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

‘Moving in’: ‘working for’ or ‘being with’?

Janey, Rafi and I have been here in Hodge Hill for four years now. Our kids’ birthdays are always a good reminder of this particular ‘anniversary’ – Rafi had just turned two when we moved in.

When I took up the Bishop’s offer of the post here, Janey and I were pretty clear that we didn’t want to live in the Rectory, but somewhere on the Firs and Bromford estate – and we found a house, to rent, which isn’t, let’s say, quite up to the ‘spec’ of your average Vicarage. I know that at the time, that was a bit puzzling for quite a lot of people here, but it was really important for us, and I hope it makes a bit more sense now.

It wasn’t just that the Rectory was next to the derelict site where the old ‘PJ’ church had stood. It was up at the top of the Common (whether we’re at the ‘top’ or the ‘bottom’, in our geographies, have more of an emotional impact on us than we often realise, I think), at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, with just a few other (equally large) houses nearby.

And we also had a sense, from friends who already lived on the Firs and Bromford, that the estate was somewhere that was used to being either ‘overlooked’ (in both senses, ‘forgotten about’, and ‘looked down on’, quite literally, from the top of the concrete pillars of the M6), or ‘done to’, by a steady stream of ‘outsiders’, whether well-meaning or more indifferent, many of whom had come for a while, promised much, and then gone away leaving local people feeling let down and abandoned once again.

I’ve reluctantly had to admit to myself, over the years, that I am a middle-class professional. An RAF child, born and bred in the ‘Home Counties’, with a Cambridge degree and another couple since then, seven years ‘professional training’, and a steady salary paid by a 400-year-old institution. Admittedly, over the last 16 years or so particularly I’ve become more and more sensitised to issues of inequality and injustice, poverty and deprivation, and the sheer struggles to ‘make ends meet’ and ‘keep head above water’ faced daily by many of my fellow human beings – a strong sense of ‘being for’ my neighbours (as Anglican priest and theologian Sam Wells puts it). And as a person who is naturally an ‘activist’, who feels good when he’s doing things – and with certificates and titles that supposedly prove ‘knowledge’ and ‘expertise’ – it’s all too easy, and all too tempting, to imagine that my most important role in life is to use that knowledge and expertise and activism to serve – or ‘work for’, as Sam Wells puts it – those who need what I can bring.

The trouble is, as Sam Wells points out sharply, “working for makes the expert feel good and important and useful, but it does not necessarily leave the recipient feeling that great. The working for model sets in stone a relationship in which one person is a benefactor and the other is a person in need. It is humiliating if many or most of your relationships are ones in which you need someone to do things for you. The working for model perpetuates relationships of inequality. Worse still, it is possible to be the recipient of a person’s help and still find the benefactor remains a stranger to you.” In fact, that’s precisely what all the structures and boundaries around ‘professionalism’ are designed to ensure.

There are alternatives, though, Sam suggests. One is about ‘working with’ – “never doing something for people that they could properly do for themselves” – but also “offering what you have and are” to support others in the action they decide to take. It paints a picture, if you like, of “a roundtable where each person present has a different but equally valuable portfolio of experience, skills, interests, networks and commitments.” A lot of what we as a church have found ourselves getting involved with in the last few years has resembled this ‘working with’ model: involvement in the Big Local ‘regeneration’ investment on the estate; the Community Passion Play, where many of us responded to the invitation from Phil to join him in turning his inspired vision into a reality; and ‘Open Door’, from week to week seeking to work alongside people to help them find jobs, use their skills and knowledge, develop their interests and passions in their neighbourhood and beyond.

But we can push this further, says Sam. We need to learn to go beyond ‘working with’ to ‘being with’. “Just imagine working for and working with have done their stuff and achieved all they set out to do. What then, when there is no world to fix? We get to ‘hang out.’ In other words, we [get to] enjoy one another. ... The being with approach says, ‘Let’s not leave those discoveries till after all the solving and fixing is done and we’re feeling bored. Let’s make those discoveries now.’”

It was our desire to ‘be with’ our neighbours that drew Janey and me to want to find a house on the Firs & Bromford estate, and to immerse ourselves, as much as possible, in the life of our neighbourhood. It has its challenges, of course: ‘being with’ takes time, lots of time; it doesn’t tend to produce lots of obvious, measurable ‘outcomes’ (the kind that the Diocesan Office or the grant funders like to see); it can sometimes be quite uncomfortable, and often messy and complicated; and there’s the constant temptation to slip back into ‘working for’ mode, because it’s so much easier and quicker, and more straightforward, and ‘gets results’. But it’s only through the patience of ‘being with’ that the most precious gifts come: like learning from our neighbours; being able to relax and enjoy each other’s company; making friends; finding people you can have a good cry with.

In the next few months, six or seven people will come together to set up home in our two Community Houses – the old Rectory is one, and the church house in Ayala Croft on the Firs and Bromford is the other. Some of those people are very local, some are from other parts of Birmingham, and some are from further afield – and all of them are up for ‘relocating’ to Hodge Hill. When we got them together for the first time a few weeks ago, we asked them to ‘dream dreams’ of what could be possible, in and around their Houses, with the passions and gifts they bring with them. Their dreams were exciting ones to see begin to unfold. But crucially, they said to each other during their conversation, they were coming first to ‘listen’ and to ‘be’ – and only then, perhaps, to ‘do’. Our Community Houses will be lived in by some wonderful, passionate, gifted people – but they are coming, responding to their sense of God’s call, first and foremost to learn: not from supposed ‘experts’ like me, but from their neighbours-to-be. They are coming not to ‘work for’ or ‘do to’ – but to ‘work with’ and, most importantly, simply to learn to ‘be with’, and enjoy the discoveries that emerge. And that, we trust, will be a gift for all of us to share in.

