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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shifting the Focus

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

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

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

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

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

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

A different response: CHILDREN

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

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

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

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

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

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

A different response: 'COMMUNITY'

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

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

A different response: BEING HUMAN

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

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

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

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

A different response: 'SUSTAINABILITY'

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are these working out in Hodge Hill?

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

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

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

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

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

4. Being overwhelmed by THIS PLACE, THESE PEOPLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A first response: 'SUSTAINABILITY'

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

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

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

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

A first response: 'COMMUNITY'

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

A first response: 'BEING HUMAN'

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

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

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

These contributions are made through:

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

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

A first response: CHILDREN

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children, Community & Sustainability in tough times

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

I've uploaded the slides from my presentation here.

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

Our Community Passion Play

Phil Howkins is one of those people who’s very hard to say No to. His enthusiasm (and he’s got bucket-loads of it) is infectious, and you very easily find yourself getting drawn into his latest big idea. Phil was one of our ‘Unsung Heroes’ at the awards ceremony we organised a year ago. When we asked him at the time ‘if you could find 2 or 3 neighbours to join you, what would you start in your neighbourhood?’, Phil talked about his passion to start a Theatre Group on the Firs & Bromford estates. Not black tie trips into Birmingham to see Shakespeare at The Rep, but local people getting together to put on theatrical productions here, on the estate, for local people to enjoy.

With some support from our ‘Unsung Heroes’ fund, as well as some funding from Star People (which helps local entrepreneurs try out, set up and build their own businesses), Phil got a group together to put on a panto, Aladdin, in the Bromford Community Centre, just before Christmas. Our very own Paul Wright from The Hub was a very colourful genie, and Tim Evans (variously known as local Councillor and Iona’s Dad) was the sinister Abanazer. It was a great show, loads of fun, and you could tell how much many of those taking part had grown in confidence in the process.

But before the panto had even happened, Phil had started thinking about the next project. A number of us from church were in a meeting one day when Phil came out with it: ‘I want to put on a Community Passion Play’. Brilliant idea, we all said. ‘Will you join me?’ he asked. Of course we would, we said. And so just before Christmas, Phil was round my house one evening, asking me to tell him the Passion story as I saw it – and went away laden with books from my shelves, different translations and re-tellings of the gospel stories.

He did his homework over Christmas, and in January we set down again, he dictated the script, and I typed it up on my laptop. We got some funding through Near Neighbours, which has helped us pay for a real donkey, some publicity, and a film crew who will capture it on the day and turn it into a DVD to give to local schools. We began to recruit a cast (local residents from the estate, people from church, and many of us who are both). We asked the Firs & Bromford Women’s Group (mostly Muslim women, who were delighted to be asked) if they would provide food for ‘the crowd’ at ‘the Last Supper’. And we walked through the estate to find good scenes for the drama: the Jerusalem Temple (St Wilfrid’s RC Church steps), the Last Supper (a green ‘square’ just at the bottom of Berrandale Road), the Garden of Gethsemane (into the ‘wasteland’ that once had tower blocks, between Newport Road and the M6), Pilate’s Palace (a disused substation), and finally Golgotha, the place of crucifixion (just under the towering pillars of the M6 itself). 

When it all comes together on Palm Sunday afternoon, Sunday 24^th March, 3pm, it will probably be a bit chaotic, a bit ‘unfinished’ – but it will be full of passion, and it will be ‘earthed’ in the day-to-day reality of the place in which many of us live. It will, in other words, be ‘the Gospel according to Us’ (as a recent passion play in Port Talbot, starring Martin Sheen, was titled).

If we as a church had decided to do ‘a Community Passion Play’, we would no doubt have thrown ourselves into it, and might well have been able to persuade some of our neighbours to come along and watch. The fact that we have been invited, by one of our neighbours and friends, to become part of his ‘big idea’, to journey with him as he explores and unfolds and re-tells the story, is a gift beyond measure. With ‘Unsung Heroes’ – when we were seeking out people of compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope – we were deliberately trying to ‘look for what God was doing in our neighbourhood, and joining in with it’. With the Firs & Bromford Community Passion Play, we are being invited to step into our most treasured story, afresh, and to discover it living and breathing at the heart of our local community, as strangers and neighbours become friends, and God’s footsteps are followed down our street.

Making sense of 'mission', Hodge Hill style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Open wide your hearts’– ‘broken’ neighbourhoods, ‘troubled’ families, poverty… and a different story…?

