Welcoming the Stranger Part 2

BE COMMUNITY MINDED

This is part 2 of a talk I gave as part of the Women’s World day of prayer a couple of years ago. If you haven’t read part 1, you might want to – it might make more sense.

We will only move towards welcoming the stranger when our view of community changes.

I visited a number of different congregations across the denominations in my role as Church in Community Advisor with Tearfund. I also was involved in commissioning and facilitating three pieces of research into the relationship between churches and between churches and the local community in different geographical areas.

In many cases the church is or has become community for many of its members. Many find their identity in the church and the church culture. So we identify with people in our congregations who are mostly similar to us – from a similar social background – with similar aspirations and values. So congregational members worship in their church – of course – but they also volunteer there, socialise there and spend most of their spare time there.   The church is then in danger of becoming the equivalent of a club of similar people.  It’s like a group of people who are holding hands in a circle and looking inward.

Of course, as with the picture of the church modelled in Acts it is important that within our church families we support and care for each other. But this is clearly to be a model of open and welcoming community, a community that others will be drawn
to. According to Acts people said – “Look how they love each other”. And “…daily added to their number.” Perhaps this would be a good baseline from which to start. Is this what people outside the church in our local community are saying about us? Do we stop, take time and ask people outside the church what they do think?

For many congregations there may be a need to turn around in our circles and face outward. We need to love one another in churches in a way that compels people to want to be a part of us – no matter who they are.

We need to move from our individual church values to Kingdom values. So we need to work out our Kingdom values in the towns and cities in which we live. Think of the impact this would have.

NB: As I was finishing this off today and reflecting on the recent atrocities in Paris, the Lebanon, Bagdad and earlier in the year in Kenya – it came home to me just how important our view of community is.

It’s not just in the church that we become inward looking. As individuals we spend so much time looking at ourselves and our problems, many of our own making.

In my own life I have learned that the more I do this the more narcissistic and unhappy I become. My “massive” problems overwhelm me leaving me little time, energy or indeed interest in or for other people. My life is the only reality I know – so obviously people must all think like me, have my intellect, my ability, my political leanings and prejudices.

It’s only in the times of reaching out to others in their pain, distress and need and the focus is taken off myself – that things begin to shift. We begin to create new norms of community as we lift our eyes to others. As we develop relationships or better – friendships across barriers, this shift is even greater. These barriers can be many; socio-economic, religious background, sexuality, ethnic, intellectual….and the barriers are often ones of prejudice which comes from lack of understanding.

This is not the time to dig ourselves more deeply into our insular trenches where we will never begin to know or understand those who are different to ourselves. Whilst in Rwanda I had the privilege of meeting a wise retired Bishop who had been put in charge of the country’s Commission for Unity and Reconciliation. His own family had experienced torture, violence and discrimination.

He was involved in the new government for National Unity which came together from opposing factions for the benefit of Rwanda as a whole. He looked me in the eye and he said, “We have taken the more difficult way of reconciliation. We did not ask ourselves, “As Rwandans, who are we? We asked ourselves, who do we want to be?”

So whether it is me as an individual, our church, our community, our country or our world – this is the question to ask. Who do we want to be?

Who is the stranger?

At this time when there is a continual focus on refugees and on migration I remembered that I had done a talk a few years ago for the Women’s World day of prayer on “Who is the stranger?” I thought it might be helpful to share some of my reflections from that talk in a series of posts and I would very much value your input and comments.

 Basically a stranger is anyone who is outside our family circle, friends, church setting. But it is much more than this. In our Christian lives we need to reflect on what the bible says about how we should treat the stranger.

The focus of the bible is on the marginalized and disadvantaged, the hungry, the thirsty, those needing clothes, the sick, those in prison, who have broken the law – done wrong and been caught!

I am speaking mostly from my own experience of working in community with The Link Family and Community Centre in Newtownards for 15 years, and also with Tearfund as a freelance facilitator working with churches over 18 years supporting them through a Church mobilization process.

