Beyond 'glass half full' - the politics of ABCD

For a couple of years now I've been a passionate advocate for asset-based approaches to community development (ABCD). I believe in ABCD partly because I'm a pragmatist - it seems to 'work' (slowly, with fragility, but surely, we're seeing evidence of 'community' springing up around us here in Hodge Hill, and that seems to be making all kinds of positive differences in the lives of those of us who live here, and are finding ourselves part of 'it') - and partly because I'm a theorist - ABCD resonates with some of my deepest principles, with the core of my theology, and seems to make a whole load of sense of some of the biggest challenges of the world that we seem to be living in today.

But I also have to acknowledge - and increasingly so, as I get increasingly passionate in advocating for it - the dangers that an ABCD approach brings to the surface, the tightropes it makes us walk. And a lot of those dangers, those tightropes, are political - with a small 'p', that is, beyond parties and voting and that stuff, to the way power is hoarded, distributed, channelled, at every level from the micropolitics of neighbourhoods to the macropolitics of the global economy.

These reflections have been brewing for a while, much of them in conversation with others. It feels timely to get them down in words, in the hope that the conversation draws in more voices, and the dangers and potential of ABCD can come to greater clarity.

1. The 'glass half full' is a statement of defiance

ABCD goes well beyond a kind of Pollyanna-ish, or Monty Pythnoesque, 'always looking on the bright side of life', but close to its heart is the image of the 'glass half full': approaching neighbourhoods and those who live within them not primarily as 'needs', as 'deficits', as 'problems', but as 'gifts', as 'assets', as holding within themselves huge creative power. For neighbourhoods like mine, this is powerful stuff - because people have, for far too long, both outside and within our neighbourhood, told the 'deficit' story: we're one of Iain Duncan-Smith's 'broken ghettos', apparently, 'workshy', 'scroungers', 'dependency culture', you name it. 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' asked Nathanael, brother of Philip, about Jesus. People have similar suspicions about neighbourhoods like mine. The labelling is so often stigmatising, and the stigmatising can - and does - crush and break people's spirits.

So an ABCD approach is, on a very foundational level, a gutsy, defiant, 'f*** off!' to those who would label and stigmatise us, and to that part of each of us that falls for those untruths. We have passion, knowledge, and gifts here, and we have each other, and in sharing our gifts together, we have so much more than we are told we have - and that is power! It was far from coincidental that the very first Firs & Bromford Community Passion Play, last year, reached its ending with a sung version of Maya Angelou's poem, 'Still I Rise':

"You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise."

2. ABCD is about community - and a dangerous vulnerability

It may sound obvious, but asset-based community development is first and foremost about building community. It needs to be said, however, because one of the risks of ABCD-language is it gets muddled up with 'asset-based', or 'strength-based', approaches more generally and, at its most simplistic, is seen as simply an expression of 'positive psychology'. At its worst, this confusion can seem to veer towards the politics of those who advocate 'individual responsibility', 'getting on your bike', and 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' - whether in work or financial security, health or education.

This is where the 'glass half full' can be misleading: beyond 'looking on the bright side', beyond looking for individuals' strengths rather than their weaknesses, ABCD affirms that we need community - we need each other, our neighbours, our fellow human beings. We need to share each other's gifts, but we also need to share each other's vulnerabilities, each other's wounds, each other's struggles. The 'half empty' half of the glass can also be, and often is, the thing that enables us to connect with those around us. And it is community, says ABCD, that enables us to do that connecting, that sharing, in a way that systems and institutions - let alone markets - fail miserably.

This invitation to community, to vulnerable sharing, is also somewhat political: money, as theologian Stanley Hauerwas is fond of saying, is what we rely on when we've forgotten what friends are. Those who live in expensive gated 'communities', secure behind their fences, are trying to protect themselves from the vulnerabilities of being human. Those of us who try our best to live a more vulnerable kind of 'community' challenge the rich and powerful to risk discovering their humanity. Who knows where that might lead?!

3. ABCD takes issue with the 'service industry' - public and private

"Perhaps, the major problem with public health’s uncritical adoption of asset-based approaches is that it fails to distinguish between a radical critique of welfare, one that is firmly linked to an analysis of neo-liberal economics and the neo-liberal attack on welfare, which by contrast, supports the further de-regulation of markets and withdrawal of the social rights of citizens. If the strength of the assets movement is that it has generated discussion about re-dressing the balance of power between the public sector, public services and local communities, its fatal weakness has been the failure to question the balance of power between public services, communities and corporate interests. As such, asset-based approaches sound the drum beat for the retreat of statutory, state provision of both public services and public health."[1]

Lynne Friedli, writing from a public health perspective (and addressing 'asset-based approaches' more generally than ABCD), offers a strong challenge to ABCD, highlighting one of its biggest dangers: it can be heard to be supporting, and indeed co-opted to support, the neo-liberal 'rolling back' of the State.

Rooted in the work of social critic Ivan Illich, ABCD does indeed shine a spotlight on the way institutions, once intended to help and empower people, have a habit of growing in size and complexity to the point where the 'service' that they 'offer' is, in fact, counter-productive in people's lives, reinforcing in people the very 'problems' that the institution claims to solve, sustaining people's dependence on the institution to feed the institution's dependence on a steady stream of 'needy' people. It is a dramatic, powerful critique, and, in everyday experience, it seems to hit home at least as often as it misses the mark. There is, in fact, much more that properly sits in the domain of 'what communities can do' for those living in them, than the 'service industry' has allowed us space to imagine.

But it is in the moves onwards from Illich's critique that the real battles are to be fought. It hardly needs stating that 'the private sector' does no better job of humanising the 'service industry' than 'the public sector' - in fact, when you add in the profit-seeking factor to the already toxic mix, the drive towards institutional counter-productivity - benefits for the institution at the expense of its 'clients' - merely accelerates beyond imagining. In fact, after years of neo-liberal, 'competition'-promoting government in Conservative, Labour, and Coalition flavours, it's now barely possible to distinguish 'public sector' from 'private sector' at all. However paternalistic in intent the post-war origins of the welfare state were, that sense of shared responsibility as a society for the welfare of the most vulnerable - and with it the acknowledgment that any of us might, at times, find ourselves living with such vulnerability and need - has been all but obliterated - and ABCD needs to position itself, and articulate itself, clearly as part of the challenge to that obliteration, rather than a colluding partner in it.

