Reflection from Revd Helen Cameron, Moderator of the Free Churches Group
I was glad to be sent a link to the report from Coventry University sharing new research called ‘Life on the Breadline: Christianity, poverty and politics in the 21st century city’ in the form of a report for Church leaders in the UK.
The report is available to read and download here.
This has been written for Church leaders across the UK to support Christian responses to poverty and to develop more effective anti-poverty responses. Importantly, it is about Christians responding to poverty experienced by people of any or no faith, not simply Christians working with Christians.
Life on the Breadline was a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council that from 2018 analysed the nature, scope, and impact of Christian engagement with poverty in the UK in the context of austerity. The research team combined three theologians (two of whom are former colleagues of mine) – Dr Chris Shannahan (project lead), Professor Robert Beckford, and Professor Peter Scott – with Dr Stephanie Denning as a social scientist, and it has been the most in-depth empirical theological analysis to-date of poverty in the UK. The research included interviews with over 15 national church leaders in the UK, an online survey with over 100 regional church leaders, and six case studies with Christians responding in differing ways to poverty in London, Birmingham, and Manchester.
On the project web-site you can find the report and as well a toolkit for churches, an anti-poverty charter and an austerity time-line, a Lent course written for 2022 but adaptable for Lent 2024. In addition to these resources, there will be further resources published later this year for theological colleges, for students to engage with as part of their ministerial formation.
The Church, with its provision of foodbanks and warm spaces in cities, towns and villages, has become an increasingly important player in the societal response to the challenges of poverty and continued austerity. This social capital possessed by the Church might be harnessed further if the Church took its vocation as prophetic community more seriously. The report contains a powerful challenge to consider government austerity as not just a political process but also “a form of social sin requiring a deliberate, direct, political and theological response”. The relationship between the Church and politics is a contested one: the report suggests that “political theology is integral to the prophetic mandate of the Church”. We are invited to critical reflection “to confront and overturn unjust policy, which leads to or maintains impoverishment”.
The report writers and researchers suggest that the development of A Kairos document Against Poverty could help church leaders “to develop a holistic, systemic and intersectional theology of poverty in the way that the 1985 Kairos document confronted the injustice of the church’s response to South African Apartheid and enabled an articulation of a theological and practical commitment to liberation by the Church.
There is clearly a range of different approaches and modes of engagement adopted by a variety of churches and Christian NGOs. These are identified in the research as “caring”, “campaigning”, “advocacy”, “social enterprise” and “self help” approaches but these kinds of engagement are not closed and several approaches might be deployed by the same Church at the same time. Two case studies highlighted, Hodge Hill in Birmingham and Inspire in South Manchester highlighted a distinctive approach of “long-term incarnational solidarity and an asset-based community development approach”.
Participants in case studies and a number of Church leaders who were interviewed highlighted two examples of Jesus challenging poverty. In Mark 12:30-31 Jesus summarises the Commandments and called his hearers to, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength..” and “Love your neighbour as yourself”. Participants also identified Matthew 25: 31-46 as a key text where Jesus suggests that when people feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and clothe the naked they welcome, feed and clothe Christ himself.
How such approaches undo or address and transform social injustices in order that our caring does not leave systemic poverty untouched needs to be a challenge to us all. The report suggests that the Church, so far, may have left the causes of poverty unmet.
So, how might the Free Churches Group, with a wide and diverse membership reflect together on this challenge? Among us we have quite a range of responses to poverty, differing theologies of poverty and ecclesiologies.
How might our different voices, all of them, be heard in the public square?
How might we overcome our hesitancy to work together for proactive action for social change? Who might we work with collaboratively – wider networks such as the Joint Public Issues team, Church Action on Poverty, the Poverty Truth Network, the Trussell Trust or Citizens UK, the Breadline team?
I am grateful to the authors of the report for sending the link to the report my way. I continue to reflect on their invitation as to how God’s preferential option for the poor might be translated by local churches and by denominations into “contextualised responses to poverty that are characterised by an ethic of empowerment, affirmation and solidarity”.
Revd Helen Cameron
Moderator of the Free Churches Group
Images from Aaron Doucett on Unsplash and Life on the Breadline website.