[Quotes come from Sam Wells & Marcia Owen, Living Without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence, IVP 2011]

On dirty blogs & messy church

I've been quiet here for a little while. Not for a lack of thinking about stuff. If anything, it might be a result of too much thinking going on - throwing loads of pieces of the jigsaw up in the air and waiting for them to land in a nice, coherent pattern. But of course, coherent patterns tend to take a long old time to form, and often the only way to find them - especially with jigsaws - is to work piece by piece.

So, inspired by the approach of a new-ish and rather wiser friend and travelling companion along the way, Laura 'Mole' Chapman, fellow blogger and faculty member of ABCD Europe, I feel the need to try what Mole calls a 'quick and dirty' blog. No time to finesse the rough edges. Little in the way of references, academic or otherwise. But an attempt, however messy and vulnerable (in all kinds of ways), to 'reflect aloud', and see what comes of it...

I want to talk about messy church.

Not 'Messy Church', that hugely infectious movement promising a 'new way of being church for families', however irrepressibly attractive its values of 'creativity, hospitality and celebration' might be. 'Messy Church' as a movement has been quite good at articulating its theology from the beginning, and last year saw the publication of 'Messy Church Theology', which not only expressed the theological significance of 'messiness' in the fallibility and unfinishedness of even 'Christ-centred' human life in the present, but kept on returning the question of how we might decide whether 'Messy Church' is really 'church'. There's something about that question that is both intriguing and troubling for me. It feels both worth asking, for the kind of issues it opens up, but also disturbing to make too prominent, as if which side of the line the answer falls, in any given context, is somehow of ultimate importance.

So, No, I'm not particularly interested in here in 'Messy Church' with capital letters. I'm wanting to explore something much more modest, much less 'brandable': something that we might be able to call church, but which is unavoidably messy - and more messy than 'Messy Church Theology' seems, as yet, to allow for.

And I don't think I'm talking about what Archbishop Justin Welby recently referred to, at a recent gathering of the Church of England's General Synod, as the 'untidy church' that lies ahead of us, particularly in the aftermath of deciding - finally! - to ordain women as bishops:

It has incoherence, inconsistency between dioceses and between different places.  It’s not a church that says we do this and we don’t do that.  It’s a church that says we do this and we do that and actually quite a lot of us don’t like that but we are still going to do it because of love.  It’s a church that speaks to the world and says that consistency and coherence is not the ultimate virtue, that is found in holy  grace. 

A church that loves those with whom the majority deeply disagree is a church that will be unpleasantly challenging to a world where disagreement is either banned within a given group or removed and expelled.  The absolute of holy grace challenges the absolutism of a world that says there are no absolutes except the statement that there are no absolutes.

Now, the part of me that is embedded in, and dependent on, the institution that is the Church of England warms to Archbishop Justin's description of 'untidiness'. But it remains an essentially introspective description, an internal conversation. The boundaries between 'church' and 'world' are still drawn sharply, and the 'rightness' of the former still very much asserted. That's still not nearly messy enough, I would suggest.

I'm attracted, too, to what theologian Nicolas Healy calls 'practical-prophetic ecclesiology': the 'grand, never-ending experiment' involving 'ongoing and self-critical evaluation of our ecclesial thought and action', of attention not to allegedly authoritative 'blueprints', but to the complex, fallible 'everyday activity' of what Healy calls the 'concrete church' in each local context in which it is embodied.

But it needs to get messier still, because even though Healy reminds us that 'church' is a messy old mixture of good and really-not-very-good stuff, there's still a working assumption that it's fairly easy to work out what counts as 'church' and what is what Healy calls 'non-church'.

And then there's a quote from Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, writer, social activist and much more. Well, it's not quite a quote, more a half-remembered paraphrase, but the gist of it is this:

"forget about defining and drawing boundaries around 'church', let's just talk about a bunch of people who love each other, doing stuff together".

That's just about messy enough for me. It may well horrify many of my colleagues and sister and brother Christians for not being remotely 'Christian' enough. But in playing with it, I'm not remotely wanting to suggest that the Christian faith has no great gifts to bring to the table, not at all. Just that the kind of spaces I'm interested in, and the human interactions that happen in those spaces, don't in any obvious way map on to an easy separation of 'church' and 'non-church'. I'm interested in spaces where there are "people who love each other, doing stuff together" - people caught up in what theologians John Reader and Chris Baker name 'entangled fidelities', some of whom might name themselves Christians (amongst other things), and others who don't; and doing things that might occasionally look recognisably 'Christian things to do', and at other times don't.

Over the last 3 or 4 years, the ongoing conversation within what we call Hodge Hill Church has thrown up a way of describing what we're about here: 'Growing Loving Community - in the love of God, with all our neighbours, across Hodge Hill'. It's a good statement, I think, because it seems to describe fairly well what people see when they see 'Hodge Hill Church'. But it's also valuable, I think, because it allows us, very explicitly, to look for, and value, and celebrate those places and moments and glimpses of 'growing loving community' in Hodge Hill that don't in any conventional way look like 'church'. Not so that we can claim them as 'ours', but so that, at the very least, we can recognise a kind of 'family resemblance'. And in that recognition, all kinds of possibilities open up.

A little while ago, a couple of us here were exploring a new course offered nationally by Livability (what used to be the Shaftesbury Society) called 'The Happiness Course'. It's good stuff - drawing on the relatively new field of 'positive psychology' and also on the deep wells of the Christian tradition, but aimed to be accessible both for people 'with faith' and those 'without', and if it seeks to persuade, then it's seeking to persuade people of the value of intentional practices to develop their sense of wellbeing, rather than seeking to persuade people of the 'rightness' of the Christian faith. But there was one interesting divergence between those of us working here and the person we were exploring the course with: for him, there was a deep longing for participants to 'journey towards home' (a 'home' that, implicitly, those running the course had already found); for those of us based here in Hodge Hill, we couldn't get away from the sense that, if there was a 'journey towards home', we are all on it together - indeed, to push it a bit further, we are journeying towards 'the home we build together' (to use Jonathan Sacks' resonant phrase).

