DURING the past two decades, there has been huge growth in initiatives such as street pastors, debt centres, foodbanks, pantries, community supermarkets, night shelters, and warm hubs. Especially since 2010, the policies of austerity have led to a boom in Christian-led social initiatives.
This expansion might be evidence of a growing Christian social conscience, but the growth of such initiatives poses important questions: Has enthusiasm for social action led the Church to become a handmaid of the State, propping up an unjust system, filling in the gaps caused by its negligence? Have these projects been effective at reducing poverty in sustainable ways? Have they been an effective way of witnessing to the Christian faith, or has social action secularised the Church?
I believe that the growing levels of poverty, homelessness, and destitution in the UK, and a newly elected Labour Government, mean that we find ourselves at an important crossroads. We need to be both confident about the importance of Christian social action and be self-critical about the consequences of what we are involved in. Sin, even unintentional, plagues all human endeavour, and our social- action efforts are not exempt.
I see these three issues as the key challenges that we face.
First, the disconnect between charity and justice. The Brazilian Catholic Archbishop Dom Helder Camara famously said: “When I give bread to the poor they call me a saint. But when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.” It’s a quote that captures the inescapable tension between charity and justice.
As church-based social projects have grown, it is common to hear people describe them in terms of “social justice”. But social action and social justice are not the same thing, and most Christian activism is within a charitable framework: people giving their time and money on a voluntary basis to benefit those in need.
Such charitable approaches are often applauded by those with social and economic power, because they do not call for more radical and fundamental change. In fact, power dynamics can be reinforced and enhanced by charitable work. Jesus spoke about this in Luke 22.25: “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves benefactors. But you are not to be like that.”
We need to ask how the growth of social action connects to questioning the underlying social and economic systems that create such need in the first place. The underlying commitment must be to a more just system.
The past 15 years have brought about a whole host of new church-based homeless charities — but there are the most people homeless in temporary accommodation since records began. After a reduction during Covid, rough sleeping rose by 27 per cent last year and by 28 per cent the year before. These figures reflect the fundamental structural injustice of the UK housing market and our broken housing system.
The Church must avoid becoming the handmaid of the State, running around filling in gaps caused by government neglect. We must not be seduced by the lure of feeling useful and settling for the transactional approaches of welfarism and of “projects” that just provide handouts. This is not social justice.
We can find inspiration in the deep roots of our Judaeo-Christian tradition to call for the relational justice of the common good. We need to focus on those elements of justice which go beyond “increasing benefits” and provide a platform for mutuality and responsibility: fair and affordable housing, decent jobs, and proper investment in education and retraining. True social justice enables people to find self-respect, dignity, and purpose.
THE second challenge is dependency: the disconnection with empowerment.
The hard truth is that not all responses to poverty are helpful or effective in addressing the problems. A huge amount has been learnt in the past few decades about what helps Majority World countries overcome poverty. The book Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo argued powerfully that “aid” given from richer countries actually served to disempower economies and deepen poverty.
We have to grapple with similar challenges in our response to poverty. The US Christian activist Robert Lupton argues in his book Toxic Charity that, too often, social action deepens problems by creating dependency and destroying personal initiative: “When we do for those in need what they have the capacity to do for themselves, we disempower them.”
Lupton makes an important distinction between crisis situations and chronic problems: “We respond generously to stories of people in crisis, but in fact most of our charity goes to people who face predictable, solvable problems of chronic poverty. An emergency response to chronic need is at best counterproductive and, over time, is actually harmful.”
This is a problem in Christian responses to poverty in the UK, too. The “crisis” approach is easy to fall into, because projects that provide a one-way exchange are straightforward, easier to set up, and popular with volunteers. But, over the years, I have been increasingly concerned to visit day centres and churches where armies of well-meaning middle-class people are running around serving people who are turned into passive recipients.
Empowering people is harder, but far more important. I have come to believe that running a class to help ten people cook for themselves is better than giving out free food to 100 people.
And the biggest need in homelessness is not to give away more resources, but to help people to maintain their accommodation, pay their rent, and use their skills and strengths. We need to shift towards a more empowering way of working.
