Living off the fumes of Faith (in the City)

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Forty years ago, the Church of England published the Faith in the City report which focussed on the plight of the inner cities and urban poverty in the UK.  

The report hit the headlines, generated significant debate and sold 50,000 copies. A key reason was because it angered the conservative government, with one member of the cabinet describing it as ‘pure Marxist theology’ and Margaret Thatcher being shocked by its failure to ‘say anything to individuals or families’.

Church critique

But as well as the political furore, there was also some thoughtful critique of the report from within the church. John Root wrote:

“There is no greater enemy of wholesome moral debate in our society than polarisation into strongly personal, socially conservative responses; and impersonal, strongly political ones. By contrast scripture constantly interweaves personal holiness and political responsibility.”

Root felt this ‘interweaving of the political and the personal’ was lacking in Faith in the City:

“Faith in the City is rightly strong on the collective injustice that creates the misery of UPAs (Urban Priority Areas); but it seriously neglects the effect of personal sins, such as dishonesty, laziness and sexual immorality. If the Church of England is to speak more prophetically to our society, it must learn to unite the voices of collective responsibility and personal transformation. Whilst the report is to be commended for saying unpopular things about the former it has been too bound by ground rules of secular debate to also speak the New Testament’s words of personal rebuke, repentance and re-birth’ (Taking on Faith in the City, 1986)

John Root’s critique continues to be highly relevant. In order to be prophetic, the church must be prepared to transcend the ‘ground rules of secular debate’. Or what we might call today ‘echo chambers’. One of the gifts of faith is the resources and challenge it provides us to forego cultural acceptability.

Faithful Cities

Twenty years after Faith in the City, a Church of England commission produced another report on the state of urban life, Faithful Cities. It is barely remembered because it failed to rouse much interest in either the government or the church. 

It had little that was distinctive or prophetic because it played it safe and stayed comfortably within ‘the ground rules’ of liberal acceptability. It contained interesting sociological analysis but failed to say anything compelling about church growth, evangelism or personal transformation.

A dialectical approach

Following criticism of the Faithful Cities report in the C of E’s General Synod, I was asked to join a working group charged with ‘going deeper’ into the theology and practice of urban mission. The group would later publish a book titled Crossover City to which I contributed two chapters, but I found the whole experience deeply frustrating.

As part of the process, I developed this chart to illustrate the siloed divisions manifested in the discussions the group had:

The point of the diagram was to highlight the theological silos that the church often stays locked within. Too often, these different emphasises are used as a basis for tribal argument or a reason to dismiss each other.

Instead we should understand them as illustrating the dialectical nature of Christian theology – that embracing divine truth involves holding contrasting emphasises in tension.

Christians believe that God is both transcendent, wholly other from creation, but also immanent, a God who is ‘with us’ whom we can know as a Father. We believe in both the truth of the incarnation of Christ and the atonement brought about through his death. We believe in both a personal encounter and a social witness. We believe in both conversion and a journey of faith, of both right belief and right action, of social justice and personal morality, of both tolerance and distinctiveness.

To all of these aspects of theological truth, the orthodox Christian can say ‘I believe’.

Richest theological resources

This dialectical nature of truth is Christianity’s great strength in being able to engage with and minister to human need. These tensions embody the richest theological resources we possess.

In the 1980s, Faith in the City created a debate because its messages ran counter to the prevailing political direction of Thatcherite Britain. In an age when society was becoming increasingly emphasising individualism and wealth creation, it said something distinctive and provocative about urban poverty and social justice.

Complacency

But twenty years later, Faithful Cities did not provoke debate because it failed to challenge in the different way that was required at the height of Tony Blair’s New Labour government. Essentiallu, it was living off the fumes of Faith in the City rather than generating a fresh challenge for that era.

And my concern is that today too many organisations social action organisations are continuing to live off similar fumes. There is too much nostalgia and not enough hard thinking about what urban mission needs to look like today.

At too many social action conferences and events I have been to over the last 20 years, there is a complacency that the liberal emphasis is ‘simply right’ and a dismissal of more conservative perspectives. Too often, those whose focus is on the red side of this chart can look with condescension on the blue side as simplistic and naive. Almost as if anything too personal is just a prelude to the enlightenment of embracing a deeper, social understanding. It is a key reason why the world of ‘urban theology’ is almost dead.

At every level the Church needs to grapple with the theological tensions and avoid ‘silo theology’: the national Church in its messages and writing of reports, local congregations witnessing to their community, the Christian organisations seeking to make a practical impact, and each of us as individual believers. This is the truth of the gospel in action.

Personal but never private

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s, was a significant influence on the creation of the Welfare State following WW2. He did more than anyone for Christianity’s social impact, and yet he said this:

‘If we have to choose between making men Christian, and the social order more Christian, we have to choose the former, but there is no such antithesis.’

Temple was right: personal and societal change are so interrelated to be inseparable – but he also recognised their order of dependence on each other.

For the gospel must transform individuals if it is to transform society. The Church’s social and political impact is derivative because it ultimately relies on people’s encounter with the risen Lord Jesus and being willing to participate in communities that express this belief. Authentic faith is always personal, but never private.

Going deeper

Neither individuals or organisations should complacently live off the fumes of the past. The challenge to us all is to go deeper in the places where we are shallow. Those who are intrinsically liberal need to be prepared to say things which are construed as conservative. And those who are conservative need to risk saying which others may define as liberal. This is how we break the silos we get stuck in.

This means being brave and taking risks. It may mean losing friends and cause offence, just as Jesus said it would (Luke 21:12-19). But it is here, in this tension and synthesis, that the gospel of Jesus comes alive. And it is here that the Church rediscovers its role and power to transform our broken world in Jesus’ name.

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Text of 2025 Hook lecture in Leeds: Prophet or Provider? Speaking with a prophetic voice whilst serving the needs of the marginalised.