A lot of stories are told about areas like ours. The Daily Mail labelled us last year the seventh most ‘workshy’ community in England (based on proportion of working-age residents claiming some kind of state benefits). As an area with a concentration of social housing, we have been branded by some policy-shapers a ‘broken neighbourhood’, in which ‘both a dependency culture and a culture of entitlement predominate’. And most recently, neighbours of mine have been described by David Cameron as ‘troubled families’, ‘neighbours from hell’, ‘the source of a large proportion of the problems in society’. This last bit of labelling, it turns out, has been applied to 120,000 families around the country who tick at least 5 of the following boxes:

• no parent in work
• poor quality housing
• no parent with qualifications
• mother with mental health problems
• one parent with long standing disability / illness
• family has low income
• family cannot afford some food / clothing items

As Jonathan Portes has clearly highlighted, ‘[w]hat instantly leaps out from this list … is that none of these criteria, in themselves, have anything at all to do with disruption, irresponsibility, or crime…’ These ‘troubled families’ are ‘not necessarily “neighbours from hell” at all. They are poor.’

The trouble is, ‘poverty’ itself is a term used by academics and professionals – and politicians. Again, it is a story of ‘them’, rather than of ‘us’. It may be the language of calmer heads and more cautious vocabularies than those of the Daily Mail and the current government, it may well ground itself in ‘hard facts’, like ‘indices of deprivation’, and painstaking ‘needs analysis’. But it is still a choice to tell a particular kind of story. A story of ‘needs’, ‘lacks’, ‘deprivation’ – of ‘what isn’t’.

It’s a story I’ve often told myself, and so have many of my neighbours. Many round here will talk about there being ‘nothing here’, or tell stories of an area that has ‘gone downhill’, and of being ‘ignored’ and ‘let down’, again and again over the years. The trouble is, when we collude with those in power who tell such stories of us, stories of ‘lack’ and ‘absence’, of ‘trouble’ and ‘brokenness’, we tacitly reinforce the story – external and internal – that we are less than capable, less than adequate, less than human. This ‘deficit’ story does little but encourage dependence (on those who are clearly more capable than us – the professionals, the politicians), and collude with the pathologising and stigmatising that would happily isolate us from apparently ‘unbroken’ society, and blame us for any and every social problem you can think of.

In recent months I’ve been digging into the theory and practice of ‘community resilience’. You could say it’s what ‘community regeneration’ has become, now the money’s run out, and the idea of neighbourhood transformation has been kicked into cloud cuckoo land. You could say it’s a convenient move by government that wants to abandon deprived neighbourhoods to sink or swim on their own. But both of these would be to give in to cynicism too quickly. The key ideas of ‘community resilience’ are:

• CR understands communities as complex, dynamic ‘systems’, affected by, and responsive to, their wider environments;
• CR is interested in the whole breadth of possible responses to disruption, change, and day-to-day pressure, from ‘survival’ to ‘adaptation’ to ‘transformation’;
• CR looks not for the pathologies and lacks of a community, but for its ‘resources’, its ‘assets’ or ‘capitals’, its ‘capabilities’ – for what it has, not what it hasn’t.

Community Resilience invites us to tell a different story about neighbourhoods like ours. While our ‘indices of deprivation’ may be high, and our ‘financial capital’ may be pretty low, CR points us towards other kinds of ‘capital’ that we might well have more of: ‘natural’, ‘human’, ‘cultural’, ‘built’, ‘political’, and ‘social’ capitals.

Of course, it may be that even expanding the range of what counts as ‘community capital’ doesn’t change the story significantly. In the midst of maisonettes and tower blocks, hemmed in by the M6 and overshadowed by the Birmingham Airport flight-path, with few local associations and voluntary organisations, and a feeling of remoteness from those in power, quite a few of those other ‘capitals’ might look pretty depleted here too.

But there remains a choice. There is still a different story that can be told, if only we have the imagination and willingness to tell it.

That ‘different story’ is one that begins with local people – not just some local people, but all local people; not just ‘able’ adults, but the oldest of the ‘elderly’ and the youngest of the children, and those who live with disabilities and ‘life-limiting illness’ too. And the story is this: that each and every person who lives on this estate has gifts, and gifts that can be shared, if only we have the imagination and courage to create the opportunities. Gifts of heart – the passions, the things we care most about. Gifts of head – knowledge, experience, wisdom, learning. And gifts of hands – practical abilities, things that ‘we can do’, to make, maintain and mend.

The ‘art’ of telling, and living, this different story, is the art of connection. It’s the art of drawing out people’s gifts, and of linking people up with each other to enable those gifts to be released into the community. It’s the art of seeing the possible connections between a derelict waste-land, a passionate gardener, and a young woman diagnosed by her doctor with ‘mental health problems’ who’s desperate to get out of her flat, get some fresh air, and do something with her hands.

There’s a nice bit of technical jargon for this different way of telling and living the story of a neighbourhood. It’s called ‘Asset-Based Community Development’ (see e.g. John McKnight & Peter Block, The Abundant Community: Awakening the power of families and neighbourhoods). It’s not rocket science, but it does demand a choice, to inhabit a different kind of mindset to the familiar, the easy, the ‘default’ story.

But it has other names too. In the Christian tradition, it’s often called ‘gratitude’. It’s the practice of seeing, and receiving, as gifts those things which might not obviously seem to be gifts. It’s the conscious, intentional, sometimes painstaking, practice of recognising gifts, opening ourselves to them, allowing our hearts to be enlarged by them, and responding to them with something more – something that exceeds attempts at ‘repayment’, exceeds what we think we ‘owe’, exceeds what we believe is our ‘duty’ with something that looks more like ‘joy’. We might say ‘thank you’ because we know we ought to – but as a practice, gratitude is learning to turn that ‘thank you’ into infectious enjoyment.

Another name for it is ‘over-acceptance’. I’ve written here before about improvisation theory:

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

But there’s a pretty crucial objection to these attempts to ‘change the story’. It’s that all this talk of ‘gifts’ distracts from, or masks, the injustice, the marginalization, the abuse dealt out to communities like ours. Is it really as simple as choosing the ‘glass half full’ story over the ‘glass half empty’ version?

I’m grateful to Ann Morisy, one of my deeply wise, deeply practical theological heroes, for pointing me in the right direction here. She talks about her suspicion of ‘poverty’ as the key, organizing concept to describe people and neighbourhoods. Instead, she points us to David Ford’s language of ‘multiple overwhelmings’ (in The Shape of Living). While such overwhelmings in our lives, Ford suggests, can often be positive (think of beauty and joy, for example), Morisy is thinking particularly of the kind of ‘overwhelmings’ that are negative, the kind of ‘common traumas’ that diminish people, ground people down – poverty, yes, but also insecurity, overload, anxiety, inadequacy, hopelessness…

Ford could be seen as a ‘resilience thinker’: he acknowledges the complexity of life’s overwhelmings, and cautions against ‘the simple solution’ that seeks to ‘tackle head-on one form of overwhelming while ignoring the others’. ‘[T]he consequences of multiple overwhelming create more intensive overwhelming... The personal and the political interact, so do the local and the global, the economic and the cultural. It is like a vast, multi-levelled ecology in which everything is somehow related to everything else.’

We might well ask how people cope – how is resilience nurtured and sustained – in the midst of ‘multiple overwhelmings’. But Ford is not just interested in ‘coping’. He advocates a very particular kind of ‘openness’. We can respond to being overwhelmed, he says, by ‘naming it’ (bringing the overwhelming into language), and ‘describing it’ (drawing on Scripture, poetry, and other sources to do justice to the complexity of the overwhelming, and to help us find common ground in our experience with that of other people). With people who are in the grip of ‘multiple overwhelmings’, we need to learn to practise what Nelle Morton calls ‘hearing to speech’: ‘a hearing that is far more than acute listening. A hearing engaged in by the whole body that evokes speech – a new speech – a new creation.’ We who live in, and we who work in, neighbourhoods caught up in ‘multiple overwhelmings’, need to learn that kind of ‘hearing to speech’ that can help the gifts to be released, but also allow the laments, the anger, the pathos, to be heard in ways that change the structures, change the politics, change the ‘well-off’ and the power-brokers.

But Ford pushes us further. Ultimately, the ‘shape of living’ he advocates is, in fact, a very profound kind of ‘vulnerability’:

‘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.’

Coping with ‘multiple overwhelmings’, receiving and releasing the gifts of our neighbours, unleashing the lament in a way that changes the politics: all of these, says David Ford, are grounded, ultimately, in letting ourselves be overwhelmed by God. This is where we find the imagination, and the courage, to change the story that is told about us, and that we tell about ourselves.