God has brought me on a journey of working with many strangers. Strangers from churches of many different denominations; strangers who struggled with addictions; strangers who had mental health problems; strangers who were from very different backgrounds (specifically the loyalist community; strangers who had a different sexual identity; strangers who have had many different disabilities; strangers who were from a number of different ethnic minority backgrounds. God certainly challenged my perceptions and prejudices on this journey and took me way outside my comfort zone. However, because of this experience – I have had to look at what is important in enabling me and people of faith to be welcoming.

ATTITUDE

It seems to me that our attitude is at the heart of how we behave towards those who are different to us.

We can have an attitude of “Us and Them” with us being the better, the right, the normal. “Them” would often therefore be the opposite  – not as good, the wrong, the abnormal….

However the bible is clear   –  we are ALL created in God’s image, as equally valuable – God so loved the world John 3, 16

Psalm 139 –  we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

I read Mathew chapter 25 and I noticed one thing  bout the sheep and the goats. It does not moralize about why people are hungry, thirsty, sick, naked or in prison  –   it doesn’t wonder if they deserve it  –   it doesn’t  judge.

I noticed too that the righteous (sheep) on the Kings right   –   don’t even know they have been serving their king   –   they have sought no reward for serving the poor, marginalized and disadvantaged.

There’s a sense that “we love because he first loved us”

We need an inclusive attitude. One that is ready to listen – without prejudice

One that has sensitivity toward people with other opinions and backgrounds.

This can be hard – even when we know that this is what Jesus expects of us – indeed when it is our job to do it.

Here is a story from one of my colleagues in Tearfund who was a church in Community advisor in the South of England.

Last summer one of our homeless guys decided to move on, and to be honest I was glad. He’d been hard work; he’d refused to engage with support networks but continued to demand our attention – loudly! Anyway, I was looking forward to a rest! But when I got into work the following Monday, I was dismayed to find 3 more homeless people, with big dogs and huge backpack, wearing combat clothing on our doorstep! Honestly, my heart sank. They looked like they were trouble. Their appearance said, ‘Clear off. Don’t come near.’ in the way homeless people often seek self protection by looking hard.

 Anyway, I took a deep breath, and went to talk with them when they arrived in the cafe. I didn’t feel I had much choice – it’s my job anyway, and I needed to model this to the other staff members – and I did actually want to serve God in making a positive response to them though I wasn’t feeling very positive about it. When I sat down with them with a mug of tea, I was staggered by their story. Two of them were a married couple who did actually have accommodation after being homeless themselves but they had given it up in order to take the third guy around to all his old haunts and say his good byes to his mates, because he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was unlikely to survive the year. I tell you, that was massively humbling. I wouldn’t do that, and to be honest I didn’t know many people who would, Christians or not. 

 I’ve heard a lot of ‘sob-stories’ in my time, but I believed them. They were genuine people, they didn’t use their story to try to get anything from us which is what normally happens, and they gratefully received the help we were able to give – food and clothing, showers etc. Their gratitude was real and they left us cheerfully, promising to return on their way back. That experience touched me deeply and I have tried to learn from it not to judge from first impressions, but also to try to be more open to where God is already at work so I can join in. 

 I’ve never forgotten that encounter, and have been working at (but failing often) a way of ‘seeing’ people that tries to be open to God’s activity more.

 In that meeting with strangers, I think I met God. It certainly changed me. 

 It certainly changed me. My question to challenge myself and possibly you is; “Do I actually want Jesus to change me?”

Journey in Understanding

The beginning of Thriving for women in Rwanda

Having worked in local Christian community development in Northern Ireland for more than 18 years, I was so interested in what my visit to Rwanda would teach me about how the process worked in a country where poverty manifests itself very differently to here in the UK.