Friends and colleagues here, and further afield, rightly want to push me on this. Where is the place for what we traditionally call 'Christian discipleship'? Don't we, as Christians, long to see our neighbours growing deeper into their true humanity, 'in Christ'? Where is the space for 'we Christians' sharing our faith - one of our treasured gifts, perhaps our most treasured gift - with our friends, neighbours and travelling companions?

But in 'messy church', as I'm exploring it, I'm not so sure who the 'we Christians' refers to. Yes, there are some of us that seem to come to conversations with fairly hefty chunks of a faith that we have inherited and explored for ourselves, that might quite straightforwardly call ourselves 'Christians'. But there are others who come with at least fragments of something that looks and sounds very similar, whether 'Christian' is a label that they choose to use, or something they're very clearly 'not', or something that is just much more ambiguous and ambivalent than either of those. And in fact, in messy reality, none of us make complete sense, free of incoherence and contradictions and ambiguities. And those of us who intentionally and reflectively wrestle with this stuff have a sense that there is an ambiguity and a mystery that goes close to the heart of what 'faith' is anyway. So we work hard at working together to create spaces, environments, conversations where the sharing and the exploring and the wrestling can happen, and where we can all learn and grow - individually and together - and where relationships between us can deepen, and where we might more truly embody something of the 'home' that we sense we are journeying towards, and that others might glimpse it too, and that our journeys might join more intimately together.

So bring on the conversation about 'messy church' - whatever it is. It clearly needs a lot more thinking through...

[thanks to Gary Hall of the Queen's Foundation for the Merton 'quote' - he's working on digging out the actual quote, which will hopefully turn up in a future blog!]

'Community Resilience' & its redemption?

Is 'community resilience' redeemable? Is it a concept even worth trying to redeem? Is it possible to highlight and strengthen a local community's social - and other forms of - capital, while at the same time building, and not disabling, its collective capacity for political - even utopian - imagination and active resistance to the structures of the status quo? These are the questions with which I ended my previous blog post.

Resilience and human geography

Today I've had the chance to read another, very helpful, critically reflective piece, 'From resilience to resourcefulness: a critique of resilience policy and activism' [Danny MacKinnon & Kate Driscoll Derickson, Progress in Human Geography (2012) 37(2) 253-270]. In their critique, the authors make three key points:

1. The concept of resilience, precisely because it is 'derived from ecology and systems theory, is conservative when applied to the social sphere ... privileg[ing] established social structures, which are often shaped by unequal power relations and injustice... [and] also clos[ing] off wider questions of progressive social change which require interference with, and transformation of, established "systems".'

2. Resilience tends to be defined 'externally' and 'top-down', 'by state agencies and expert knowledge in spheres such as security, emergency planning, economic development and urban design', and thus 'invariably place the onus on individuals, communities and places to become more resilient and adaptable to a range of external threats ... serving to reproduce the wider social and spatial relations that generate turbulence and inequality.' (This is Evans & Reid's key point in the paper I explored previously).

3. '[T]he concern with resilience of places is misconceived in terms of spatial scale... rely[ing] on an underlying local-global divide, treating scales such as the 'regional', 'urban' or 'local' as self-contained systems, thus 'foster[ing] an internalist conception which locates the sources of resilience as lying within the particular scale in question', while obscuring the reality that 'the processes which shape resilience operate primarily at the scale of capitalist social relations' (i.e. national and trans-national). (pp. 254-5)

Although MacKinnon and Derickson acknowledge that, 'among oppositional groups and campaigns', 'resilience' langauge 'is meant to prefigure alternative social relations in which social and environmental well-being is the system which is to be privileged (i.e. the resilient system) with capitalism seen as one of a number of disruptive and destructive forces', they conclude that the term has been so co-opted to be irredeemable, and go on to propose an alternative concept that, they suggest, better addresses the 'uneven access to material resources and the levers of social change' - or, in Spivak's words, better 'cultivate[s] the will to social justice' among everyday people' (p. 255, 263).

'Resourcefulness' as an alternative

What MacKinnon and Derickson propose instead, then, is the language of 'resourcefulness'. Firstly, they suggest, 'resourcefulness' is meant to focus the spotlight on how 'resources' (and power) are distributed, and to 'problematize' and contest the inequalities that emerge:

'The normative vision that underpins resourcefulness is one in which communities have the capacity to engage in genuinely deliberative democratic dialogue to develop contestable alternative agendas and work in ways that meaningfully challenge existing power relations.' (p. 263)

Secondly, they suggest, 'resourcefulness emphasizes forms of learning and mobilization based upon local priorities and needs as identified and developed by community activists and residents'. In contrast to the 'top-down' definitions of resilience, 'resourcefulness' is intended to promote a kind of 'local autonomy' understood as 'the ever-contested and never complete ability of those within the locality to control the institutions and relationships that define and produce the locality'.

Thirdly, addressing the issue of a false 'localism' which fails to recognise the interactions and power-relations between different spatial scales, the authors argue that 'resourcefulness' is 'not only spatially grounded in identifiable local spaces', 'focusing attention on the need to build capacities at community level,' but also 'outward-looking', 'open and relational in terms of both recognizing the wider politics of justice that often underpin local activism and emphasizing the need for alliances between community groups and broader social movements'.

