‘Does charity work?’ Challenging the non-profit comfort zone

A number of years ago I was co-leading a seminar at the Greenbelt festival on homelessness. In this context, we knew there was a danger that it would simply be full of people agreeing that homelessness was ‘A Bad Thing’ and that ‘the government should do more’.

So to mix it up a bit, we arranged for an actor to interrupt the start of the session, pretending to be someone who was homeless. After a bit of discontented grumbling at the back of the venue, he walked down to the front, took the mic and explained his situation. He then made an appeal to the 300-odd people in the venue for cash.

We wanted to recreate something of the dilemma and tension involved in responding to someone presenting urgent needs. And it worked. The actor did a great job and created a genuinely tense moment.

Honest discussion

The aim was not to create awkwardness for its own sake but to prompt a more honest discussion about how we respond to human need. And it led to a debate that was far more lively and real than would otherwise have happened.

It also led to people sharing their own stories. One of the people who stood up and spoke was Chris Ward, someone who had spent 3 years sleeping rough and was at the festival with the church which had helped him begin his recovery journey. Chris’ honesty about his own behaviour and what really helped him made a big impression on me and we stayed in touch. (For more see The best speaker at Greenbelt 2011.)

13 years on, Chris is a close friend and we have done countless talks and seminars together and also co-wrote a booklet titled Homelessness: grace, truth and transformation.

Passive consumers

Sadly many conferences and events I go to do not give sufficient time for proper discussion. Often just a few minutes of Q&A are just tacked onto the end of didactic talks. This turns attendees into passive ‘consumers’ who may enjoy a talk but are not helped or challenged to grapple more deeply with the issue themselves.

Underneath this lies a fear of disagreement and an anxiety about grappling with real tensions. Instead of probing and debating, a huge amount of conferences and events stay within an comfort zone of safe acceptability. And comfort zones easily become echo chambers.

One consequence is that this leads to events which are anodyne, safe, and frequently boring. But another is that they fail to grapple with the kind of tensions faced in frontline work.

Authentic discussion

We urgently need conferences, training, podcasts, articles and blogs which do not fall into echo chamber thinking. We need to value far more the challenges of frontline realities rather than aspirational theories or detached theology.

I have been encouraged by the energy and interest provoked by my lecture on Grace, Truth and the Common Good: the future of Christian Social Action. Whether people completely agree with me or not, I have encountered a real thirst to talk about the thorny issues of injustice, dependency and secularisation.

All Things Considered

Following The Church Times publishing the lecture, BBC Radio Wales invited me to go on their programme, All Things Considered, along with Housing Justice and Trussell, the food bank charity, to discuss the question ‘Does Charity Work?’

It is an important question which people in jobs like mine need to be prepared to discuss.

On the programme, hosted by a Baptist church minister, we discuss the key themes of my lecture: how do social action projects relate to politics and policies? How do we avoid deepening dependency? And what is the role of faith? We also speak personally about how we respond to people who are begging.

Inescapable tensions

These are all sensitive subjects – and they all relate in different ways to the tension between collective action and personal responsibility. It’s a tension that is inescapable and one that frontline services have to continually grapple with. How do we provide help in ways that truly help?

This is why I find the dialectic of grace and truth so helpful because it provides a framework for authentic discussion. It helps us avoid the simplistic polarisation to either simply blame the system or blame individuals.

Deeper truth

One of the benefits of faith is that it can anchor us in a deeper truth so that we are not simply drifting with current trends. Faith can provide the wisdom, moral compass and courage to leave the shallow waters of comfortable assumptions and easy agreement and venture into the deeper waters.

This is where discussions can get choppy and challenging but this is what authentic progress involves. We cannot change anything from an echo chamber. What I saw written on the wall of a centre for homeless people is true for everyone: