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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On not crashing the asterisk: the value of pausing

Last Monday a small group of us from Hodge Hill Church - in different ways either 'activists' or in positions of leadership, or both - paid a visit to our friends and travelling companions, the sisters of the Community of St John the Divine, just down the road from us in Alum Rock. Our reason for going was to explore where we go with our vision for a 'community house' after our recent unsuccessful auction bid (for some reflections on that moment of disappointment and 'bereavement', see here).

My experience of conversations with the sisters of CSJD has frequently been one of surprise: their attentive listening, to me and my companions, and to the 'deep currents of the Spirit', has often resulted in a response, a suggestion, a 'wondering' or a challenge that has seemingly come from nowhere, utterly unexpected or imagined, but has resonated deeply, 'rung true', stopped me in my tracks with its 'rightness'. On this occasion we witnessed another of those unexpected responses - an interruption of our forward momentum with a challenge to go deeper, a pressing of the 'pause' button to allow new possibilities to come to birth.

We went into the convent having lost the possibility of a community house. We came out with the invitation to consider deepening our commitment to community (house or no house), through exploring a shared 'rule of life' among those of us who live and/or work in our neighbourhoods here, which might just possibly prove attractive to other friends and travelling companions in other places. A 'rule of life' which is life-giving rather than life-constricting, inclusive and flexible, which yet enables us to shape together a sense of 'life balance', and deepens the spiritual, relational, earthed, foundations of our local (and sometimes more explicitly political) 'activism'. Emerging from that possibility, even more strangely, came the possibility of not one 'community house' but two... one as a place of hospitality to neighbours, at the heart of our busy, demanding, bustling, exciting estate; and one as a place more explicitly for 'retreat', with an emphasis on space, beauty, reflection and prayer - and hospitality to a much wider and more dispersed network of fellow travellers and explorers. There is much more to be reflected on, considered, explored, and decided, before any of this becomes much more 'concrete', but it was, as I say, a most unexpected turn in our conversation.

We finished the evening in the convent's chapel, saying Compline (Night Prayer) with the sisters. It was one of those moments where it becomes painfullly obvious who is practised at praying several times daily (the sisters), and who is awkwardly not (the rest of us, including the Vicar!). We were invited to say the psalms 'antiphonally' (that means one side of the chapel take a verse, and then the other, in turn), pausing in the middle of each verse, where the text has an asterisk. For some of us it's a familiar concept, even if we might have been rather out of practice. But there are few things more obvious, in a convent chapel in the quiet of a late evening, than half the congregation crashing unthinkingly through the asterisk, while the other half are pausing, reflectively, prayerfully, mid-verse.

Taking a breath, pausing with intent, listening for (and in, and to) the silence, waiting with our companions. It's an art that takes practice. But the interruptions it creates, make space for something new, unexpected, sometimes even unimaginable, to emerge...

Spaces of encounter, vulnerability and pausing

I recently shared my PhD work with a group of clergy. It was great to get some encouraging, stretching responses, energising the next steps of the journey. But one of the most precious gifts of that encounter was being pointed to a poem by R.S. Thomas, which in Thomas' raw, sparse choice of words, evokes a space of encounter, vulnerability, and pausing - painfully necessary in the world that we find ourselves living in today.

SICK VISITS

They keep me sober,

The old ladies

Stiff in their beds,

Mostly with pale eyes

Wintering me.

Some are like blonde dolls,

Their joints twisted;

Life in its brief play

Was a bit rough.

Some fumble

With thick tongue for words

And are deaf;

Shouting their faint names

I listen:

They are far off,

The echoes return slow.

But without them,

Without the subdued light

Their smiles kindle,

I would have gone wild,

Drinking earth’s huge draughts

Of joy and woe.

R.S. Thomas 1913-2000

The Echoes Return Slow. 1988, London: Macmillan, p.63.

Why #Listen?

"Someone's crying, Lord..."

Someone's crying... in anxiety... in suffering... with longing... with hope... with possibility...

Someone's crying, in isolation, longing to be heard.

We all need 'a good listening to'.

Listening builds understanding and empathy between people.

Listening establishes real, lived evidence, challenging and undermining our own prejudices and those of others. It builds an authority, a rooted, shared authority - a foundation from which we can speak and act.

Listening bridges divides, and builds relationships of trust, friendship and power-through-connectedness.

Listening interrupts our hurry into action, disturbs our 'instinctive responses', comfortable patterns, and what we think we know we should do. It shapes and energises 'good', careful, attentive action.

Listening 'hears to speech' those things and people that have not been heard, or have even been silenced. Listening ushers in the 'new thing', the 'outsider', the 'hidden'. Listening unlocks gifts and unleashes possibility.

And as listening 'hears others to speech', it empowers them as new 'hearers' in turn. Listening builds a movement for change.

That's why we listen.

(Reflection offered at Citizens UK in Birmingham Founding Assembly, 25/4/13)

On 'Social Inclusion' and professional addicts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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