On dirty blogs & messy church

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

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

I want to talk about messy church.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing in the Dust: an Ash Wednesday sermon

When the planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 11^th Sept 2001, Rowan Williams, soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, was in Trinity Church, Wall St, just a couple of minutes’ walk away. He witnessed first-hand the destruction, death and dust all around. But, as George W Bush within hours of the attacks was already talking the language of ‘consequences’ (by which he meant ‘counter-attacks’) and a ‘war on terror’ (by which he meant more violence, destruction and death), Rowan Williams sensed the need for a ‘breathing space’. Some months later, he wrote a little book called Writing in the Dust, with some brief reflections that emerged from that ‘breathing space’:

“in that space there is the possibility of recognising that we have had an experience that is not just a nightmarish insult to us but a door into the suffering of countless other innocents, a suffering that is more or less routine for them in their less regularly protected environments. And in the face of extreme dread, we may become conscious, as people often do, of two very fundamental choices. We can cling harder and harder to the rock of our threatened identity – a choice, finally, for self-delusion over truth; or we can accept that we shall have no ultimate choice but to let go, and in that letting go, give room to what’s there around us – to the sheer impression of the moment, to the need of the person next to you, to the fear that needs to be looked at, acknowledged / and calmed (not denied). If that happens, the heart has room for many strangers, near and far. There is a global hospitality possible too in the presence of death.”

I was reminded of these reflections last week, on Ash Wednesday, as we began the journey of Lent with the story of ‘the woman caught in adultery’, in John chapter 8 (verses 1-11). It’s a heated moment, with an angry mob dragging the accused woman before Jesus, and reminding him (as if he needed to know) that the Law stated she should be stoned to death. Jesus knows they will seize on his response, whichever way he chooses to act. But Jesus, rather than entering into the heat of the moment, bends down and writes in the dust. We don’t know what he writes, but we do know that in doing so he refuses the quick response, he creates a ‘breathing space’, a pause, which allows some of the heat of the moment to dissipate. And then he responds to their demands with an invitation: ‘let the one of you who is without sin cast the first stone’. The question shifts the focus of attention, from the finger-pointing at the woman, to the accusers themselves. And one by one, they all walk away.

Just before our morning service in Hodge Hill on Ash Wednesday, I was painting the garden shed that had just taken up residence in the grounds of Birmingham Cathedral, the ‘Hunger Hut’, which will, throughout Lent, be a place of information and awareness-raising, a place of conversation and prayer, and a place where people can share their stories and pledge their commitments to act, on the desperate issue of food poverty in the UK, where half a million people last year were forced to use Food Banks to feed themselves and their families, and where 5,500 people last year were admitted to hospital suffering from malnutrition.

My hands, when I turned up at the eucharist, were covered in grey and orange paint. There is an old tradition, in parts of the Church of England, that the priest washes his or her hands before leading the Eucharistic Prayer. It’s partly simply a hygiene thing, of course, touching bread that will soon be eaten. But it also comes, I think, out of a concern for a ‘theological hygiene’: a belief that the priest, before touching ‘holy things’ needs to have ‘clean hands and a pure heart’ (Psalm 24:4). As a priest, I have resisted this tradition, more or less intentionally. Nowadays, I think I’m clearer about why. I try to operate an ‘all or nothing’ (or ‘everyone or no one’) policy instead: sometimes, we will all wash our hands, in our prayers of penitence, as the broken body of Christ (the church), before together we touch and consume the broken body of Christ (the bread). But often, we don’t all get a chance to wash our hands, so I’m not sure I should either – at least, not in a ritualised way. It’s particularly clear on Ash Wednesday, when we are all smudged with black, oily, ashy crosses. But each and every time we come to the table, to the eucharist we celebrate together, we all come with dirty hands. Partly because we have deliberately got our hands dirty in the life of the world. Partly because we are fallible, broken human beings and we can’t help ourselves. ‘Let the one of you who is without sin cast the first stone.’

So Ash Wednesday, unfolding into the rest of Lent, offers us a ‘breathing space’. A space in which we can begin to leave behind our knee-jerk tendencies to point the finger of blame at others. A space where we discover that we all come with dirty hands – and in so doing, are able to begin to discover a real solidarity with one another, with our friends, neighbours, and even enemies. And a space where, despite our dirty hands, we are not condemned, but touched with God’s love; where we are given, into our dirty hands, the broken, healing body of Christ.

#EndHungerFast prayers for Ash Wednesday

Let us pray for our neighbours,
for the cross-scarred body of Christ,
and for all creation, saying:
God of life
hear our prayer.

For those among us who go hungry today:
that they may be fed.
God of life...