4. ABCD is about social justice

With Friedli's challenge ringing in our ears, we cannot possibly say that the State's withdrawal from communities, its withdrawal of its people, places and money, is somehow going to make everything better. To be sure, often what communities need to be able to function better is for the systems and institutions to 'get out of the way' - but the ideal of the 'Big Society', dreamt up in a cosy Oxfordshire village, with volunteers aplenty to 'man the pumps' of everything from the library to the fire station, has been shown to be a blatant cover for the accelerated redistribution of wealth, an 'asset stripping' which has enabled the rich to get even richer and forced the poor to get even poorer, abandoning the poorest communities to 'look after themselves'.

Edgar Cahn, the founding father of timebanking, expresses the point with a necessary sharpness. Lamenting the way the 'brilliant work' of ABCD (in the USA) was being 'circumvented and perverted, used to get money without really altering professional practice or changing who got the dollars, who defined the problem, and who defined the response', Cahn exploded with anger at the 'obscene' way 'in which we were throwing away, destroying, degrading, or denigrating the most precious assets we have: human beings'. The core values of ABCD needed to be intertwined with a fundamental commitment to social justice:

"Assets became: No more throw-away people.  

Redefining work became: No more taking the contribution of women, children, families, immigrants for granted. No more free rides for the market economy extracted by subordination, discrimination, and exploitation.  

Reciprocity became: Stop creating dependencies; stop devaluing those whom you help while you profit from their troubles.  

Social capital became: No more disinvesting in families, neighbourhoods and communities. No more economic and social strip-mining." [2]

An angry No, then, intertwined with a hopeful, creative Yes. Not disinvestment, then, but changing the way we invest. Not abandonment by the State, but the State - at least so far as it embodies society's 'shared responsibility' and power-in-coordination - finding new ways to be present within neighbourhoods, ways that are infinitely more receptive, connective, and creative, than the familiar models of 'delivery' which so easily modulate into 'control'.

The three questions at the core of ABCD approaches, then, remain vital:

i. What can this community do for itself, with local people power? 

ii. What can this community do for itself, with some help and support from external agencies? 

iii. What does this community need external agencies to do for it (or perhaps better, alongside it)?

It's crucial to ask all three questions, of course - something the 'roll back' advocates would rather ignore. But the order of the questions is also crucial, because the 'default position' is to proceed from (iii) to (i), leaving local communities with the left-over scraps of activity once the external agencies have delivered on their own agendas and taken whatever rich pickings are to be had. A third caveat is also necessary: the questions need to be asked in each and every neighbourhood, and repeatedly over time, because the answers will vary greatly from place to place, and from year to year. There can be no nationwide prescription, as 'Big Society' implied - investment needs to be determined by local power and local need, and that, in itself, will require a radical redistribution of resources, people, and energy.

5. ABCD and 'progressive localism'

Having said that, I am increasingly convinced that there is something inescapably 'counter-State' about the evolving ABCD tradition. In the seemingly innocent language of 'progressive localism', some UK geographers are beginning to argue for, and discover already present around them, a 'counter-movement' to the aggressively 'anti-public', neoliberal 'austerity localism'. David Featherstone and colleagues outline four significant dimensions of such a counter-movement:

i. 'place-based organising' can, and does, challenge 'neatly bounded' conceptions of 'community' which spill out beyond the obviously 'local' (they offer the example of Gate Gourment workers in West London who were able to forge links of international solidarity, through the aviation industry, with workers in Norway and Denmark who refused to load meals onto aircraft bound for London) 

ii. rather than seeing globalisation as something 'done to' local communities in a simply 'top-down' way, local communities, workers, citizens can be seen to be 'active agents in shaping and negotiating such [globalizing] processes', 'challeng[ing] rather than entrench[ing] inequalities between and within places and regions' 

iii. these global linkages and connections can serve to highlight 'diverse forms of actually existing multiculturalism' that are present in localities and shape 'everyday practices of localism', challenging the chauvinistic rhetoric of politicians and media around race and migration

iv. progressive localisms 'can feed into broader social and political movements that aim to transform national and international policy frameworks' (the mobilisation of the living wage campaign from particular local communities in London is offered as an example) [3]

More recently, Andy Williams and colleagues from Exeter have argued that 'in amongst the neoliberal infrastructure' of localism, 'new ethical and political spaces' of 'resistance and experimentation' can be discovered, which work 'strategically, and even subversively, with the tools at hand'. Citing Foodbanks as a now notorious example of the neoliberal State apparently co-opting the people power in local communities, Williams et al argue:

i. 'the visible presence of Foodbanks has enabled structural critique of the processes underpinning food poverty in the UK' (by publishing data on usage, narratives detailing the reasons for usage, etc.) 

ii. 'spaces of care such as Foodbanks present a practical device through which citizens from myriad ideological perspectives can potentially experience a more positive identification with, and understanding of, the issues facing people with low-incomes' (the possibility of vulnerability leading to change that I suggested earlier) 

iii. 'these spaces of care can facilitate wider ethical-political alliances across voluntary organisations and protest groups' (similar to Featherstone et al's argument above) as part of an 'emergent public', 'a body able to advocate and represent itself and hold government to account'

Williams also, secondly, highlights research that suggests that 'the rationalities and technologies of neoliberal government at work in public, private and voluntary organisations can be performatively subverted from within'. 'Inside every civil servant is a citizen waiting to get out', as my friend and ABCD colleague Cormac Russell puts it, but perhaps they are not patiently 'waiting' as often as we think!