It is, incidentally, the kind of witness that we discover in today’s lectionary readings: of Job, looking God in the eye in the midst of the whirlwind; of frightened disciples in a fragile, storm-tossed boat; and of Paul and his co-workers, writing to the Christians in Corinth:

‘[A]s servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labours, sleepless nights, hunger… We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything… We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you… open wide your hearts also.’ (2 Corinthians 6: 4, 8-12)

Jobs, a ‘local economy’, improvisation and… church?!

I am perhaps the last person qualified to write about jobs. I have one – of a kind. I have also spent a small fraction of my life on Jobseeker’s Allowance. But to have been ordained to an, inescapably ‘vocational’, ‘job for life’, with no career structure to speak of but large amounts of job satisfaction – well, I guess that puts me in a tiny and rather curious minority of the ‘labour market’. Nevertheless (and partly because it’s what I’m paid for), I want to attempt some reflections on ‘work’ from this rather odd position…

Here on the Firs & Bromford, the Daily Mail very kindly labelled us, a while ago, the 7th most ‘workshy’ neighbourhood in the country, with a very neat bit of short-circuited logic that somehow ‘not being in work’ means ‘not wanting to work’. One of the facts they neglected to mention is that, round here, a hell of a lot of jobs have vanished in the last 10 or 20 years. Lots of people worked in factories, and the factories have gone.

So what we need is jobs. We need to create jobs. We need to have create local businesses and industries, or attract businesses and industries, that will offer local jobs. That much seems obvious.

But let’s just allow ourselves to be stopped in our tracks, for a moment or two, by the words of one of your local young people: “I don’t want a job. I want a career.” More than just something which pays some bills (and often even paying the bills is a struggle). But what’s the ‘more’? This is where I want to traverse some unfamiliar territory…

Livelihood

Let’s start with the basics. Making ends meet. To be housed, to be fed, to be clothed, to be warm (and the same for those ‘dependent’ on me). And here’s where ‘local economics’ must surely challenge some of our normal assumptions. Do we need money for food? What if there are some people in our community who are good at growing fruit and veg? What if there are things we can do for them in exchange? Would money need to be part of the equation? What if we as a community had invested in ways of generating local energy? What is it about the bricks and mortar of a home that demands thousands of pounds a year, for life (and yes, I write as someone who lives in a house provided free by the community of which I am a part)? Are there other ways of meeting our basic needs, that ‘keep it local’? The network of ‘Transition Towns’ suggests there might be – in ways that are sustainable for us human beings, and the earth’s resources.

Relationships

What else do jobs normally do for us, though? How about the network of relationships we have through work – at best (although it seems to be getting rarer and rarer), a relatively stable community of friendships that provides mutual support. And there’s the relationship that ‘working’ gives us with the wider community (and wider society), of having ‘value’, perhaps bound out with a sense of reciprocity – that I, by working, am making a valuable ‘contribution’, and I am being given back something (normally in the form of money) for doing so. But again, let’s just unpick this a little. Does money have to be the key currency of exchange in these relationships? Do we absolutely need to be ‘employed’, in the conventional sense, to be part of a stable, mutually supportive, community of friendships, where I have a sense of making a valuable contribution, and am given a sense of being valued in return? As a vicar, it strikes me that church might surely be one example of a place where all of this should happen – and not a penny changes hands (well, not as a necessary part of the community’s ‘currency’, at least).

Vocation

But there’s yet more to ‘work’. That ‘career’ that our local young person talked about, surely has a lot to do with a sense of ‘journey’, of ‘going somewhere’ – a sense of purpose, and of meaning, to my existence and my labouring; of learning and growing and developing. Of course I’m a fine one to talk about vocations. But why shouldn’t everyone have their own sense of vocation? Why should some people have to be content with a sense of ‘going nowhere’, doing meaningless, repetitive chores day after day? Even if, as you’ll no doubt argue, the world needs lots of people doing persistently repetitive tasks, who says that is the only task they are allowed to perform? Who says they have nothing to contribute to design and development, to sales and marketing, to care for fellow employees, to making their environment, and the world, more beautiful, more happy, as well as more well-equipped with whatever…? And again, why should ‘vocations’ be limited to only those things someone expects to pay us for? Why do we value the vocation of child-rearing, for example, so much less that we refuse to pay for it? Why can’t every community have its poet, its artist, its head gardener, its jester, its singer – and for these to be their occupations, and for their livelihoods to be met by the community, in whatever way the community is able to do so, in exchange for them occupying that role?