For those among us who hunger for justice today:
that they may be energised and sustained
in their restlessness to speak and act for change.
God of life...

For those among us who rest in satisfaction and security today:
that they may be unsettled and disturbed
by the calls from the wildernesses.
God of life...

For those among us who are treated as worthless today:
that they may be raised up with dignity and joy.
God of life...

For those among us who work to welcome, listen and support:
that they may be blessed with patience and grace.
God of life...

For those among us who hoard power and wealth for themselves,
and who make decisions indifferent to those they will affect:
that their hearts may be melted by the warm wind of your compassion.
God of life...

For those among us who will seek to keep this Lent
in solidarity with the poorest,
in contradiction to consumerism,
in the compromised, broken middles of our world,
and yet in hope of transformation within and without:
that we will all catch glimpses
of your face in our neighbours, near and far,
of your Spirit in the cracks in our systems,
and of your kingdom taking root and blossoming in our midst,
in Jesus Christ, our brother and Saviour.
Amen.

Hunger, anxiety and labour pains

I read Jack Monroe's blog post, 'Hunger Hurts' in church this morning. Her 'pull no punches' description of life as a mum of a 2-year-old boy, struggling to keep a roof over their heads and a bit of food in their stomachs, when Housing Benefit errors have left her in rent arrears, planning to take the TV and the guitar to the pawnbrokers, and barely a thing to eat:

Now I’m not only in arrears, but last night when I opened my fridge to find some leftover tomato pasta, an onion, and a knob of stem ginger, I gave the pasta to my boy and went to bed hungry with a pot of home made ginger tea to ease the stomach pains. 

This morning, small boy had one of the last Weetabix, mashed with water, with a glass of tap water to wash it down with. ‘Where’s Mummys breakfast?’ he asks, big blue eyes and two year old concern. I tell him I’m not hungry, but the rumblings of my stomach call me a liar. But these are the things that we do.

Read the whole piece. It's harrowing reading - but any of us who've never been in that position need to face the reality squarely in the face:

Poverty isn’t just having no heating, or not quite enough food, or unplugging your fridge and turning your hot water off... Poverty is the sinking feeling when your small boy finishes his one weetabix and says ‘more mummy, bread and jam please mummy’ as you’re wondering whether to take the TV or the guitar to the pawn shop first, and how to tell him that there is no bread or jam.

 Run this up against Jesus' words that begin today's gospel reading, and we have a bit of a problem:

‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?' (Matthew 6:25)

Don't worry?! How can we take Jesus' words seriously? How can we possibly dare to echo them, in the hearing of people like Jack and her young son, when hunger is aching in her stomach, anxiety gnawing away in her guts?

We might, just possibly, find the beginnings of a response in the passage from Paul's letter to the Romans that we heard just before our gospel. In it, we discover an aching, a 'groaning', on a cosmic scale. All creation, the whole universe, is groaning, aching, for liberation. And through it all, God is groaning, aching too. It is no coincidence that the word in Hebrew for 'compassion', and the word in Greek too, are both rooted in the guts. When any of God's children ache with hunger, God aches too, in her guts. Neither is it any coincidence that in the previous chapter of Matthew's gospel Jesus pronounces God's blessing on those who groan with hunger for justice. When we feel compassion in our guts, when we ache for justice and liberation for all created things, we are longing, aching, with God herself.

No one who's caught any news this past week can have missed an open letter, published in the Daily Mirror, signed by Anglican bishops and senior representatives of the Methodists, URC and Quakers. In it, they echo Jack Monroe's story, but underline that such stories are repeated over and over again, across the country:

Britain is the world’s seventh largest economy and yet people are going hungry. Half a million people have visited foodbanks in the UK since last Easter and 5,500 people were admitted to hospital in the UK for malnutrition last year. One in five mothers report regularly skipping meals to better feed their children, and ever more families are just one unexpected bill away from waking up with empty cupboards. 

We often hear talk of hard choices. Surely few can be harder than that faced by the tens of thousands of older people who must “heat or eat” each winter, harder than those faced by families whose wages have stayed flat while food prices have gone up 30% in just five years. 

Yet beyond even this we must, as a society, face up to the fact that over half of people using foodbanks have been put in that situation by cut backs to and failures in the benefit system, whether it be payment delays or punitive sanctions.

 The letter calls on the government to 'do its part': 'acting to investigate food markets that are failing, to make sure that work pays, and to ensure that the welfare system provides a robust last line of defence against hunger.'