Thirdly, Williams points to examples of localism policies being embraced by local communities precisely in the cause of resisting the trends of neoliberalism: 'community take-overs of local facilities and amenities as social enterprises', 'strategic use of Local Enterprise Partnerships to direct economic development towards the growth of renewable and sustainable industries', 'harnessing the more open and deliberative nature of policy-making' that accompanies devolution 'to reject neoliberal models of individualised commodified care in favour of a more locally coproduced system of care-provision', and so on.

Finally, Williams highlights the emergence of groups which have created 'autonomous spaces', intentionally distanced from 'regulatory or financial relationships with government in order to pursue prefigurative, oppositional, and confrontational stances towards neoliberal logics'. They cite the example of Zacchaeus 2000 (Z2K), 'a London-based anti-poverty charity which provides free social, economic and legal assistance for low-income households affected by welfare reform and debt' which, alongside such support, has also been at the forefront of organising protests outside magistrate courts and other anti-cuts activism. While not entirely autonomous, as a registered charity, Z2K 'ventures directly into confrontation with state policy through its marriage of provision and protest'. [4]

It may be that I've deviated somewhat from directly discussing 'the politics of ABCD'. But I see in the developing discourse of 'progressive localism' a textured argument that allows us to take on board Lynne Friedli's challenge, but to go beyond a simple 'for or against neoliberal localism' dichotomy. In starting with the messy complexity of the local, with the diverse gifts and contestations of 'community', we are by no means restricted to the local, or to compliantly carrying out the wishes of neoliberal government. When people discover the power of face-to-face relationships with their neighbours, the possibilities of solidarities beyond the local, of challenge and resistance and re-shaping of wider structures, become more graspable. This is what Cormac is arguing, I think, in his excellent piece on an ABCD approach to local democracy, 'power from the people - power to the people'.

6. ABCD as (post)anarchism...?

I'm not sure it's been explicitly acknowledged anywhere, but there is, I would suggest, a distinctly anarchist streak to ABCD. In its emphasis on direct relationships of mutual care; on horizontal, associational life over against the hierarchical relationships of institutions; and on the 'common wealth' of local neighbourhoods, there is more than a resonance or two with anarchist politics - the development of 'autonomous zones' and experimental 'micropolitics' which 'prefigure' (i.e. begin living out in the present) a different kind of social order, beyond the State. Perhaps, following Saul Newman, Todd May and others, we might say the resonances are strongest with what is being described as postanarchism, which 'sees the state as a problem, but not the problem; it rejects the logic that would make any single point of resistance primary or central' and instead 'assumes power to be multiple and fluid, requiring more creative responses', which might well involve 'working more and more outside the state rather than strictly against it'. Interestingly - at least for me - that seems to bring us back to a place where some of the social practices of the Christian community might make a significant contribution. [5] But that, I think, is a reflection for another time...

Notes:

[1] Lynne Friedli, ‘“What we’ve tried, hasn’t worked”: the politics of assets based public health’, Critical Public Health, 23:2 (2013), pp.131-145

[2] Edgar Cahn, No More Throw-Away People (2000) p.29

[3] David Featherstone et al, ‘Progressive localism and the construction of political alternatives’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (2012), pp.177-182

[4] A Williams, M Goodwin & P Cloke, 'Neoliberalism, Big Society & Progressive Localism', Environment and Planning A (forthcoming 2014)

[5] Ted Troxell, ‘Christian Theory: Postanarchism, Theology, and John Howard Yoder’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 7:1 (2013), pp.37-60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#OccupyWestminster and Common Worship

A few weeks ago I was in a room in Westminster Abbey from which a previous Archbishop of Canterbury was arrested and taken to be executed. I was there, in the company of some rather eminent theologians, to listen to American theologian William Cavanaugh give a robust defence of religion against its secularist critics, particularly addressing the charge of religious violence, by highlighting the inherent violence of the nation-state. The irony of the context was noted at the time, but none of us could imagine how much that irony could have been intensified in a matter of weeks.

For Cavanaugh, alongside other such leading lights in the theological world as Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank and Sam Wells (now Vicar of St Martin's-in-the-Fields in London, and also in the room at the Abbey that day), the worship of the Church shapes its participants in a kind of politics that is quite different to the dominant politics of the world that we live in, the politics of neoliberal capitalism, of democratically-sanctioned state violence and the all-consuming power of global corporations. More than that, the Church's worship doesn't just shape worshippers for political engagement in the world - the Church enacts a different, resistant, even revolutionary kind of politics in its worship. For Cavanaugh, "the Eucharist" is "an alternative imagining of space and time which builds up a body of resistance to violence, the body of Christ. This is a body that is wounded, broken by the powers and principalities [of the world] and poured out in blood offering upon this stricken earth. But this is also a body crossed by the resurrection, a sign of the startling irruption of the Kingdom into historical time and the disruptive presence of Christ the King to the politics of the world." (William T Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imgination, p.7)

And then I saw photos yesterday of Westminster Abbey, surrounded by a ring of police, 'protected' by the power of the State against a crowd of disabled people, protesting against the government's removal of the Independent Living Fund. Church staff had, it seems, called in the police when the protesters started setting up tents and gazebos on the lawn outside the Abbey.

The scenes were reminiscent of those outside St Paul's Cathedral a couple of years ago, when the Occupy LSX encampment was evicted by the police, at the request of the Cathedral authorities. At that time I'd felt not only embarrassed by the Church's stance, but deeply sad at an opportunity so spectacularly missed, for the Church of England, for once, to place itself on the right side of history, receiving the gift that the occupiers were offering them; offering hospitality, sanctuary, even, in the midst of London's privatised 'public squares'; but more than that too, humbly 'venturing out' into the tented city, not as host but as participants among others, engaging together in the globalizing wave of questioning and re-imagining of which the Occupy movement had been an iconic part.

This time, at Westminster Abbey, was worse - not just because the Church showed it had learnt nothing from the Occupy/St Paul's encounter, but because those who were setting up tents on the Abbey lawn could not so easily be dismissed as 'middle-class hippies' (however inaccurate that might have been of Occupy LSX), but were, very visibly, physically vulnerable disabled people, many in wheelchairs, whose access the police were able to restrict, even before the ubiquitous 'kettling' manoeuvre, simply by removing various makeshift ramps from the site in question. That was some of why I tweeted last night: "Yet again CofE’s public face is that of the oppressive, defensive neoliberal state and not the vulnerable."

