THE Sunday before last, church felt pointless. I woke up and checked for news from the Synod: first, a motion concerning justice for Palestinians wasn’t even selected for debate. Then the General Synod voted against redistributing one per cent of the Church Commissioners’ wealth to diocesan stipend funds, instead amending the motion to debate funding later (News, 18 July).
It is hard not to see this as the sensible adults, who also happen to control all the money, telling poorer churches to die quietly. Justice delayed is justice denied, and poorer parishes have long worked miracles with just a few loaves and fishes. Yet, denial of justice did seem to be a theme. The Revd Dr Ian Paul, of the Archbishops’ Council, insisted that “finance reflects spiritual reality” — a plainly offensive echo of the so-called “indolent poor”. But it was another who really took the biscuit.
The Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Revd Philip North, is known for his resolute defence of the working class (News, 27 February 2024). Yet, if he and I ever discussed such matters, we might initially talk at cross-purposes, until realising that we needed to define our terms.
THERE are many competing ideas about social class, each considering some combination of culture and resources; but, too often — and even in Bishop North’s approach — the emphasis falls on the cultural. But culture is shaped by material conditions, and failure to recognise the centrality of economic questions will inevitably lead to a failure to understand cultural ones.
I was raised on a council estate and was eligible for free school meals. I have experienced extended unemployment, depending on £350 a month and the kindness of already stretched friends and family. Yet, because I went to university, do not speak with a regional accent, and believe that Nigel Farage and Reform UK are a plague on society, some still deem me out of touch with the working class. But am I not working-class? Are voices like mine not worth hearing simply because we do not fit some cartoonishly monolithic idea of the working class?
I have great respect for the care that Bishop North consistently gives these topics, but this has always been where we have parted company, because, at the Synod debate in York, he sounded less like an ally and more like a Dickensian villain: “I don’t want no-strings subsidy for the diocese of Blackburn because that would encourage torpor and disincentivise missional imagination.”
Torpor. Where had I read that word before? I looked it up: “Torpor: the state of not being active and having no energy or enthusiasm.”
And then I remembered: Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Why, after 200 years, are we still behaving as though the poor know nothing about their own poverty and are too lazy to learn, anyhow? What is it about those of us actually experiencing poverty which means we’re still treated like holy fools at best, and clueless undeserving leeches at worst? And why, why does our language still echo with the eugenicist logic of the 19th century?
Torpor! How dare you? My family and I have laboured, sometimes up to 85 hours per week, in dead-end, minimum-wage jobs, not because we “take pride in paying [our] own way”, as Bishop North suggests, but because we have no choice.
To be clear, there is no meaningful distinction here between needy churches and needy individuals: poor churches labour in poor communities. They have no money for the obvious reason that their parishioners have no money. Yes, some may display remarkable missional imagination: I’ve never been to an HTB-style church-plant that incorporated the horizontalism of Ernesto Cardenal, the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, or the liturgies compiled by Cláudio Carvalhaes.
But the gospel is not an M. Night Shyamalan movie: restricted funds do not facilitate creativity. Creativity stems from the necessity found within the communities in which these churches labour, not in the fact that the churches themselves cannot afford to heat the building or pay enough staff. Churches are just as creative when properly resourced, and can do a lot more with those resources than richer churches ever could.
THE disparity between richer and poorer churches is stark. One I knew in a deprived area suffered its third break-in in two months, at about the same time as another church in a well-off neighbourhood near by was bequeathed a substantial six-figure sum. Both did great work in their communities, but I could not help thinking that even the fraction that the latter spent on a new door could have replaced all the electronics stolen from the former. “Missional imagination” did not enter into it.
Just this month, many in the diocese of Birmingham were surprised to hear that seven churches, almost all Evangelical, would share £5.7 million for “church plants and revitalisations” (News, 11 July). If funding stays like this, the C of E will cease to be “a broad Church”, if a Church at all. It will keep retreating from working-class communities while the rich snap up assets to rent back at extortionate rates, with no Church left to support or challenge. Working-class pride will not change this.
The real work of the Church happens on the ground: those committed people who turn up, day after day, doing the work of the gospel. They do not always get it right, but they are there. How much more could they do if they were properly resourced?
Adam Spiers is an educator and freelance journalist.