That the churches will play an ever greater role in the provision of public services over coming years is not exactly news. Governments of all colours have been playing footsie with “faith groups” for at least two decades. The fact there is no money left in the pot is making their wooing all the more passionate.
A new report by the think tank ResPublica helps explains why this is not just necessary but in fact a rather good idea. The nation needs, what the authors colourfully call, “a new institutional architecture”, a way of addressing addiction, poverty, exclusion, inequality, social immobility and all our other social ills, without simply relying on ineffective government intervention or the false promises of the market.
Institutions, the report argues, are the answer (or at least a major part of it) and the churches are central to that answer. They have the people, in spite of the narrative of congregational decline. They have the will, because of the faith that motivates them. And they have the experience, as many of them have been educating, rehabilitating and pastoring for years.
The report makes great play of the fact that the Church of England, which is its real focus, is particularly important to this endeavour, embodying three key elements. It is local: not only does is have a branch in every high street, so to speak, but the vast majority of its staff and customers live in the ‘parish’. It is bespoke: locally-rooted and staffed by people who are aware of immediate, community nuance. And it is holistic: unlike state provision, which is necessarily delivered in silos, Christian care is for the whole person.
So far, so uncontroversial: even the church’s critics recognise that its congregations do enormous good across the country, often where it is most needed. What the ResPublica report adds to this is the emphasis that Christians can (and should) do this as Christians.
Put this another way: it remains received wisdom, certainly among religion’s cultured despisers, that the price of entry into public life, and particularly public service, is a secular uniform. You may want to feed the hungry, house the homeless and clothe the naked because of what your crazy, Bronze Age scribblings tell you, but if you are doing it as part of public service today, you need to shed the religious robes (and ideally the piety too), and wear a smart secular suit, while speaking secular Esperanto, that strange modern language that is, apparently, understood by all “reasonable” people. The irony of this is not hard to spot. By all means fight on, brave Christian soldiers, setting up food banks and debt crisis centres, just don’t do it as Christian soldiers.
On the face of it, the ResPublica report concurs with this. At the launch at Lambeth Palace on Wednesday night, there was a lot of talk of proselytism, and how bad it was, and how the Christians interviewed for the project denounced it. They didn’t want to force their faith down anyone’s throat, still less use their soup kitchen as a cover for an Alpha Course.
But ‘proselytism’ is a boo word. No one thinks it’s a good thing. As soon as we use less prejudicial language, a more positive and interesting story emerges. Those believers who did not seek to proselytise did not, at the same time, feel they needed to join the National Secular Society’s supporter network to do what they were doing. On the contrary, they were not going to hide their “religious motivation”, not least as it was precisely this motivation that led them to pick drunks out of the gutter on a Friday night.
Instead, many of the organisations adopted ‘codes of practice’ whereby volunteers undertook “not [to] talk about their faith unless asked to do so by the person whom they are serving.” This is the practice that has been adopted by the hugely successful Street Pastors initiative, whose volunteers are to be seen outside pubs and clubs across the country every weekend: never initiate a faith conversation; just respond to them. It was also the tactic used by Jesus, whose actions provoked some questions, and much anger, among his contemporaries. It’s not a bad model to follow.
This is surely the way forward. Public money should not be used to evangelise, still less proselytise. But nor should Christians (or any other religious group, for that matter) be required to engage in a kind of secular limbo dance in public, squeezing themselves under some arbitrary bar of “reason” just because “the reasonable” people in society easily do so.
Rather, they should be allowed, encouraged, to do what they do for the reasons they do it. This is not only the most fruitful way, refusing to cut off the religious roots that nourish the plant. It’s the most honest way, too.
If secular groups are worried about this, it might be because they are anxious that those whom such groups serve will find the reason for their service (whisper it: the love of God) actually intriguing and attractive. And if this does worry them, the response is not to ban such activity, which benefits no-one, least of all those in most need, but to get out and set up a few drug rehab centres themselves.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos and was on the Advisory Board for ResPublica's report, Holistic Mission
Image from flickr.com by Tim Abbott under the Creative Commons Licence.
