or officers, I find myself with that big 'if only', knowing that yesterday, in that auction, money won - that all-consuming systemic lie that only money has the power to do and decide and determine the stories we live, that it is only in money's terms that we know what (and who) is valuable and what (and who) isn't, and that those with the most, win, and those with the least, lose. If only things were different...

I am transported back to what we Anglicans call 'Holy Saturday' - the day before Easter Day. Except in so many ways it's not 'the day before' - it's simply 'the day after'. The day after the crucifixion, the death. A day not of hope and anticipation - because in that first Holy Saturday there was nothing to anticipate or hope for. A day simply of nothingness. Of nothing to do. Nothing to hope for. No future to glimpse, no possibilities to reach out for. I've written before about what we did on Holy Saturday evening this year - simply sitting together in our local patch of 'wasteland', as the sun went down, sharing not so much 'stories of hope', as I think I'd initially intended, but stories of 'hope deferred', of hope longed-for. Sharing, perhaps more accurately, our laments, our deep, heart-breaking 'if only's. A lot of what one of my very good friends and co-workers here described himself doing yesterday:

Walking home found myself praying (As sometimes happens) about the days events and as I was naming situations, issues, people etc. I found myself shouting out: 'Bloody hell God there's a lot of shit going on!!!' Some might say that's disrespectful but it's what was on my heart #Lamenting #Faith

And I realise that there's something immensely significant in those moments. Over the past 18 months or so here in Hodge Hill, we've come to live and breathe the language of 'asset-based community development'. It's implicit or explicit in a lot of my blog reflections here. At its simplest, it's often said to be about putting relationships between neighbours - mutual, reciprocal relationships - at the heart of all we do, and "starting with what's strong, not what's wrong", with the 'assets', the 'gifts' of a neighbourhood and its people, rather than its 'problems' - approaching with a "glass half full" attitude rather than the more dominant "glass half empty" mindset. But however much truth there is in those sound-bites, there's an 'underside' that also needs articulating: the best kind of 'asset-based community development' is also, inevitably, 'vulnerability-based community development'. I was reminded of that in a powerful conversation with my good friend Cormac Russell just earlier this week. It is perhaps not irrelevant that the beginnings of 'ABCD' terminology emerged in a conversation between a community-builder and a powerful economist, and the 'assets' language was the economist wanting to translate the messy work of community building into the 'respectable' language of the academy. The language of 'gifts' is, I think, a much better 'fit' in the real world of neighbourhoods - and while our gifts may often be "what's strong" by our normal judgements, so often the most precious gifts we can share are our gifts of vulnerability, of fragility, of weakness. It can often be our vulnerabilities that drive us to connect with our neighbours, and it is almost always in our vulnerabilities, our 'daring to expose' something of ourselves that feels a little fragile, that we allow our more distanced relationships with strangers turn into the mutual, reciprocal relationships of passion and care that we call 'friendships'.

Bitter disappointments, losses, and pain can too often isolate us from other people, seal us off in our own private world of grief. Our Western so-called-'developed' society has crystallised and cemented technologies and expertise that do, and encourage, exactly that. We are pushed into ways of coping that are about creating and reinforcing securities, walls, defences around our vulnerabilities that allow us to project an external strength that enables us to 'keep fitting in' to socially acceptable patterns of behaviour.

But the 'empty half' of our glass can also, in some environments (or cultures, or conditions of hospitality, let's say), be precisely the thing that enables us to connect with others. What we call lament - grief and disappointment expressed, made public, shared - can clear a space, a breathing space, a waiting space, a listening space, which can enable genuine, deep, authentic community to grow.

In the waiting space that I find myself, with other good friends and travelling companions, currently inhabiting, I am wondering about that dream that felt so shattered in that auction room yesterday. I find myself wondering about the relationship between, on the one hand, the very obvious value of 'having a place' where 'we' can offer hospitality to others, and on the other hand, the deep-rooted longing for bricks and mortar that 'we' can call 'ours', at its most human a longing for home, but at its worst an 'edifice complex' that is more about security, control, and a kind of public power. I find myself wondering whether, and how, that intimacy of community, that vulnerable exposure to each other, that is found when you share a house, might yet be discovered and practised within a neighbourhood, even if we are, at times, divided by our bricks and mortar. I find myself wondering how much we, the church in Hodge Hill, are still being called to live out of our 'homelessness', our 'exile', our dependence on the hospitality of our neighbours - because in that experience and practice is something that profoundly connects us to many of our neighbours (near and far), and to the roots of our own faith - to our incarnate, homeless God. I find myself wondering whether there are times and seasons for these different ways of living - and whether this particular season is turning, or simply deepening. And I find myself wondering what strangers we might encounter, as we continue walking along this road, today, or tomorrow, or next week, or beyond, who might give to us a glimpse of a new future, a new possibility, springing up in the cracked earth of our current lament.

We had a dream.

Dreams are fragile, and we are invited to 'tread softly' on them. They can also, sometimes, be stubbornly persistent.

We have a dream. We are still here. We are waiting, lamenting, longing, looking, listening, wondering.

One great Irishman shared a treasure or two from another this week. Cormac Russell, echoing Seamus Heaney, invited us to "walk on air against your better judgement".

We continue walking here.