Many religious contributions to the realm of public decision-making can seem tired in the trying times that are upon us. They often conflate the flexible life of politics with the resource scarce realm of policy making, advance old models of welfare as fresh sources of hope and drive up public noise without unlocking civic innovation. Increasingly this makes the Churches not only look tired but also predictable. But now that we are facing a decade of austerity fresh ideas need to be born, new ventures built, new institutions for demanding times brought forward if pressing needs are to be met . Whether they come from the private, public or civic sectors ; whether they are hybrids across those divides, they will need new laboratories to discover them, invent them and take them to scale. And the Churches and other faith communities should be part of that reinvention of public service that needs to break through.
This of course is not short term work: In 2006, with now NESTA (http://www.nesta.org.uk/) Director Geoff Mulgan, a few of us published ‘Social Silicon Valleys’ arguing for the clustering of skills and resources to unlock civic renewal. We pointed out along the way that faith based innovations can often grow to a scale well beyond their founding locale. Christian Aid was invented by the British Council of Churches and grew beyond it. The Catholic Womens’ League incubated CAFOD while Traidcraft emerged from St John’s College with Cranmer Hall, alma mater of the new Archbishop of Canterbury. From Vienna to North America banks, mutuals, health innovations and large businesses all have their origins in the ingenuity of religious communities working with colleagues of good will wherever they come from.
The challenge for Churches is that concretising systematic aspirations involves resource, time, the organisation of talent and a form of mission which embraces risk. In the face of such demands it is easier to cry ‘but we do not wish to be utilitarian’. In the process Churches may then feel good but typically reveal that they are not financially or morally literate enough to recognise that their balance sheets and profit and loss accounts say as much about their ethics as their words or their intensely communicated beliefs. How then to reconnect language with practical social responsibility, press releases with concrete renewal and noise with real social change?
When in 2008 I authored Moral But No Compass for the Church of England. The team I led found real signs of hope when it came to social innovation. In particular we came across a Social Responsibility Officer, Canon Nick Ralph, who uniquely among his peers had given up sitting on committees and issuing condemnations of national social policy from his Diocesan desk. Rushing from partnership meeting to partnership meeting he had come to feel as though the Church had become nothing more than a grumpy professional consultation body. So he invented the Rapid Parish Development Programme to help congregations become more enterprising . As those parishes re-wired the way they approached their assets they then needed a specialist kind of support and so Ralph’s Council for Social Responsibility co-founded a social enterprise called Just Ventures which could take on that role both for parishes but also with public and private bodies that wanted to do more for the communities around them. Some of us were so excited about the potential that we got involved. And so last week Just Ventures span out a further social enterprise when Baroness Berridge and Minister for Employment, Mark Hoban MP launched the Cathedral Innovation Centre (www.cathedralinnovationcentre.com) and movement which is focused on unlocking the under-used property and skills of congregations to create jobs . Working with the RSA, university business schools and business it wants to take that vision further. Consequently in our first national initiative Secretary of State for Communities, Eric Pickles MP, will tomorrow announce the first ever £250,000 award fund to seed new ventures founded from, or backed by, congregations and colleagues of any background who are discontented with the present state of our society and employment patterns.
What is at stake here is a theory of how change emerges. Does one rely on economic trickle down by looking to markets , or to bureaucratic trickle down by hurling press releases at stretched ministers? Does one just hope that if enough good people can be dropped off in positions of influence then somehow virtue will prevail thanks to their good example? Or might instead we re-group ecclesiastical and other resources so as to trailblaze new approaches which can then be adopted, copied, refined and built on a greater canvas? Dyson and the Body Shop were not founded on press releases alone, and neither was the hospice movement, the first heart surgery or advances in care for those with the severest of depressions. Neither did they emerge from a clever Cabinet Office project management plan. New Ideas and powerful principles were instead given legs by embedding them in institutions which could sustain them.
As time becomes more pressured, and resources become more scarce, reaching backwards for ideas of social change which served us well under a now broken consensus risks sustaining a luxuriating irrelevance. The models which help us breakthrough to a new social terrain then will instead come from particular instances of innovation rather than general talk of progress. And so conceivably the Church needs to think of itself now not as a moral behemoth holding all before it to account but as the shaper of conversations that would not otherwise happen, the creator of alternative perspectives , the founder of new institutions and ventures to enable such conversations and visions to take root. We need new sparks in the dark not the tired rehearsal of that which has been washed away.
Francis Davis is a member of the Theos Advisory Group, a carer, a founder of the Cathedral Innovation Centre and movement and Visiting Fellow in Civic Innovation at Portsmouth Business School
www.cathedralinnovationcentre.com
@FrancisTDavis
Image by Hampton Roads Patnership from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.