Improvisation

I was away overnight last week with friends and fellow-clergy from Birmingham’s ‘Strengthening Estates Ministry’ group. Among many earthed, passionate and stimulating conversations, we spent some time playing with the metaphor of ‘improvisation’ – something I’ve written about here before (just after the August 2011 riots, in fact):

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

I’m going to try, in 2012, to stop using the word ‘empowering’ – or at least to cut back considerably – with its suggestion that somehow it’s all about ‘us’ giving power to ‘them’. I much prefer the idea of ‘overaccepting’ – starting with the assumption that those around us have always, already, got something to offer; and just working out how we can be daring and creative enough to receive it, draw it out, be part of a relationship that enables such offers to become more than any of us can ever intend or imagine. I reckon it’s what church does with people, when it’s at its best. Maybe it’s something we might even be able to offer to the wider communities of which we are a part (or indeed discover as already present within them!). Maybe it’s what we’re all crying out for. It’s got to be more than just a job…

How do we respond? (A sermon after the ‘riots’)

In the face of the events of the past week, how do we respond? Our faith demands we ask the question – not as Daily Mail readers or Guardian readers, but as Christians. And our faith will not allow us to lock our doors, board up our windows and hide safely inside – it compels us to open our doors wider, to look outwards, in fact, to go outwards to seek to work out how we ‘do our faith in public’ now.

There’s a natural first response, and it’s the right first response for us. It’s to lament– to seek to voice our shock, our anger, our grief, and to join our voices with those others who lament today: for destruction and lost livelihoods, for the death of loved ones.

And bound up in that first response for us is a second obvious one: to pray– for all those who’ve been affected; for those who’ve been seeking to re-establish calm and order and clean up the mess; for those in authority, for wisdom in choosing their words and making their decisions; and, of course, for those who have been involved themselves in the rioting and looting…

And beyond lament and prayer…? As Christians, we are driven back to our Gospel: where is the ‘good news’ to be found?

And our lectionary, as so often, comes up trumps, offers us the right story at the right time. Today, we encounter Jesus and the Canaanite Woman (Matthew 15:21-28).

Jesus is on a journey here – both literally and metaphorically. He is far from home, the other side of the lake, ‘the other side of the world’, in the district of Tyre & Sidon. Seeking a bit of calm, perhaps. But a woman finds him, pursues him, shouts after him. A parent, a desperate parent. “Lord! Son of David! Have mercy on me! A demon controls my daughter. She is suffering terribly.”

And Jesus responds. With silence. He ignores her completely.

She tries again. And this time, Jesus responds with indifference. “I was sent only to the people of Israel. They are like lost sheep.” He washes his hands of her. ‘Nothing to do with me’ he says.

A third time, and she’s begging on her knees in front of him. And Jesus says “It’s not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to their dogs.” Jesus calls her the woman a dog, less than human, not one of ‘the children’. Vermin.

There is, thank God, a fourth stage in this encounter. The woman persists: “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their owners’ table.” And finally, Jesus catches a glimpse of this woman, this ‘other’, as a fellow human being, a child of God; finally, he hears her desperate cries for help; finally, he opens up to respond to her with compassion. “Woman, you have great faith! You will be given what you are asking for.” But it’s taken time – even for Jesus, it’s taken time – to get to this point. He’s had to go on quite a journey.

And so must we. Our faith demands it of us. In a very different context, in 1960s America, Martin Luther King said this: “at bottom, riots are always the language of the unheard.” As everyone from politicians to archbishops have said this week, this is not about condoning the destruction and the violence. But we need to start listening today – amid the destruction, the violence – to seek to hear the cries of the unheard.

Listen to these four voices then, from the London Borough of Hackney:

• "There's two worlds in this borough. More and more middle classes are coming and we're being pushed out. The shops are pricing stuff like it's the West End, we can't afford the rents. We're the outcasts, we're not wanted any more. There's nothing for us."
• "Youths are frustrated, they want all the nice clothes. They ain't got no money, they don't have jobs," a 41-year-old youth worker said. "To live, to have money in their pocket, they have to thieve, they have to rob. The people that run this country, they got money, they are rich, they got nice houses. They don't care about poor people."
• "Everyone's heard about the police taking bribes, the members of parliament stealing thousands with their expenses. They set the example," the youth said.
• "The only way we can get out of this is education, and we're not entitled to it, because of the cuts. Even for bricklaying you need a qualification and a waiting list for a course. I signed up in November, and still haven't heard back," one young Kurdish man said.