The particular irony, of course, is that Westminster Abbey, like St Paul's Cathedral, is a place where Christian worship has taken place for hundreds of years, where the Eucharist - which Cavanaugh holds up as the 'resistant politics' of the Church - has been celebrated daily, tens of thousands of times over its history. Surely - at least if the logic of Cavanaugh et al is correct - these should be the places par excellence which have formed Christians in the habits of resisting the violence of the State, and of a Christlike solidarity with the vulnerable and excluded? Surely these should be the places where there is not even an 'ethical dilemma' in situations like this, where the response is instinctive, shaped by years of repeating the 'political' liturgies of the anti-Empire Church?

But of course, there are caveats from the theologians of 'liturgical politics': "All of this sounds wonderful," Cavanaugh admits, contrasting the liturgies of the Church with the blasphemous 'liturgies' of the State, "but we must confess that it is the shrivelling of this vision within the church that has allowed the flourishing of ersatz realities... [State] liturgies have succeeded in imagining communities because Christian liturgies have failed to do so in a fully public way. As the church expanded after Constantine, Christian worship was not centered on the parish but on the whole city... The church sought to replace the pagan cult of the city with the Christian liturgy. Therefore, Christian worship on the Lord's Day and other feasts generally took the form of a series of services in churches and public spaces, linked by public processions, totaling six to eight hours. Here was the church taking itself seriously as nothing less than 'the embodiment in the world of the World to come.' Much of this way of imagining the world has been lost as the liturgy has shrunken to a short semiprivate gathering." (Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, p.122)

When pressed, with concrete examples of liturgy's apparent failure to form counter-cultural Christians, Cavanaugh et al respond by telling us we're not doing the liturgy well enough, and if only we did it better, things would look very different. We're not taking it seriously enough. The church isn't taking itself seriously enough.

But yesterday's events at Westminster Abbey don't quite fit that script. If there's one thing Westminster Abbey does, it's take itself - and everything it does - seriously. It is, perhaps, the epitome of the Church of England taking itself seriously. And that, here, seems to be the problem, rather than the solution: here, cross and imperial crown nestle together, the liturgy of the Church and the liturgy of the State are indistinguishable, because they are one and the same. If there is revolutionary potential in Christian worship, it has been neutralised in Westminster Abbey.

Apart from, yet again, the pain and embarrassment of association, through the Church of England, with what 'we' did to a group of disabled protesters yesterday, what's disturbing for me, as Rector of Hodge Hill, is that since at least the 17th Century, the 'common prayer' or 'common worship' of the Church of England has decreed that what they do in Westminster Abbey, we do, in some kind of similar form, in our little Anglican church here. If Cavanaugh and friends are right, that there's something about our liturgies that profoundly shapes, if not actually constitutes, our 'political' habits and responses, then however much I might protest that here (in Hodge Hill) we're an inclusive church, here we're a politically radical church, here we're engaged in building new patterns of relationship and society as the neoliberal world crumbles around us - if we too are tied up in the 'common worship' of Church and State, then we're surely sunk.

But it's clearly not quite as simple as that. Hodge Hill Church is not Westminster Abbey (thank God!). We are not likely to host any coronations here in the near future. We are about as far from the 'centres of Empire' as you can get, demographically if not geographically. Our worship here looks, sounds, feels very different to what they do in Westminster Abbey (and, don't tell anyone, but we also sit rather loosely to the expectations of 'common worship', and that's not just because we're an Anglican-URC ecumenical partnership). But all of that is only half the story, I would suggest. Because I'm not convinced our worship is the only thing that shapes us, by any means. I think our engagements 'out there in the world' shape us just as much, if not more, than our worship in church does. And we have learnt - and are continuing to learn - here how to receive, with humility and expectation, the gifts offered to us in those encounters and engagements, even when those 'gifts' feel initially awkward, uncomfortable, or even hostile - from strangers, as well as friends.

And perhaps that's the most important difference between we Christians here in Hodge Hill and those who have been in charge of Westminster Abbey and St Paul's in their brushes with 'Occupiers' over the last few years. They, there, have had lots of practice at welcoming and honouring the rich and powerful (and, in a lesser way, anyone who is paying to come and look around their beautiful buildings). We've had lots of practice at being displaced, homeless, and dependent on the hospitality of our neighbours. And that, in turn, has shaped our worship, as much, if not more, than the other way round. Of course, we have much less 'symbolic capital' to play with in Hodge Hill - few people (even locally!) are going to notice, or care, if a few tents popped up on our church building's front lawn, and so any response we were to make, equally, would hardly make political waves. But we will, of course, continue our little, barely-noticed acts of hospitality and receptivity, solidarity and subversion, trusting in the power of tiny mustard seeds to grow, in the infectiousness of the microscopic germs of the kingdom of God. And, despite the shame of being Anglican on days like today, we will continue to hope and pray that our Christian sisters and brothers who find themselves in places of symbolic and political power, will rediscover in their own ways the subversive challenge of the gospel, and of the worship of the Christ who was crucified by the powers-that-be.

#TrojanHorse, #BritishValues & troublesome faith

In the wake of OFSTED's publication, this week, of a series of weirdly incongruous reports on Birmingham schools (and nurseries) in the spotlight of the so-called 'Trojan Horse' investigation (downgrading a secondary school from 'Outstanding' to 'Requires Improvement' in a matter of months; slating a Nursery school for not including, in its Behaviour Policy, an alertness to "identifying and minimising extremist behaviour"), David Cameron has seized on the opportunity to argue that schools should be teaching and promoting 'British values'. And in case anyone was wondering, these values include "freedom, tolerance and respect for institutions".

Now, I think there's a real case, and opportunity, for a 'big conversation' here in the UK, particularly in England perhaps, about the kind of 'common ground' we (and I use 'we' knowing that that 'we' spans differences of class, ethnicity, faith, culture, age and much more) want to claim to inhabit, and to offer as a common heritage to our children. And I would be surprised if a British Prime Minister didn't air his or her opinions about what such 'common ground' might look like. But I do seriously think that David Cameron's 'values' miss the mark with a quite drastic naivety, if not something more sinister.

There is something unsurprising about an Eton-educated Conservative Prime Minister telling us that we should respect the institutions of the State, but I struggle to find a way of understanding it that doesn't make it sound like an order. Or perhaps it's a desperate plea? I'm not a great historian, but my sense of British history is that any respect we've ever had for institutions has always had a sense of irony about it (if not downright cynicism), and certainly in the last few decades that irony has slipped towards a very justified suspicion, if not contempt. Politicians, press, bankers, police, and yes, the Church too - all have revealed not just fallibilities, but to a greater or lesser extent systemic prejudice, greed, self-protection, abuse and corruption. Relationships of 'respect' have broken down significantly, and not because 'the British public' have somehow simply become less 'respectful'.

At the same time, with more than a little (unacknowledged) irony, we hear of Conservative MPs filing complaints to the Charity Commission against Oxfam, of all organisations, for 'getting political at home' when they should, apparently, be getting on with their proper job of 'feeding people abroad'. And we've heard more from the Trussell Trust about the angry threats from the heart of the Department for Work and Pensions to 'close them down' if they persist not just in feeding the hungry, but in asking why they are hungry in the first place. And of course at the heart of the 'Trojan Horse' investigation is an intense suspicion, by central government, of a whole collection of schools and their governing bodies, within a wider sustained attack, financially and politically, on Birmingham as a Local Authority. 'Respect for institutions' is, it seems, something we are expected to be rather selective about.

From a Christian faith perspective, I find myself with at least two pressing thoughts.

First is a sense that people like Cameron - and here he may well be representative of 'government in general', as exactly the same could be said of New Labour - fundamentally misunderstands and distorts what faith 'does', as they cast it in instrumentalising language. Faith, they seem to think, teaches (or should be teaching) 'freedom, tolerance, and respect for institutions'. Faith builds (or should be building) 'social capital' in our neighbourhoods and wider society, understood as helping people 'get along together', avoiding uncomfortable things like 'extremism' and 'rioting', and maintaining the social, economic and political status quo. The trouble for people like Cameron, is that in real life faith might sometimes do those things, but it also, often, does rather more awkward things like:

- opening up spaces for people to express strong emotions (anger, frustration, cynicism, weariness, fragility, to name but a few)

- promoting quite 'counter-cultural' (i.e. to marketplace or government) norms, values and 'rules' for living, such as self-emptying, forgiveness, transformation, risk-taking and openness to learn from others

- intentionally accepting those who have been rejected elsewhere

- challenging what others – including creators of theories - accept as the norm, as part of a critical rather than an uncritical consensus

- fostering the responsibility to be prophetic in situations of injustice, and a 'politics' that goes far beyond representative democracy

My second thought returns to the question of 'institutions'. For Cameron, Gove et al, it seems the only real institutions are those of the market and the State, with the latter as servant to the former. 'Society' is imagined as what William Cavanaugh calls a 'unitary' or 'simple space', characterized by a duality of a powerful, centralized, hard-boundaried State on the one hand, and individual, property-owning, competing consumer-subjects on the other. In contrast, Cavanaugh offers a picture (drawn perhaps from an over-idealized reading of Medieval Europe), of 'complex space', where "authority was often marked by personal loyalties owed in complexly layered communal contexts", where "social space was completely refracted into a network of associations" not simply 'intermediate' between state and individual, but with their own particular 'ultimate loyalties'. The role of the church, Cavanaugh argues, is to "at every opportunity, 'complexify' space, that is, promote the creation of spaces in which alternative economies and authorities flourish." The nation state, he says, "is neither community writ large nor the protector of smaller communal spaces; rather, it originates and grows over against truly common forms of life... the nation-state is simply not in the common good business."

The 'Trojan Horse' saga is a product of, and an excuse for deepening, the British state's stripping away of 'intermediate' associations and institutions (such as governing bodies and Local Authorities) in favour of the kind of 'unitary, simple space' that Cavanaugh describes so forcefully and - I think, in our current context - convincingly. But it also highlights the misunderstanding - whether naive or wilful - that 'faith communities' can be, or should be, understood, treated, instrumentalised as such 'intermediate associations' themselves, rather than mediating a quite different form of sociality, and a quite different form of authority: for Christians, the God who calls not 'servants' but 'friends', who 'puts down the mighty from their thrones and exalts the humble and meek', who 'feeds the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty'.

Notes:

- C Baker & H Skinner, Faith in Action: The dynamic connection between spiritual and religious capital, William Temple Foundation, 2006, pp.12-13

- William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State and the Political Meaning of the Church, 2011, pp.19, 32, 41-42

So who's 'radical' then?

Last Friday/Saturday, I spent 24 hours in the company of some wonderful people, in the serene surroundings of Salisbury Cathedral Close - perhaps England's oldest 'gated community' - discussing the meaning(s) and future(s) of 'radical theology'.

And yes, the ironies were noted. And, to some extent, explored.

One of the things we wrestled with was who was there - and why - and who wasn't. I think without exception, none of us would have called ourselves 'radical theologians', even if some others might use the term of us. If anything, most of us struggled with a persistent, nagging feeling that we weren't half as 'radical' as we could/should be. And we could certainly think of, and name, plenty of people that weren't there who were much more 'radical' than we were. 'Radical theology', perhaps, is almost always a call from beyond ourselves, a call to include, to move, to push or stretch or struggle further.

Most of us, in one way or another, were enmeshed within institutions. Most of us were Anglicans - that in itself highlighted a whole load of 'radical Christians' from non-conformist (not to mention Catholic and Orthodox) traditions beyond our rather 'established Church' huddle - and many of us worked within the structures of the Church of England, or colleges and universities within institutional academia. But at the same time as we named those locations near to 'centres' of power, we also named our ambivalences, our dis-eases with those centres and structures, our sense of being simultaneously close to their 'edges', of resisting their weight, their pull, their dominance. And their were costs, hurts, pains that went with that sense of 'bi-location'. In that, perhaps, was a certain kind of 'radicalism'.

We were helped to chart some of the terrain of 20th Century 'radical theology' in the UK - particularly clustering around the focuses of (1) economic injustice; (2) the politics of identity (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, among others); and (3) questioning and deconstructing dominant theologies of God (e.g. through the non-realist tradition, but much broader than just that). We explored the intersections between these (if you're female and not 'white', for example, you're more likely to be poor; hierarchical theologies of an autonomous King-God have been used to legitimise poverty and manifold social exclusions), we asked how much these broad movements might be said to have 'succeeded' (do equalities legislation and international debt relief count as 'successes', even in a world that sees Food Banks and Nigel Farage both on the rise?), and we began to wonder what the new 'edges' were when some of what was once 'radical' has become 'mainstream'.

Although the tone of the gathering was warm, friendly, and overridingly positive, some 'others' did emerge, sometimes having to be named as 'elephants' in the room. One was the institutional Church's ever-growing obsession with numerical growth (aka institutional survival), and a 'strategic' management culture which presumes to be able to 'deliver' it - the peculiar mix of an outwardly confident evangelicalism and an unspoken, but apparent, desperation. Another was the apparently all-consuming dynamics of neoliberal global capitalism, however 'orchestrated' or otherwise we saw them to be. And a third was the movement that calls itself 'Radical Orthodoxy' - more tricky, this one, as one of RO's own primary targets is neoliberalism, but its fondness for an idealised medieval Church and its arrogant presumption to 'out-narrate' all other narratives and theologies left it with little in the way of enthusiastic support in this particular room.

So where did we get to? In many ways, it was 24 hours of 'throat-clearing', of 'readying the ground' ready for seeds to be planted. One seed that had just begun to germinate by the end of our time together was around the question of 'where we find our hope'. What are our sources, theologies, and practices of hope, in our contexts, at this point in the early 21st Century where hope seems to be pretty thin on the ground? We committed ourselves, together, to go away and intentionally attend to, and reflect on this question, to let it infiltrate and permeate our thinking and acting (for some of us that includes our reading, writing and teaching, but also our engaging, relating, listening and most practical 'doings'), and to seek to bring those fragments together, over the course of the next year. There are 'radical theologies and practices of hope' out there to be identified, gathered, shared and celebrated - and perhaps we can be some of those that do that work of identifying, gathering, sharing and celebrating.

But there were other questions too - related, almost certainly - that offered teasing loose ends to tug at...

Is attention to place 'radical', within the 'dis-placing' dynamics of global capitalism? Is place where economic injustice is seen most clearly, and yet also where a host of differing identities find themselves in contact, potentially in relationship and interdependence? Is place where God-talk can be challenged and re-invented in both its radical immanence and its radical transcendence?

Is 'church' something that we can just let get on with whatever it is it is doing, leaving - with liberated indifference - the 'desperately-managed-survival thing' to do its thing, and trust that 'church', in some form, might be unintended outcome rather than focus and direct objective of our struggles and creativity?

Is there a vital key to be found in the connection between 'mysticism' and 'activism' - that only in seeing, experiencing, practising our connection to everything that is, can we discover right and radical actions towards everything that is?

Does our faith give us the self-discipline to hold off the inclination to blame, even those who are giving obvious offence - not refusing action or resistance, but being able to identify within ourselves the same capacities that we see in those others, and to find ways to be penitent, publicly, which invite others - even our most difficult 'others' - to join us?

What are the nouns, the apparently 'fixed states', that we deploy in our everyday language and thinking, that need to be turned into verbs, dynamics which can change and be changed? What happens, for example, when we see 'poverty' as the dynamic of 'impoverishment' - or 'God' as the dynamic of 'Godding'?

Can we do radical theology from places of joy and beauty, as well as from places of pathos and suffering? Is it even possible to 'do radical theology' in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral?!

I would add one more question. At times in our conversation, hopeful possibilities were offered as potential 'third ways' between two uncomfortable poles. Political 'Third Way' language also made its appearance once or twice. I found myself wondering how often 'third ways' are either possible or even desirable. It struck me that much of what we touched on - with our words and, in more vulnerable moments, with the wounds that we carried - did not allow for happy, easy 'third ways', but rather testified to the necessity of staying in, dwelling in, negotiating and bearing the pains of the 'broken middles', where we find ourselves inhabiting both the 'centre' and the 'edge' and know that the two cannot be brought together. Discovering a language, and embodiments, of hope in that - apparently endlessly - 'torn place' is perhaps our greatest challenge.

Voting and not-voting, for 5-year-olds

I came back from the Polling Station yesterday evening to be interrogated by my bright, questioning 5-year-old son, who was in the middle of bathtime. "Daddy, who did you vote for?"

I explained to Rafi that I'd thought long and hard, and had decided to write "None of the above" across my ballot paper.

"So if you didn't vote for anybody, what happens then?" he asked, sensibly. I took a deep breath, and tried to find an answer that made sense to me, let alone him.

I explained that, of the four 'choices' I was given, the UKIP candidate represents a party who think many - or most - of his friends and classmates shouldn't be allowed to live in this country (in fact, to extend the logic to its conclusion, shouldn't exist at all). I explained that the Conservative and LibDem candidates are part of the parties who are in charge of the country at the moment, whose economic priorities have made the majority of our neighbours poorer, and who have enacted brutal, degrading and destructive policies on people that I have come to call friends, forcing them to go hungry or cold, causing them huge stress, distress and physical illness, and making them think they are worthless 'human waste' from the social machine.

And I said to him, with deep sadness, that the only other candidate, for the party of Ed Milliband who once came to visit us and on whose knee a rather smaller Rafi sat, represents a party that lacks the courage and imagination to present a credible alternative. She also lives on the other side of the city, which is interesting, for her knowledge of, and relationship with, the people she has now (we know this morning) been elected to represent. Rafi asked if she was going to move here now. I said we should ask her.