But despite the inevitable backlash from those in denial or comfortable indifference, it is not a letter that shifts all the responsibility onto others. It highlights the hundreds of thousands of people who have already taken action, setting up and supporting foodbanks; and it urges people of all faith and none, people of good conscience, to join together in a time of fasting during the season of Lent, beginning on March 5th, when Christians traditionally seek to 'draw closer to our neighbour and closer to God'.

The letter marked the launch of the End Hunger Fast campaign, an invitation to embrace in our guts even a small glimpse of the hunger that so many of our neighbours experience every day: to let compassion, and a hunger for justice, change us; to allow fasting, praying and reflecting lead to speaking and acting for change in our society. Here in Birmingham we're taking on the challenge, siting a garden shed - the 'Hunger Hut' - in Cathedral Square for the duration of Lent, to engage Birmingham's shoppers, workers and passers-by, inviting them to share their own stories of hunger as we gather together a 'Hunger Journal' from across the region, and offering space to write prayers, and make pledges for action. [To find out more and get involved in Birmingham, click here!]

But there is more.

Because when Paul tells the Roman Christians that 'all creation groans', he's not talking just about the ache of hunger. He's talking about a groaning as much in God's womb as in God's guts. He's talking about the pains of labour, of birthing.

I've had the privilege to witness two births. The first, especially, was long, with much pain, and with moments of acute anxiety and fear. There were times when Janey and I thought we might be losing our first child, as his heart-rate plummeted and we saw the looks of concern on the faces of the doctors and midwives present. But in the end, Rafi was born, alive and well, and the gnawing anxiety was replaced with floods of tearful joy.

Something new is coming to birth. It is of a cosmic scale, but we can, at least, catch glimpses of it in our own local neighbourhoods.

In Hodge Hill, we have deliberately resisted setting up a FoodBank so far. Not because the need has not been here, not because none of our neighbours are going hungry. Tragically, there is hunger here, just as in so many other neighbourhoods across the country. But we have wanted to resist simply creating another place where people whose dignity and self-respect has already taken a brutal battering, are forced to queue up, empty handed, for a food parcel that will last them 3 days, wrestling again with that gnawing anxiety, that after three visits even this last 'safety net' might be taken away. I have been involved in setting up this kind of model, and have written here before about its deep ambivalences.

What we're developing here now, inspired by the amazing story of The Stop in Toronto, Canada, is something a bit different. A 'community house' where people can come and grow food together, cook food together, eat food together, and, yes, if they need to, take away some food to help them through the days ahead. But a place that doesn't have vouchers, no 'customers', no labels, no 'handouts' - a place where people are welcomed as fellow human beings with gifts as well as vulnerabilities, where strangers become friends, where all have something to contribute, where loving community is grown, and where the food on the table is for all to share. A place about far more than meeting immediate needs - a place where the hardest questions can be asked about systems that turn a blind eye, and push people to the edges, and allow people to go hungry. A place where people who are used to being silenced and ignored can begin to find their own voices, to speak with courage, and anger, and challenge, and possibility. It will be, I dearly hope, a glimpse of the 'new creation' that, to take Paul's image in the letter to the Romans, is 'coming to birth' in the aching, groaning world as we know it.

Jesus' 'don't worry' is not the first word, although it might just possibly be one of the last. In the glimpses we catch of what is coming to birth, we see a community, a society, where people care deeply for each other, where none go hungry, where gnawing anxiety is replaced by floods of joy. 'Strive for the kingdom of God,' says Jesus. Hunger for it. Ache for it. Pray for it. Act for it. Today, and in the days to come.



[NB. if our 'community house' sounds like something you might want to get involved with yourself, please do get in touch with us - more details here!]

An extraordinary invitation...

Hodge Hill Church Community Houses
Experimenting in Christian community ‘on the edges’

The Invitation

• To come and live – for the medium- to long-term – in one of two ‘community houses’, places of shared life, hospitality, activity and prayer
• To join a wider ‘dispersed community’, within the local area, of Christian disciples and friends, activists and pray-ers, as part of the ‘extended family’ of Hodge Hill Church (an Anglican-URC Local Ecumenical Partnership)
• To get involved with a growing and richly diverse local movement of neighbourhood community-building, which has already developed many fruitful and exciting groups, activities and projects
• To be in on the beginning of this exciting new venture, shaping with us this radical experiment in ‘missional, intentional community’

Where we are

In the diverse, multi-cultural and rapidly-changing parish of Hodge Hill, in East Birmingham, near M6 Junction 5:

• The Old Rectory – on the edge of Hodge Hill Common – focused on hospitality to those seeking space for retreat, prayer and reflection, or a listening ear
• A house on the Firs & Bromford estate – a focus for community-building activities on the estate, with an emphasis on growing, cooking, eating and sharing food with our neighbours