Finally, 'resourcefulness' is offered 'as a process, rather than a clearly identifiable condition, amenable to empirical measurement or quantification. As a relational concept, resourcefulness cannot be understood as something communities possess to varying degrees. It is the act of fostering resourcefulness, not measuring it or achieving it, that should motivate policy and activism.' As a tentative framework undergirding the term, they propose four key dimensions: (1) an attention to the 'Resources' available (including e.g. spare time, social capital, organizing capacity, etc.) and their distribution; (2) 'Skill sets and technical knowledge' (e.g. in governmental procedures, finance and IT); (3) 'Indigenous and "folk" knowledge' (including cultural 'stories of origin', sense-making stories and shared visions); and (4) a cultural and political 'Recognition' which 'promotes a sense of confidence, self-worth and self- and community-affirmation that can be drawn upon to fuel the mobilization of existing resources and argue for and pursue new resources.' (p. 264-5)

There is much to be said for MacKinnon and Derickson's critique, but I must admit I'm not entirely persuaded by their alternative. 'Resourcefulness' is a good, evocative word, but while it deliberately foregrounds the question of the distribution of resources, I can't help thinking they're trying to have their cake and eat it. Can 'resourcefulness' really, at the same time, highlight inequalities (in 'resources') and yet resist measurement or quantification? Is 'resourcefulness' inherently and insistently a 'process', or is it just as vulnerable as resilience to becoming crystallised as a 'condition'? Neoliberalism's proven ability to co-opt the concept of 'resilience', even when the concept has been employed at a 'grassroots' level, suggests that 'resourcefulness' might not be immune to a similar kind of appropriation - I can imagine David Cameron quite easily conjuring up images of a wartime popular 'resourcefulness' in the midst of the London blitz - thereby 'disabling' the necessary 'politics of resistance' in exactly the same way that Evans & Reid so powerfully highlighted in 'resilience rhetoric'.

Resourcefulness in the wilderness: four 'arts' of survival and resistance

As a practical theologian, working with critiques of resilience like Evans & Reid's and MacKinnon & Derickson's, I find myself driven back towards theology for alternative metaphors and practices. Christian faith began in the context of an all-powerful Empire and huge inequalities, and while it has by no means been immune to being co-opted and domesticated by the 'powers that be', it has shown a remarkable capacity to reinvent itself, from the edges of the dominant regime, as challenge and alternative. (We might even call it 'resilient', if that wasn't the term we were currently trying to disentangle!)

In her remarkable book Sisters in the Wilderness, Delores Williams explores at length the 'survival strategies' deployed by African-American women, from slavery to the present day. While acknowledging that even these strategies can themselves be ‘exploited’ within the African-American community and in the churches, Williams concludes her study by outlining four such strategies, or ‘arts’, which have managed to ‘keep the community alive and hopeful’:

• An ‘art of cunning’, combining knowledge and imagination with ‘manual skill and dexterity’, ‘a wholesome shrewdness’ that ensured individual survival and ‘economic well-being’;
• An ‘art of encounter’, combining the twin ‘movements’ of ‘resistance’ to, and ‘endurance’ of, oppression – and knowing when to deploy one, and when the other;
• An ‘art of care’ - a ‘commitment, devotion and love’ not just for their own children and ‘the lovers in their lives’, but also ‘for their extended families, for their communities and for their churches’;
• and an ‘art of connecting’ - with the right people, and ‘the relevant social, political and religious structures’, that could improve the well-being of African-American women, men and children, educationally, politically and spiritually. (Sisters in the Wilderness, pp.236-8)

There are resonances here, for me, with MacKinnon & Derickson's conception of 'resourcefulness', but while that concept is targeted - with considerable effectiveness - towards questioning the distribution of resources, Williams' interconnected 'arts' do much better, I would suggest, at being explicitly relational, dynamic and contextual. They name the tension between 'endurance' and 'resistance', and they quite deliberately 'connect' into the larger structures of power.

'Distancing' and 'being liked'

Evans & Reid, discussing the cultural and political representations of American life post-9/11, point to another alternative to the governing discourses of vulnerability and resilience, encapuslated in Thomas Hoepker's photograph 'of people in Brooklyn relaxing and enjoying life against the backdrop of the attacks' on the twin towers.

The image, they suggest:

'unsettl[es] the dominant aesthetic dialectic of initial vulnerability and subsequent resilience. Instead, it depicts a perfectly normal state of affairs that was permitted by a certain distancing from the action. Indeed, as it emphasises, proximity alone offers no such guarantees for the constitution of a shared sense of experience. Many were far more deeply traumatised by viewing the unfolding of events thousands of miles away on televised screens than the subjects in Hoepker's frame.' (Evans & Reid, p.88)

Reading this, I hear more than incidental echoes of a reflective piece by Girardian theologian James Alison in the wake of 9/11, 'Contemplation in a world of violence' (Chapter 1 of Alison's brilliant On Being Liked).

Alison describes the way what was an essentially meaningless act -  'some brothers of ours committed simple acts of suicide with significant collateral murder, meaning nothing at all' - became a spectacle endowed with huge symbolic power, because of where it was (the World Trade Centre in New York), and because it was already under the spotlight of 'rolling cameras and a hugely powerful media network'. 'There took hold of an enormous number of us a feeling of being pulled in, being somehow involved, as though it was part of our lives.' Alison names the outbreak of unanimity in grief, and a fear 'not unrelated to excitement', and a sense in which '[w]e were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity.' (pp.5-6)

In a quite stunning reading of the Gospel of Mark's so-called 'apocalypse' (Mark 13), Alison argues that Jesus is seeking to wean his hearers away from the seduction of, and addiction to, 'the apparently sacred world of apocalyptic meaning', the world of 'wars and rumours of wars', where 'order [is] based on sacrifice'. He instructs them, says Alison, 'not to allow themselves to be pulled by their desire' or their fear, into that 'world which others will want to create'. He warns too of the inevitable violence from that 'order' against those who 'break the unanimity which is demanded' by it. (p.10)