I have reflected on what I saw, the people I met, the concerns they had, what made them laugh and what made them cry and I have come to an unsurprising conclusion. No matter where you are in the world – people are people. They love, they laugh, they cry, they hurt, they get angry. Some are better off than others, some make better choices, some deal better with their life circumstances – but people are people no matter where they live.

Let me tell you two stories: one from Africa and one from Northern Ireland.

Margaret lives in Uganda. The big issue in her community was lack of access to clean water. Women and children spent much of their time walking long distances to collect water and as a consequence children did not go to school and women did not work. The economic situation of families was not good.

Margaret was chosen by her village to train to be a water tank builder. Her husband laughed at her and told her that she would never be able to make a difference – she was only a woman. She was living in a patriarchal society.

So Margaret was trained with the support of a Tearfund partner and helped her village build the water tanks they needed to collect water from the roofs of houses. Things greatly improved as less time needed to be spent on walking to collect water. Children were able to go to school and women able to work in other jobs. The village is beginning to transform.

A sense of belonging

Another Margaret lives in a town in Northern Ireland. She lives on a public housing estate controlled by a paramilitary organisation which exerts control on the daily lives of the people who live there. She is married to one of those who belong to the organisation. She is living in a patriarchal society.

Margaret was trained with the help of a Christian community organisation supported by Tearfund in community leadership. Her confidence and skill grew and she began to understand the difference that she could make in her community. She worked to enable women in the community to come together to learn about their own Protestant identity and begin to understand more of the Catholic community. She facilitated an older people’s group and inter-generational work – finding out the needs of her local community and seeking to meet them. She is now the Chairperson of her local residents association. That community is beginning to transform.

In both these situations there is a long way to go. The poverty might have looked very different, but the issues were the same.

What was I expecting when I traveled to Africa?  Perhaps I had an idealized view of what poverty might look like.

Poverty is never simple. It is a symptom of a series of interlocking factors which conspire to bring people down and prevent them from thriving and flourishing. I don’t always know what issues there are in other poor countries. Is the government corrupt? How much support do people have? What is the attitude to women? How active is the Church?

However, when I started working in local community, coming from a very privileged background, I thought I knew what caused people to be in poverty and had a simplified idea of how they would be able to get out. What I had not thought through was: the complex and unfair nature of the benefits system; that not everyone has the same intellectual ability; that poverty affects mental health as well as physical and mental health saps your energy for doing anything; people in general are not very self-aware and they rarely can see for themselves what might be glaringly obvious to others. (I include myself in this category!!) That’s just for starters. I may also have been getting some of my theology from the media.

God has brought me on a journey of understanding, not just of the needs and issues of the local community, but of my own heart, understanding and prejudices. It has been a steep learning process, painful at times, but also joyful, exciting, rewarding and funny.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to travel to Rwanda and I met some incredible people who taught me a lot about faith, about courage and about forgiveness. But God placed me in Northern Ireland and our fields are just as ripe unto harvest as in Africa. We are equally in desperate need of transformation.

Can I encourage you to go on a journey of understanding in your own local community? It will bring about transformation not only of your community, but of your church and your own heart as God blesses your endeavors. I pray that those in your community would know the love of God through His people and begin to understand that,

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

John 10:10

Flourishing Churches – what do we need?

I have thought about publishing a blog for sometime now, but never quite got round to it.

Anyway I read this article and really wanted to share it as it holds some really helpful thoughts about church growth and flourishing churches. Didn’t know how else to do it – so here it is. Hopefully this will give me the incentive to start posting a bit more in the future.

APPEARING on Radio 4’s Today programme on New Year’s Eve, the Archbishop of Canterbury yet again got people talking positively about the Church of England. One comment stood out, endorsed by the Chief Executive of Barclays (who was guest-editing the programme), as common ground about good leadership: “Where you have a good vicar, you will find growing churches.”

You could almost sense the heads around the country nodding sagely in agreement over their morning coffee. Successful organisations are undoubtedly indebted to good leadership. So the ecclesiastical equivalent becomes an apparently simple equation: good vicar = growing church.

While the logic seems straightforward enough, there is a deeper discussion to be had. To start with, good vicars are necessary, but not sufficient alone, for churches to grow. Here in this wonderful part of East London, I have the privilege of working alongside some of the best clerics I have ever come across – yet, while some of their churches are growing, some are not. This is a pattern you will find repeated in areas of urban deprivation across the country.

I find that the “standard” growth formula of expanding suburban churches rarely works in deprived parishes, where confident and able lay leadership is scarce, upward mobility robs churches of asset bases, and the dysfunctionality of everyday living means that congregations contain a disproportionate number of needy individuals. There are numerous well-researched inhibitors to growth in the inner city – even in the most vibrant churches, and even with the best clergy.

THEN there is the growth agenda itself. On a national level, the Church’s first aim for this quinquennium is “to take forward the spiritual and numerical growth of the Church of England – including the growth of its capacity to serve the whole community of this country”.

In London, we have taken this to the heart of Capital Vision 2020 (CV2020), our blueprint for the next six years. It includes some markers for growth, such as creating or renewing 100 worshipping communities, and increasing the number of ordinands by 50 per cent.

CV2020’s wider focus on confidence, compassion, and creativity is, however, about advancing the mission of the Church in London in other, non-numerical ways, such as deepening our engagement with poverty and inequality, strengthening our work in education, and addressing the worlds of sport and the creative arts.

All of this sets the context of what we mean when we talk about a growing Church: it is only partially about the numbers. Growth cannot be an end in itself. Like the Church, it must serve a higher calling.

That higher calling is what takes us into the socio-political dimensions of human life, to foodbanks and foster-homes, schools and night shelters, credit unions and creative industries. This is about being a Church – and a priest – for the parish, the nation, the world; and it may not lead to numerical growth at all.

Sometimes, the Church may have to lose itself to find itself; to disappear in order to be true to its calling. This idea, based on the theological and Christological notion of kenosis (or self-emptying), suggests that we are called as a Church to give ourselves away. It is a counter-intuitive calling for the Church, not necessarily to grow and be strong, but to be faithful.

IF IT is true that growth happens more easily within suburban contexts, then it is also the case that it follows the natural grain of culture and homogeneity. In other words, like attracts like.

Yet, in an increasingly fragmented and tribal world, perhaps God is calling his Church to create and become communities of difference. If we are to be icons of hope, perhaps diversity is the key, a kaleidoscopic community struggling with harmony.

Growing this type of Churchis, however, hard and counter-intuitive. Networked, homogenous communities (which make up a large proportion of Fresh Expressions) can allow people to opt out of locational responsibilities.

Therefore approaches to mission that focus on network communities can be highly effective, but seriously deficient. Also, an emphasis on growth will be misguided if it adopts only models of homogeneity, because what we grow might not be a fully authentic expression of a Christian Church for a divided world. Ultimately, that simple equation – good vicar = growing church – needs to be nuanced if it is to have real value for us in facing the challenges ahead.

HOW, then, might we frame the discussion about growth and good vicars from this point? I believe that the growth agenda is vital for a flourishing Church, and a flourishing Church is vital for a healthy society. But it cannot, and must not, be growth at all or any cost.

Good growth will have these marks:

• It will hold a priority for the poor (empowering, not paternalistic).
• It will have a tendency to heterogeneity (communities of difference, not similarity).
• It will emphasise the radical (free, but not cheap, grace).
• It will affirm the indigenous (local, not dislocated).
• It will be wired for longevity (deep roots, not shallow ones).

If our recent experiences in Stepney are anything to go by, this sort of growth is possible – far from easy, but possible. It may emerge on a smaller scale than we might like, but it has authenticity and integrity when it does so. What is more, it might just help us know what it means to be a good vicar as well.

The Rt Revd Adrian Newman is the Bishop of Stepney, in London.