Our Vision

•  LOCALLY ROOTED – committing to being a living presence, discovering God here, in this place, and joining in with what God is doing here
•  LIVING TOGETHER – exploring the challenges and possibilities of sharing a common life together as ‘lived’, or ‘intentional’, community and part of the wider ‘dispersed’ community
•  LOVING OUR NEIGHBOURS – growing ‘infectious’ relationships of compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope; offering and receiving hospitality; joining your own ‘sparks’ with those of your neighbours in the work of community transformation
•  LEARNING AND LIVING OUT A RHYTHM – seeking to immerse ourselves in the different, but equally vital, dimensions of a shalom-shaped life...

o   HEALING & PEACE-MAKING

§  seeking God’s ‘shalom’ (wholeness, peace, justice, and the integrity of the natural world) in our life together, in our neighbourhoods, and in the wider world

o   WELCOMING

§  offering a place of hospitality, and being people who listen, to friends, neighbours and strangers

o   PRAYING

§  growing into, and sharing with others, a spirituality that sustains, energises and inspires

o   DOING

§  taking up opportunities for voluntary and paid work, with local partner organisations, with children, young people and adults in the neighbourhood, and/or seeking to live out our faith in other workplaces in and around the city

o   LEARNING

§  taking up opportunities for learning together, training in core community work skills, and reflecting theologically (asking ‘where is God in this?’) – both as a community together, and with some of our partner organisations

o   RESTING & PLAYING

§  finding spaces to have fun, recharge our batteries, and be ourselves

o   GIVING & RECEIVING

§  finding opportunities to generously share our gifts, time and money with others, and to receive with gratitude the gifts of others

‘BOTH... AND...’

o   Prayerful AND activist

o   Places to live AND places to meet

o   Being community together AND joining with change-makers in the wider community

Practicalities

We are inviting prospective residents to consider:

•  making a medium- to long-term commitment within the community here – and for a minimum of 2 years
• finding a means of earning an income, either locally or within the wider Birmingham area, at least for part of their time each week
• sharing their income within each Community House (or across the two houses), and making a contribution to cover running and living costs (we estimate this to be between £100 and £300 per person, per month)

Who we are

We are a creative local partnership between:

• Hodge Hill Church – a flourishing, outward-looking Anglican-URC Local Ecumenical Partnership passionately committed to ‘Growing Loving Community, in the love of God, with all our neighbours, across Hodge Hill’
• Worth Unlimited – a locally-rooted youth work organisation with national reach, committed to ‘building hope, unlocking potential, realising worth’ among marginalised and excluded young people
• Together, we intentionally pursue a shalom-shaped, ‘asset-based’ approach to community development (‘ABCD’) in our local neighbourhoods, and are already very active on the Firs & Bromford estate, with many youth and community activities revolving around our shop-front space, ‘The Hub’
• The Community of St John the Divine – a nearby Anglican religious community in Alum Rock, with a long-standing link with Hodge Hill, bringing deep wisdom from many years of ‘being community’ together

We also have close links with: 

• The Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education – Birmingham’s centre for training Anglican & Methodist ministers, and many others, both lay and ordained 

• The Midlands Centre for Youth Ministry (at St John’s College, Nottingham) – training and supporting Christians in the skills of children’s, youth, schools and community work  

• The Faithful Neighbourhoods Centre – a place of learning and encounter between people of Birmingham’s many different faiths

What Happens Next?

• Contact us (see below) to find out more and/or to register your interest
• Come and visit us, get a feel for the area, see the houses, and talk and eat with some of us!
• If you’d like to explore things further, we’ll invite you, with others, together for a couple of days of ‘getting to know each other’, reflection and discernment (hopefully in April/May/June 2014)
• We aim to have The Old Rectory ready for its first residents in September 2014, and the Firs & Bromford House ready by January 2015

Sounds interesting?

To explore further, contact:

• Revd Al Barrett
• hodgehillvicar@hotmail.co.uk
• 0121 747 6982  /  07738 119210

Info booklets and application forms available now! Deadline for applications: 15th April 2014.

To find out more about us:

• Our church website: hodgehillchurch.wordpress.com
• Al’s blog:                  thisestate.blogspot.com
• Al’s twitter:              @hodgehillvicar

'Community Resilience' & its redemption?

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

Resilience and human geography

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

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

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

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

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

'Resourcefulness' as an alternative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Distancing' and 'being liked'

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

The image, they suggest:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can 'resilience' be redeemed?

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

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

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

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

'Learning how to die'

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

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

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

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

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

'Community Resilience' & its dangers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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