Jesus talks of, and lives out, 'a quite different power coming, scarcely noticeably, in the midst of all those things', 'a creative acting out and living so-as-to-lose to the sacrificial game in order to undo it' - a power which reveals us human beings 'categorised' as nothing else other than 'created', which means, in Alison's terms, 'liked spaciously, delighted in, wanted to give extension, fulfillment, fruition to, to share in just being'. 'In the midst of the false manufacturing of meaning and frightening power displayed by the satanic [Alison uses the term quite technically for the kind of 'fascination' or 'addiction' he describes above], we are being taught that our being liked and held in being is at the hands of something infinitely more powerful, infinitely restful, and we can live without fear.' (pp.13-16)

'Personally,' Alison concludes, 'the strongest feeling I have had over the last few months is the quite unexpected discovery that I am no longer frightened of Muslims, and that I like them, and that this is only the beginning of discovering what it will mean to rejoice in them and see them as part of an "us". Is this not the deepest act of treachery against the satanic order which was turned on in a part of all our minds and hearts by the events of 11 September 2001? And where on earth will it end?' (p.16)

Why have I spent considerable space here dwelling on this 'reading together' of the events of 9/11 and one of the weirder chapters of Mark's gospel? What Alison does, in a significantly deeper - and obviously more explicitly 'traditioned' - way than Evans & Reid's interpretation of Hoepker's photo, is point a way out of the captivity to the all-consuming 'unavoidable vulnerability - necessary resilience' narrative of Ulrich Beck's 'risk society'. Neither Alison nor Hoepker deny the tragic realities of death and violence where they happen, nor do they seek to freeze our instincts to compassion for those who are suffering, but they do seek to remove us from the kinds of manufactured fascination that insist 'There Is No Alternative', and demand only resilience, and not resistance, from those who the system ensures remain the most vulnerable.

What emerges, between Hoepker and Alison, is a kind of 'distancing' that functions as almost as an ironic opposite to the rich and powerful's 'gated communities' - a joie de vivre, not without compassion, but which rejects the fear-inducing 'securitisation' stories which seek to divide people from one another. It embodies the particular kind of 'indifference' that, in Pete Rollins' terms (which I've explored previously), rejects the 'token gestures' and the 'perverse protests' (which can enable us to feel like rebels for a while, but often turn out to be simply 'release valves in the system, opportunities for people to resist in a way that [is] ultimately authorized by those in control') in favour of 'insurrection', simply 'living a different life', building something new in the shell of the old, 'changing the system by ignoring it'.

Can 'resilience' be redeemed?

The critiques of 'resilience' language from Evans & Reid and MacKinnon & Derickson hit their nails squarely on the heads. But as with any word, it is the context and associations within which the word finds itself that create the parameters of its meaning. 'Good' words will always be co-opted and distorted - and that should not simply drive us to find a different word (as exactly the same dangers will still apply), but to work on the connections and webs of meaning which surround the words we use.

The core of Evans & Reid's argument was that the way resilience rhetoric has been deployed, functions to disable resistance among the most 'vulnerable' at the same time as it effectively removes the social bonds between the endlessly vulnerable and 'those who have the ability to secure themselves'. This 'containment' of the 'vulnerable', and indeed of the 'powerful' too, in their own forms of high-security prison, and their physical, relational and psychological segregation from each other, are echoed in MacKinnon & Derickson's critique discussed above - that the spatial scales of 'the local' and 'the city' are isolated from wider spatial relations which produce and reproduce unequal distributions of power and resources.

While the engaged 'arts' of 'resourcefulness' proposed by MacKinnon & Derickson, and fleshed out by Delores Williams, ironically it might be in the kind of 'imaginative distancing' which emerges from Hoepker's photo and Alison's exegesis, I suggest, that 'resilience' language could be 'redeemed'. It is a very specific kind of distancing, as we have seen: from the 'sacred centres' of power which generate the discourse of the unavoidable necessity of both 'vulnerability' and 'resilience', and perpetuate and deepen inequalities and segregations.

In Hoepker's photo, we witness an outbreak of what Ivan Illich calls 'conviviality', a distinctly embodied, attentive, face-to-face enjoyment of the company and friendships of other human beings in a way that resists, or better is outside the grip of, the technocratic, instrumentalizing drives of the systems and power structures of the modern world. Conviviality has a scale, a pace, limits that are appropriate to the kind of activity it encompasses - but limits which create thresholds for hospitality. As such it resonates closely with the more positive, grassroots uses of 'resilience' language - but at the same time refuses to be commanded, co-opted or corrupted by governments and the powers of global capital. If for some the word has resonances of exclusive champagne dinner parties, it refuses to be so confined, and is in fact alive and well in low-income neighbourhoods, resisting and ridiculing the stark choice offered within the governing language between 'hard-working' or destitution. It is not a 'means' to any 'end' other than itself, it cannot be the focus of any 'strategy' - and yet, at its carnivalesque best, it is infectious, catching, overflowing the local and disrupting the established systems and regimes of 'order' at national and international scales too. The ripples of the 'Occupy' movement and its 'politics of recognition', for example, have been felt far beyond the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, or the railings of Zuccotti Park.

'Learning how to die'

In Alison's more explicitly theological 'distancing' too, we witness a particular kind of breaking down of 'containment' into what we might call 'overflow': attentiveness not to the spectacle, but to the human faces obscured by it, in the context of the infinitely more powerful and yet infinitely gentle 'liking' of creation by God, enables the discovery, and the 'living-into', of an inclusive 'us' which - as he puts it - is 'treachery' against the established order of 'us and them'. Evans & Reid, following Cornel West, seek to liberate the 'resilient subjects' from their imprisonment by inviting them to 'give up the prospect of self-renewal' and 'learn how to die', 'turning your world upside-down' in the process and 'actually liv[ing] more intensely and critically and abundantly' (Evans & Reid, p.97). It is inescapably theological language, which Alison would ground in the very particular death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth ('a creative acting out and living so-as-to-lose to the sacrificial game in order to undo it'), and to which fellow-theologian David Ford brings a particular clarity:

“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)

Perhaps, after all, resilience language does need to be jettisoned. Conviviality, as Illich describes it, turns out to be a very particular form of 'being overwhelmed' - a form which, within Ford's theological ecology, includes 'facing' and 'feasting', singing and dancing, thanking and lamenting, and more. From a very particular kind of vulnerability comes an 'overflow' of both joy and responsibility which cannot be contained by locality, ghettoed or gated communities, or structures which perpetuate inequalities. At the same time both liberating to 'live outside' the system, and liberating to engage with and resist the system as it is, it allows us to recover, among other things, a utopian imagination of the kind that Thomas Moore envisioned: 'a site of human togetherness and shared access to resources' (Evans & Reid, p.97).