What we have seen this week are not ‘isolated incidents by a minority’ – not, as David Cameron would have us believe, ‘pockets of society’ that are ‘sick’. The events of this week have laid bare a sickness in society as a whole – in all of us…

• The multiple pressures on families today – on working parents, on those who can’t find work, on the single parent who struggles to do everything, on the poorest who battle to make ends meet
• The breakdown of community – where neighbours don’t know, let alone trust and support each other, where children and young people are ‘someone else’s problem’
• The long-term neglect of our poorest neighbourhoods, including those in our own area, our own parish – and the cuts that will simply make things worse
• And then… the ‘state religion’ of consumerism that says ‘I shop, therefore I am’; an economy that depends on us ‘buying now, and paying later’; a system designed to foster our discontent and our constant desire for more ‘stuff’
• And an inequality, where the richest 10% of our society are a hundred times – a hundred times – richer than the poorest 10%; and that says to the poorest, ‘you don’t have, therefore you are not’
• A breakdown of trust in key institutions – where police officers are paid by newspapers, politicians claim expenses for non-existent houses, and bankers pay themselves ridiculous bonuses while their workers are getting laid off
• And a society where young people are dehumanised and demonised – as ‘hoodies’ and ‘feral rats’, long before the events of the past week; where so many of our young have no place to call their own, no future to look forward to, no self-worth, no hope, nothing to lose…

Listen again to Martin Luther King: “There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it." Prophetic words, from over 50 years ago.

So how do we respond? We are driven back to our Gospel again… but let’s first spend a moment thinking about jazz.

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

The Canaanite woman is an improviser ‘par excellence’. She won’t be put off by Jesus’ persistent blocking, and when he calls her a dog she says ‘Yes, but…’ Even the dogs get crumbs of bread. She takes Jesus’ indifference, resistance and hostility, and daringly, creatively, turns it into a life-giving, healing ‘Yes’. And in doing so, she reflects a God who, as we see in the cross and resurrection, does likewise: takes our indifference, resistance and hostility, and daringly, creatively, turns it into a life-giving, healing ‘Yes’.

So how can we do likewise? Well, in the last few days, we have been offered glimpses of what such daring, creative ‘overaccepting’ in the face of destruction and violence might look like.  The ‘riot wombles’, the multi-coloured army wielding brooms and mugs of tea, a great symbol of down-to-earth practical support, togetherness, ‘Englishness’ even. So too have been the Sikhs and Muslims in our own city, who’ve come out to protect not their own, but each other’s places of worship. And more than any, perhaps, Tariq Jahan, just hours into the grief of losing his own son, calling not for revenge and reprisals, not for more violence, but for calm, for peace, for solidarity together, as parents, as people of faith, as citizens of one city.

Our own journey towards daring, creative ‘overacceptance’ starts with these examples.

We can join in the positive action – the clean-ups, the peace vigils – where we can – and where we can’t, we can give thanks for them, because gratitude, as we are discovering here, is the first step towards generosity.

We can, and must, come alongside the young people of our area – and we can, particularly, through our partnership as a church with Worth Unlimited at The Hub – through the work that Paul, Matt and Tim do, and volunteering ourselves in simple practical ways, whether through making tea or chopping up fruit, like Phyl – to listen to young people, hear their voices, their stories, their struggles, and begin to see them more clearly as human beings; to ‘invest’ in them our time, our trust, our friendship.

We can, and must, lobby our politicians – for investment in our poorest areas, in the most marginalized members of our society – in things like mentoring programmes, employment opportunities, support in education and within families.

But more than any of these, perhaps, we need to become, as a church, a different kind of community to the society that has been laid bare this week. A community of radical welcome, of radical listening; a community that values people not for what they have, or what they’ve done, but as beloved children of God; a community of young and old together, dedicated to peace-making, healing and reconciliation; a community, as our own vision proclaims, seeking to nurture compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope. Those five words have, this week, become more important than ever.

Can we even come close to being that kind of community – one that might make a real difference to those who come into contact with it? Dare we? Beginning today?