A key problem is that we have dependency and negative incentives baked into our welfare system. Housing benefit, particularly, disincentivises people from working and creates the “benefit trap”, whereby people are better off not working, or end up taking cash-in-hand work. As Frank Field argued, this kind of benefits system is “a full frontal attack on a working-class moral economy that believes in work, effort, savings and honesty”.
When Field was Minister for Welfare Reform in the Blair government, in the late 1990s, he proposed a change from a means-testing to an insurance-based system. I believe that the failure to take forward these proposals is an enduring tragedy in social-policy history. Such a radical re-wiring would have undoubtedly been hard, but the context of the large majority and an economic boom was the moment to implement such change.
THE third challenge is secularisation: the disconnection from faith.
One of the constant challenges that I have worked on in the past 20 years is how Christian organisations and projects maintain an active connection with the faith that gave birth to them. The homeless sector is packed full of agencies that used to be Christian.
Sometimes faith fades because of a lack of passion or confidence. Sometimes, it does so because of fear about what funders think. Sometimes, it becomes fossilised when a charity’s founding inspiration and charism is neglected.
So, rather than something dynamic and creative, faith often becomes just a slightly embarrassing footnote in the history of an organisation. The fruit becomes separated from the roots from which it has grown.
The missionary theologian Lesslie Newbigin has been the most significant influence on my thinking. As a student in the 1920s, he volunteered on a mission to help unemployed Welsh miners; the work had a strict liberal ethos, which excluded any religious elements. But Newbigin writes in Unfinished Agenda (1993): “as the weeks went by, I became less and less convinced that we were dealing with the real issues. . . these men needed some kind of faith that would fortify them for today and tomorrow against apathy and despair. Draughts and ping-pong could not provide this. . . they needed the Christian Faith.”
Newbigin wrote a huge amount of wise and insightful theology, but the phrase “draughts and ping-pong could not provide this” has stayed with me.
IN 2013, the secular research agency Lemos & Crane conducted a survey of homeless people, which found that issues of faith and spirituality were very important to many of them. Its report, Lost and Found, said that the “secular orthodoxy” of the homeless sector more reflected staff perspectives than those of the homeless people themselves. The author, Carwyn Gravell, was an atheist; so this could not be dismissed as Christian propaganda — and this was independent evidence of the deep relevance of faith and spirituality.
To use Paul Bickley of Theos’s milk metaphor, we do not have to “skim out” the faith element of social action. In fact, some of the most exciting work is happening where there is a “full-fat” approach.
I have spent most of my working life at the skimmed and semi-skimmed end, but I felt called to work for Hope into Action because of the organisation’s full-fat approach. We make no secret of our enthusiasm for integrating passionate faith within a professional working practice.
Faith in Christ is our engine: it’s what motivates staff to work for us and people to invest in our houses, and it’s what motivates churches to offer friendship and community to our tenants.
And faith is so relevant to the recovery journey that so many of our tenants are on. Last year, more than 60 per cent wanted to be prayed for, and 16 got baptised or made a formal commitment to Christ. As one tenant said recently at her baptism: “I am a recovering alcoholic, 509 days sober today. The Lord did not give up on me. He saw fit to help me rebuild my life. He gave me a safe home to live in, support from Hope into Action and the generosity of Portsmouth Christian Fellowship. I owe my life to Jesus Christ and I ask that you all bear witness to my declaration of faith in him.”
Testimonies like this show how relevant faith is to the problems that we seek to address. And it should never mean that we are not professional: in June, Hope into Action was one of five agencies to win an Excellence award from the national body Homeless Link.
I believe that these issues — the disconnect with justice, the problems of dependency, and secularisation — are the three key challenges. Christian social action may have grown, but it needs to mature — and I believe that a practical theology of grace and truth is what we most need.
Jon Kuhrt is the chief executive of the charity Hope into Action. hopeintoaction.org.uk
This is an edited extract from a lecture that he gave last month at the London Jesuit Centre, hosted by Together for the Common Good, in memory of Frank Field (Obituary, 26 April). Read the full text here, watch a video here, or listen to a podcast of the lecture here.
togetherforthecommongood.co.uk