We are being invited, I suggest, to engage in the practice what feminist theologian Sarah Coakley describes as a kind of receptiveness or 'contemplation'. When it keeps silence, it is certainly not being silenced: rather, she says, 'it is the voluntary silence of attention, transformation, mysterious interconnection, and (in violent, abusive, or oppressive contexts) rightful and divinely empowered resistance: it is a special "power-in-vulnerability"... Contemplation engenders courage to give voice, but in a changed, prophetic key' (Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the self: an essay 'on the Trinity', pp.84-85).

And that voice, as founder of community organising Saul Alinsky knew well, depends on a receptiveness to discovering a utopian imagination, and a freedom to start living it into reality, before our acts of resistance to the injustices of 'the world as it is' can be more than simply 'perverse protest'. We need to deliberately shape our political actions, Alinsky would insist, 'simultaneously to declare the unjust way to be untrue and to present a possible alternative through which all may flourish.' There has to be 'a constructive alternative', argues Luke Bretherton, such that 'the declaration of a "No" to something is always premised on the prior celebration and upholding of a "Yes" to another way, a way in which both oppressor and oppressed are invited to participate' (Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics, p.79). In other words, conviviality and resistance - both rooted in but overflowing the local - go hand in hand.

'Community Resilience' & its dangers

For the past 3 years or so, I've been playing around with the concept of 'community resilience' and its value for neighbourhoods like my own.

It's 'hot' language at the moment, popping up all over the place, from papers emerging from thinktanks, like DEMOS' Resilient Nation, and the much more 'earthed' and practical examination by the Carnegie Trust of resilience in rural communities, to policy documents published by the UK's 'Risk & Regulation Advisory Council' and the United Nations Development Programme. It's also fed - and this should ring a warning bell or two - by trends in philosophy (a shift from dealing in utopian ideals to a philosophical realism needed for 'coping in an intractable world'), politics (a 'localist' focus on 'what communities can do for themselves') and economics (what you can do when, so we're told, there's 'no money' for the kind of - supposedly - 'transformative' investment in 'community regeneration' that went on a couple of decades ago).

'Community resilience', in short, is about the 'personal and collective capacities' to survive and thrive in a world that is rapidly changing, unpredictable, and, in many different ways - from climate change to terrorism, from epidemics to austerity - potentially or actually hostile. It focuses on the 'assets', 'capitals' or 'resources' of local communities; it emphasises the positive 'agency' within communities in response to disruption and change; and, as a 'science', treats communities as complex, multi-levelled 'systems' including, in its broadest formulations, the ecosystems within which human communities are embedded.

In fact, the roots of 'resilience thinking' lie in engineering (how materials 'bounce back' from shocks, and resist under pressure), in social psychology (how individuals survive and thrive through, and after, stressing and traumatic life experiences), and in ecology and 'environmental management' (often deploying sophisticated mathematical modelling of a system's 'capacity to absorb disturbance and still behave in the same way').

There's a lot to commend a 'resilience' approach to communities:

•  The systems approach of CR relates individuals and households, to the community itself, to the wider environment, in a complex and ongoing interaction
• CR encourages an honesty about the potential ‘hostilities’ of the wider environment – particularly in the present time of international economic turbulence, severe government cuts, and global climate change
• CR describes a neighbourhood not just in terms of its ‘indices of deprivation’, but pushes towards ‘a fuller understanding of the collective history of [an area]’ (including ‘how they have been affected by previous economic decline, the impact of in-migration, their connectivity to any remaining sources of jobs’)
• CR’s positive, ‘asset’-focused approach, in contrast to prevailing ‘deficit’ models, values ‘what is’ in a neighbourhood, including the skills and gifts of local people
• Rather than a ‘top-down’, ‘professionalised’ approach that encourages ‘passivity’ and ‘dependency’ among local people, CR looks for, encourages, and focuses on agency and participation by local people – and brings individuals’ stories of resilience into the discussion of the community level
• As a move away from ‘regeneration’ language, CR makes it clear that communities can not be ‘made better’ simply by investing large amounts of money
• CR is interested in more than ‘coping’ or ‘stability’, but in ‘flourishing’, often ‘despite extraordinarily tough experiences and environments'

But there is what one author has called a 'dark side' to community resilience, that I'm finding more and more troubling.

One aspect of this 'dark side' lies in what 'resilience' is often defined 'against': 'vulnerability'. The working assumption is that communities find themselves in a potentially - and often, actually - hostile environment, and that resilience is about reducing a community's 'vulnerabilities' to 'a broad spectrum of risks' (as the DEMOS report puts it), including 'threats like terrorism and organised crime', 'hazards such as flooding, heat waves and snow storms' and 'major accidents' such as the King's Cross fire. But, as Ulrich Beck has repeatedly reminded us, the general fear and anxiety of a 'risk society' allow some, in the 'security business', to profit. Risk 'is not synonymous with catastrophe. Risk means the anticipation of the catastrophe', and as such, shapes our imagination in a way that 'becomes a political force that transforms the world'. Who decides what is and is not a risk, and why should we believe what they tell us?

