‘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]

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.

Benefit caps, the housing market, and Jesus

Of course, common sense says it’s crazy that someone can be on benefit payments of more than £26,000 a year. The trouble is, common sense gets a lot wrong.

Firstly, let’s get these in perspective. As Andrew Simms put it so well yesterday, they’re really small beans compared to city bonuses – with 1,200 senior staff averaging £1.8million in bonuses each last year. Where should we really be expended heat and light on ‘capping’ debates, hey? But blaming the victims of economic crisis is so much easier than blaming the perpetrators, isn’t it?

But as I understand it, one of the principle reasons for these rare, highest-level benefits payments is that people who were once in social housing have ended up (through policies of previous governments, both Labour and Conservative) in private rented accommodation. And the areas that they may have lived in all their life have, through ‘market forces’, found house prices (and rental prices) driven sky high. And a debate that began with the proposed housing benefit cap in November 2010 continues. For David Cameron and his mates, apparently the solution is simple: the poor should move out of expensive areas. Social – and often inevitably ethnic – cleansing.

All very convenient. An economic crisis caused by the rich, in which the rich still end up getting richer, targets the poor, slashes and burns the benefits safety net, and tells the poorest that they have no right to live near rich people anyway. Demonising, marginalising, displacing, disappearing. Out of sight, out of mind – as well as out of public finances, out of pocket, out of long-standing homes and communities…

So maybe benefit payments of £26,000 are crazy. But what’s the root of the madness? It’s easy to pile blame on ‘indolent’ individuals – and again, very convenient, so that we don’t ask questions about the system itself. But what is the morality of a ‘market’ that allows house prices to sky-rocket in areas that, thanks to the choices of the rich, have become ‘desirable’, pushing out the non-rich in the process? If instead we valued stability and diversity of relationships and community; if we genuinely believed in knowing, and loving, our neighbours (and not just those who look, and sound, and earn, like us); then we would turn our attention to ensuring a mixed economy of housing provision, outside or beyond the socially destructive forces of the ‘free market’. Housing affordable for all, where rich and poor can live side-by-side, and where, as neighbours begin to look into each other’s faces, even those inequalities of wealth begin to break down.

Jesus’ parable, the one about ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’, doesn’t end well for the rich man. And it’ll be no use blaming the poor, or the market, then…

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. ‘Rights’ and the housing market

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

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

2. Mobility vs. Stability

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

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

3. “We need these people”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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