I also explained that Uncle Tim, our friend, neighbour and retiring Labour councillor, has spent 3 years being passionately committed to using his position to help his neighbours when they've been in need, to help us make our neighbourhood a better place, and to campaign for issues of justice, local and wider. But just because he's done a fantastic job, that doesn't tell us much about his successor.

I explained that feeling that you have to choose between 4 unsatisfactory candidates/parties is not a 'free choice', and that choosing not to choose is also a choice. It potentially increases, marginally, the risk of a 'more worse' outcome rather than a 'less worse' outcome - but just think what would happen if we all decided to make this particular choice...!

And finally, and most importantly, I explained (the bath water was getting a little cold by this point), that politics has very little to do with voting. The important stuff happens after election day. Some of that is about what the elected representative then does with the position they find themselves in. But so much more - the really crucial political work - is what each of us does, day to day, with the little bits of power and connection and influence we have, on the streets of our neighbourhood, and in how we engage with those in decision-making positions, and how they engage with us.

I don't think Rafi's likely to become a politician any time soon. But I'm very, very glad he's getting political.

#Rev, broken arms & little Easters

So this series of Rev has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, to say the least. We’ve been through the twists and turns of the Church of England’s negotiation of inter-faith relations, same-sex marriage, and some of the harder safeguarding issues us vicars occasionally get confronted with. We’ve laughed – for some of us both knowingly and a little nervously – as the desperately overconfident numbers-driven machinations of the Church’s hierarchy have been laid bare with uncanny accuracy, and treated with deserved irreverence: what parish priest will not recognise a Diocesan strategy-cum-training-programme with a focus closely resembling the inspired ‘IED – Invade, Evangelise, Deliver’?!

But all of this, as the series cantered towards its all-too-early conclusion, receded into the background, became almost mere scenery, as the quite brilliant writers – with an emotional subtlety that nevertheless frequently left us viewers feeling clobbered, winded – brought to centre-stage Adam and Alex’s marriage, his drunken but not utterly unanticipated kiss with Head Teacher Ellie, the clergy disciplinary procedures prompted by jealous Reader Nigel’s formal complaint, and the closure of the ‘failing’ St Saviour’s Church. Plotlines converged, characters and relationships fell apart, in what could be seen, from many angles, as a pretty comprehensive tragedy.

But it’s not simply a tragedy. It becomes entangled, in the final two episodes, in the Church’s journey with Jesus through Holy Week and into Easter. It enacts a Passion, with Adam at its centre: a kiss – and the report to the authorities by a ‘friend’ – which betrays him, another friend who ends up denying he even knows him (with multiple cock references for good measure), a man in power washing his hands of responsibility (the kindly but institutional Bishop who ultimately finds Adam ‘innocent’, but places the burden of the church closure firmly on Adam’s shoulders: ‘if you resign, I can’t save St Saviour’s for you’), and finds Adam carrying a large, heavy, wooden cross through the streets of the city (delivering it to a colleague for a Palm Sunday procession), jostled and jeered at, spat at and wounded, stumbling and falling along the way as he presses on, through the night. As dawn breaks, on a hill overlooking the city, as he dances deliriously (singing ‘Lord of the dance’), Adam is joined by a shellsuit-wearing, tinny-holding, cliché-spouting ‘God’ (in the form of Liam Neeson), to whom Adam confesses, ‘I’m trying to keep something alive but I don’t think I can do it’. Amid the clichés, Adam’s companion reaches out his hand to touch him on the shoulder, saying, ‘We all have our crosses to bear – I understand, Adam, I’ll always be here’. And then he vanishes.

Where does the rollercoaster go from here? I settled in to watch the last episode expecting an ‘Easter’, but having no idea what that Easter would look like, or how we would get there. Adam, collarless, volunteering in the local shop while applying for management consultancy jobs, shows many of the telltale signs of going through a breakdown, while the closed St Saviour’s is boarded up and fenced off ready for the land on which it stands to be sold to the highest bidder. Colin, having made it clear to Adam that what he’s done – destroying St Saviour’s – is up there above the Holocaust on the list of worst things in the world, runs out of the shop clutching handfuls of stolen stuff, including a chocolate Easter egg which he feeds to his beloved dog, Bongo, a meal which proves fatal to his canine companion. Adam retreats to bed, engulfed in grief and God-knows-what-else, half-whispering, half-sobbing the Beatitudes (‘blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’), deaf to his daughter Katie’s crying in the room next door.

It is Alex who finally takes charge, visiting Head Teacher Ellie at school to tell her she forgives her and to enlist her in her plan; and then getting Adam out of bed at 5am in the morning – Easter morning – to take him to St Saviour’s, where all of them – the ‘crowd of lost, hopeless, annoying people’ as Alex later calls them – are waiting for him. He runs away, and Alex goes after him. He must do a ‘last Easter service, a final goodbye’ – not for him, but for them. ‘I’m not their priest any more,’ he protests. ‘You gave up being a priest for Lent,’ she responds. ‘Well done. I don’t blame you. But now we need you back. And can we please finally christen Katie?!’

And so they return to the church steps, keeping vigil around the Easter fire, passing the light to a new Paschal candle, and joining together, loudly, to the uncomprehending annoyance of the neighbours, in the Easter greeting: ‘Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!’ Archdeacon Robert hands Colin a spade to prise open the locked church door, Alex clothes Adam in his robes and dog collar, and Adam prays: ‘Dear Lord, I seem to be back in a cassock again. You won’t let me go, apparently. Is this what resurrection is?’ And they baptise little Katie, by candlelight, and her cries at the shock of the water on her head end the episode, the series, and – will we see it again? – perhaps ‘Rev’ for good.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who was in bits at that moment – and I can still feel tears welling up as I recall it now. Among the many ways in which it struck me, I was left with a strong sense that this was an immensely faithful Easter story.