There is more to it than that, though, and it emerges from community resilience's origins in ecology. Resilient systems, the scientists, tell us, are those which have a level of diversity, modularity (where 'subgroups of components are strongly linked internally, but only loosely connected to each other') and tight - but not too tight - feedback loops (where 'the consequences of a change in one part of the system are felt and responded to in other parts'). There is much to learn from the science of resilience - for example, about decentralizing control within institutions and networks; an increased awareness in the developed world of the consequences of our actions in the developing world; and the vulnerabilities built in to the dependence of a town or estate on one supermarket's supply chain (and the 'efficiencies of scale' that it promises), contrasted with everyone growing their own fruit and vegetables and sharing between them. There is an element of redundancy in resilient systems (the exact opposite of 'optimised efficiency', in fact), a more-than-optimal 'surplus', which enables an 'adaptability so that life may go on living despite the fact that elements of our living systems may be destroyed'. Such 'redundancy' is not tragic when it relates to supply chains or a garden's vegetable crop - we can probably cope if the cabbages don't appear this time - but what does 'redundancy' - the tolerable loss of certain 'elements' of the system - mean when applied to a neighbourhood? Is community life to simply 'go on' as the lives of some community members are destroyed? As some human beings within the neighbourhood are ground down, pushed out, broken?

Of course this is never explicitly said when 'community resilience' is invoked, but the question must be asked: where is the 'cost' of resilience to be absorbed? The question is sharpened when the focus is widened beyond an individual neighbourhood to the society of which it is a part. When a government advocates 'community resilience', is it, in fact, demanding it of those deemed most 'vulnerable', and insisting that their vulnerability is an inescapable part of their condition? Resilience rhetoric has as its target 'the insecuritisation of the most at-risk which politically threatens the security and comforts of those who are sufficiently protected' [Brad Evans & Julian Reid, 'Dangerously exposed: the life and death of the resilient subject', Resilience (2013) 1:2, pp.83-98] and, at the same time, places the responsibility for 'resilience' squarely on the 'at-risk' themselves. As Zygmunt Bauman sharply puts it, '[l]eft increasingly to their own resources and acumen, individuals are expected to devise individual solutions to socially generated problems, and to do it individually, using their individual skills and individually possessed assets.' [Bauman, Collateral Damage, p.17] For 'individual' read 'or communal', and we get close to the heart of the problem of 'community resilience' rhetoric.

What we're witnessing here is, as Brad Evans and Julian Reid argue, neoliberalism's 'politically debasing reduction of resistance to resilience': '[b]uilding resilient subjects involves the deliberate disabling of the political habits, tendencies and capacities of peoples and replacing them with adaptive ones.'

'To increase its resilience, in other words, the subject must disavow any belief in the possibility to secure itself and accept, instead, an understanding of life as a permanent process of continual adaptation to threats and dangers which are said to be outside its control. As such, the resilient subject is a subject which must permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world, and not a subject which can conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility.' [Evans & Reid, p.85]

If resilience rhetoric functions to disable resistance among the most 'vulnerable', at the same time it effectively removes the social bonds between the endlessly vulnerable and 'those who have the ability to secure themselves', creating gated communities for some, who are able to 'outsource the need to be resilient to other elements within the gated system ranging from barbed fences, physical walls, surveillance technologies, catastrophe-proofed architectures, insurance premiums to armed guards patrolling the perimeters.' [Evans & Reid, pp.96-7]

Is 'community resilience' redeemable? Is it a concept even worth trying to redeem? Is it possible to highlight and strengthen a local community's social - and other forms of - capital, while at the same time building, and not disabling, its collective capacity for political - even utopian - imagination and active resistance to the structures of the status quo? These are the questions for next time...

Waiting for dawn to break (Midnight Mass sermon 2013)

[a bit of a rough and ready draft, with deep gratitude to Julian Dobson, whose brilliant blogpost ‘A truce and a common: a Christmas story’ (http://livingwithrats.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/a-truce-and-common-christmas-story.html) helped both shape and 'earth' my more disparate thoughts]

The rabbi asked his students: “How can we determine the hour of the dawn, when the night ends and the day begins?” One of the students suggested: “When from a distance you can see the difference between a dog and a sheep?” “No,” answered the rabbi. “Is it when you can tell the difference between a fig tree and a grapevine?” asked a second student. “No,” the rabbi said. “Please tell us the answer then,” said the students. “It is dawn,” said the wise teacher, “when you look into the face of another human being and you have enough light in you to recognize your brother or sister. Until then it is night, and darkness is still with us.”

Two years ago, in the middle of this church, a tent appeared, just before Advent, with a sign over its opening, ‘Welcome to the Kingdom of God’. It was a sign of revolutionary hope, at a time when tents were springing up all over the place, from Egypt’s Tahrir Square, to Wall Street and the City of London – canvas occupations of places the powerful thought they had under control; places where, all of a sudden, the hungry were being fed, all who were sick were being treated, the voiceless were being heard, impossible dreams were being dreamed.

But then, what? What has changed? A question echoing down the years not just from 2011, but from two millennia before. “Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong.” What has changed?

In the House of Commons last week, government ministers and their colleagues laughed and jeered, or just didn’t bother turning up, for a debate on the causes of the spiralling increase in foodbank use, and then within days launched vicious attacks on the Trussell Trust, Church Action on Poverty, and others for daring to ask why people are going hungry in one of the richest nations in the world.

Less reported, for the first time this Christmas, people in prison have been banned from receiving parcels from their loved ones, including stationery, books, and clothes – under new rules introduced by the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling.

And then are stories which won’t reach the newspapers at all, of men and women, young and old, stripped of even their pittance of jobseeker’s allowance over Christmas, for reasons as arbitrary and as unjust as not being able to attend the JobCentre because of a hospitalising illness.[i]

It is still night, and darkness is still with us. There is not enough light, it seems, to look into the faces of our fellow human beings and recognise them as our sisters and brothers. We are still too immersed in our own ideologies, our own self-interests, our own agendas, to hear the love-song the angels bring.

And yet...

In a Mexican slum there is a destitute old woman who each year puts up an extensive nativity set. The Christ Child is in the centre, of course, and around him she places dozens and dozens of figures of people and animals. This is no matched set! None of the figurines match; and they are not in scale with each other, some only an inch high, some several feet tall. She just clutters the set with whatever figurines she can find. But there is a great truth hidden in this mish-mash of nativity characters. Although the senora cannot read or write, she has seen something that is all too easily missed. In the Bethlehem stable, there is room for all. From the highest to the lowest, from king to shepherd, from old woman to new born baby.

On one level, it is merely a chaotic, mismatching nativity set. An eccentric tradition. A futile gesture. But on another level, it ‘prefigures’ a different world, a place where ‘what-is-not-yet’ breaks in to ‘what-is’. Just like the alternative spaces that Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London Stock Exchange, and many more, created. However fragile, however temporary, however imperfect. Places in which to practice living differently. Places where we can learn to recognise each other as sisters and brothers.[ii]

The pictures of Rembrandt are striking in many ways, but perhaps most so for the way he uses light and shade. Have a look at his picture of the Nativity. There is a man with a lamp, but the stable is not lit by the lamp. The light comes from the manger, the light from the newborn Jesus lights up the faces of those around him, enabling us to see them, and enabling them to see each other.[iii] This is where night ends, and dawn begins. In the stable. In the manger.

On the day of Nelson Mandela’s funeral, I led a small, quiet Requiem Mass in this church. I was accompanied by five men, as they remembered the uncle of one of them, who had recently died. They came from five different African countries, countries which have, at times, been at war with each other. Congo, Burundi, South Sudan, and others. And as we remembered those who had died, and shared bread and wine together, we recalled the words Archbishop Rowan Williams had used recently to describe Nelson Mandela:

“Most politicians,” he said, “represent an interest group, a community of people who vote for them and whose interests they serve. Nelson Mandela was different; he represented a community that did not yet exist, a community he hoped would come into being.”

‘Prefiguring’ a different world, a place where ‘what-is-not-yet’ breaks in to ‘what-is’. A place not fully a reality in today’s South Africa, by any means. But a place glimpsed, touched, tasted.

And I was reminded too of the words of another Archbishop, Christoph Munizihirwa, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bukavu, Zaire, who was killed by Rwandan soldiers in the process of surrendering himself, in the hope that two companions might be able to escape in his car:

“One cannot wait for conditions to be easy in order to act,” said Archbishop Munzihirwa, not long before his death. “People of good will must never be disheartened... There are things that can be seen only with eyes that have cried... In the midst of it all, the seed sown in the soil of our heart slowly germinates. God knows that there is no better way for him to express himself than through the weakness of a child. This is love telling us that it comes unarmed.”

The seed in the soil. The light in the stable. The tent in the city square. The nativity scene in the slum. The prisoner who forgives his enemies. The martyred Archbishop. The child in the manger. These are the small, fragile beginnings of revolution. And those in power do not like them one bit. And so they send armed police in to clear the tents. They attack churches and faith organisations for ‘scaremongering’, and, bizarrely, for creating the demand for food banks in the first place. And a threatened king in Jerusalem orders the massacre of all Bethlehem’s babies.

And what do we do? We keep on beginning the revolution. Returning to the stable. Planting new seeds. Putting up new tents. Forgiving new enemies. Hearing to speech as-yet-unheard voices.

There is a place not far from Reading in Berkshire called ‘Christmas Common’. It is the site, according to the history books, of a Christmas truce in 1643 during the English Civil War. A dangerous, if fleeting, moment of daring to recognise enemies as brothers or sisters, even in the darkness of the battlefield. But Commons like Christmas Common – and perhaps even a Common much closer to home – are also enduring places of shared resource, open to and cared for a whole community, places where ‘commoners’ of all backgrounds and circumstances can meet each other as equals, as neighbours, as sisters and brothers, and work, and play, and eat, and celebrate together.[iv] We have a dream for just such a common in the wasteland we’ve renamed ‘Bromford Meadow’. A seed sown in the soil, slowly germinating.

Our twice-weekly 'Open Door' is another such space where 'what-is-not-yet' breaks in to 'what-is'. It is what it says: an open door. And a warm welcome, a hot cup of tea, some friendly faces, and listening ears. A place where people might come in with 'I need', but discover among friends an 'I can', perhaps for the first time.

We get a taste of ‘what-is-not-yet’, too, every time we share communion together, whether it’s shared in a circle, where we can see the faces of our sisters and brothers; or shared in a moment together, each waiting to eat until all present have food in their hands – our own small ‘prefiguring’ of the time when no one goes hungry.

In 1990, the year that Nelson Mandela made his ‘long walk to freedom’, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (who also died this year) was translating a Greek epic telling the story of the Trojan War. It gave him some of his most well-quoted words. They are words for a night like this, as we celebrate once again the Word-made-flesh, and as we wait for dawn to break:

“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme” 

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[i] I’m deeply grateful to Julian Dobson for highlighting these 3 examples in his brilliant blog post, ‘A truce and a common: a Christmas story’ (http://livingwithrats.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/a-truce-and-common-christmas-story.html)

[ii] See e.g. reflections on Occupy’s politics of ‘mutual recognition’ http://www.opendemocracy.net/participation-now/rc-smith-richard-gunn-adrian-wilding/alternative-horizons-understanding-occupys-po

[iii] E.g. http://my.opera.com/Anvui/albums/showpic.dml?album=5055882&picture=76437382

[iv] Julian Dobson, ‘A truce and a common: a Christmas story’