In what was effectively a ‘series review’ of Rev in the Guardian on Monday, a piece rather strangely written and published before the final episode was aired (and presumably not seen by the author), James Mumford criticises the ‘pernicious’ success of Rev as ‘imposing its own outsider viewpoint’ in its representation of the church, in a way in which ‘the devout do not speak for themselves’. In ‘both a lack of creativity and a failure of representation’, he says, Rev ‘denies the rich diversity of the church in England’, operates on the assumption that faith is ‘purely personal’, ‘not something held in common’, and not ‘transformative’: ‘Perhaps the show’s most wonderful character, the drug addict Colin, is a parishioner Adam is genuinely friends with. But there’s never a question of faith freeing him from addiction.’ Mumford offers a hypothetical plotline from ‘an insider viewpoint’: a woman knocked over in the street, ‘[h]er spine damaged, comes to St Saviour’s and asks for prayer. With low expectations Adam agrees but suddenly she claims she’s been healed and runs down the aisle.’

Now apart from its lack of acknowledgment of the number of ‘insiders’ on Rev’s writing and advisory teams (there are generous handfuls of ‘Rev’s in the credits at the end of each episode!), and the point about comedy that it misses in imagining that somehow Rev’s portrayal of the Church of England should be a bit like the BBC’s policy on party political balance, what really annoyed me about James Mumford’s review is its complete inability to acknowledge faith, personal and shared, as written all over, and under, every moment of drama and comedy in Rev. It’s particularly ironic, in fact, that Mumford was so impatient to criticise the programme that he couldn’t even wait for its Easter morning to come.

My 5 year-old son broke his arm just before the Easter holidays. Well, technically, in fact, he had his arm broken. He’s had no sense of anger at the person who did it, but has been deeply sad about missing the first half of the summer term’s football training. He’s obsessed with football, and when we’re out and about, or just in the back garden, he can’t be restrained from kicking a football about, or even making ambitious sliding tackles on someone else who happens to have the ball. As concerned parents, we regularly have to remind him he’s broken his arm – but because his arm is in a plaster cast, it seems he imagines he’s invincible. Yes, something went wrong, he knows, but nothing further can go wrong now, he reckons.

Plenty of my fellow Christians seem to operate with a faith either of the ‘invincible plaster cast’ variety, or of the hypothetical healing story variety. Resurrection faith is either protection, or liberation, from the tragedies of day-to-day reality. It happens instantly, and it lasts for ever. Easter morning comes, and everything from now on is as bright as the mid-day sun.

But the Easter faith that I know doesn’t work like that. Healing, where I’ve witnessed it, seems to be mostly a life-time of ‘two steps forward, one step back’ (and that’s at the most positive end of the maths). Lots of stuff – trauma from the past, feelings of inadequacy, fears about the future – never ‘goes away’. There are lots of decisions we make, with the best possible intentions and good faith, that seem to cause as much harm as they do good. We feed our beloved dogs chocolate because we know they love it, and then they die. A plaster cast on an arm doesn’t stop us falling off a climbing frame and breaking a leg.

In Hodge Hill, we’ve got into a tradition of keeping our ‘Easter vigil’ on a patch of wasteland, at the edge of our estate, that’s been abandoned for decades. Much of it is knitted with brambles, and a dumping ground for fly-tippers. And we meet there, as the sun goes down on Easter Eve, and we light our lanterns, and we tell stories. Rarely are they stories where everyone lives happily ever after. Many of them are stories which catch tiny glimpses of healing and life and hope, but amidst fragilities and struggles and brokenness that simply don’t go away. That wilderness gathering is a place of lament, as much if not more than a place of hope.

And then we return, the next morning. It is still a thorny, rubbish-strewn wasteland. And all we do is light a candle, and shout – with the same neighbour-annoying loudness of Adam and his friends – ‘Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!’ And then we carry the candle through the streets of our estate, and into church. It gets blown out constantly, by the slightest breath of wind, or by our movement as we walk. And we have to painstakingly re-light it at every stopping-point along our route.

Later in the morning, and on every Sunday throughout the 7 weeks of Eastertide, we pass the light from that Easter candle through our gathered congregation, from person to person – an awkward, sometimes uncomfortably slow, process, clumsily passing on the little flame of one tea-light to the next. And every Sunday morning in Eastertide too, we make a space for people to share their ‘resurrection stories’: again, often in awkward silence, waiting what sometimes seems an eternity to ‘hear to speech’ a few, often quite tentative and stumbling, testimonies to glimpses of healing, forgiveness and renewal amid life’s ongoing hurts, struggles and tragedies.

We still do a fair bit of shouting and singing, but I hope something of what we do is faithful to our reading of the gospel stories of resurrection. A sense that it doesn’t all suddenly turn out right, that fear and bewilderment accompany resurrection, that there are slow, painful journeys of ‘working through’, and that when disciples return to the city with good news, they are also returning to a place of threat, vulnerability and violence, much of which they find they themselves are implicated in. As theologian Shelly Rambo teases out at length, in her reflections on those who live with the memory of trauma, there is a sense in which, even come Easter Day, the trauma of Good Friday remains – the enduring, broken ‘middle space’ of Holy Saturday becomes the space in which we work through what it means for love to also be part of that ‘remainder’. Or, in Adam’s words, ‘you won’t let me go, apparently – is this what resurrection is?’

The Easter morning gathering of the cracked, the broken and the divided, slipping through the prised-open door of St Saviour’s with their Easter candle and a baby to baptise, embody perfectly the shared faith of the Christian church as I know it. Even the Archdeacon is there, leaving aside for the moment his preoccupation with ‘church growth’ – and his preoccupation too, in perhaps a telling parallel, with himself. We know in that moment that Adam has not left the priesthood – has not even yet left St Saviour’s, even though he will do. And although perhaps in this moment the script does not quite do justice to the faith we see – those gathered are united through their belief in Adam, we’re told, even though it is clear that’s far from the full story – we do see in Adam’s ‘grace and anger’ – which his wife Alex saw in him many years before, for which she first loved him, that which makes him a priest – not the saviour of St Saviour’s, but a visible, truthful, authentically humble, doggedly persevering, and quite infectious, resurrection faith. “Blessed are the cracked,” as a recent travelling companion of mine has written, “for they shall give light.”