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ABSTRACT
As the scope of state social welfare is reduced, churches and other faith-based organizations are invited into the public realm to help “plug the gap.” This warrants a theological exploration and assessment of community focused diaconal ministries. Much church-based social action seeks to fill-in or fix a fragmenting welfare system, and therefore it often lacks a distinctively Christian theological grounding. The Church should seek a reintegration of its social ministries and spiritual life. This will necessitate a move away from public action that is symbiotic with the public welfare system and towards a mode that is semiotic, pointing to an eschatological horizon. Against dominant community franchising, service provision, or justice campaign approaches, congregational social action should seek to support neighborhood resilience through the building of what could be called “spiritual capital.”
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Paul Bickley is Research Fellow at Theos. His background is in Parliament and public affairs, and he holds an MLitt from the University of St Andrews’ School of Divinity. Paul is the author of a range of Theos reports on churches and faith-based social action including The Problem of Proselytism, Doing Good Better: The Case for Religious Social Innovation, and People, Place and Purpose: Churches and Neighbourhood Resilience in the North East.
Notes
1 In Anglican Social Theology, Malcolm Brown observes that whatever one thinks of the Same Sex Marriage Act, government could not have been less interested in the Church of England’s perspectives on the goods of marriage.
2 See Brown, Anglican Social Theology.
3 Honourable exceptions include the work of the Centre for Theology and Community, Church Urban Fund, Jubilee Plus (working mainly with NFI churches). On a more academic level, Luke Bretherton’s essential work around religious congregations and community organising is fully theological yet integrated into to arguments about the role of religious congregations. The recent Wells, Rook, and Barclay’s, For Good has been positively. On this last piece, it is notable that even in the work of a leading Church of England theologian there is little explicitly theological work. There is an implicit theological vision, and much rich theological-informed social analysis, but tellingly begins with the statement that “seventy years ago … the state became the church,” meaning that the state took responsibility for the much of what the church used to do. I would suggest that this is a significant overgeneralisation, historically speaking, and in other ways conceptually unfit to bear the load of the subsequent argument. One suspects that different theological components could be gathered from Well’s wider work.
4 Knott, “National Church Social Action Survey Results 2014,” executive summary.
5 Bickley, Good Neighbours, 4.
6 See Bickley, People, Place and Purpose.
7 Office of Budget Responsibility, “An OBR Guide to Welfare Spending.” Accessed May 19, 2019. https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/An-OBR-guide-to-welfare-spending-March-2018.pdf.
8 Cottam, Radical Help, 12.
9 Ibid., 17.
10 Wells, For Good, 17.
11 Beveridge, Voluntary Action: A Report of Methods of Social Advance (1948).
12 Hedley, Rochester, and Davis-Smith, Introduction to the Voluntary Sector, 44.
13 Begg, Mushövel, and Niblett, The Welfare State in Europe Visions for Reform, 7.
14 Collins, Diakonia Studies, 157.
15 This text has some interpretive difficulties, but the overall thrust of its meaning in clear enough. See, for instance, the discussion in Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 857–62.
16 Spencer, Doing Good, 44.
18 See Bickley, People, Place and Purpose.
19 The term emerged initially through the discipline of psychosocial sciences, notably the work of Emmy Werner, a developmental psychologist who followed the cohort of children born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1955. Werner observed that children’s life chances are negatively affected by environmental risk factors (e.g., poverty, family breakdown, or poor education) but also that some children facing those risk factors developed into caring and competent adults in spite of their context. She also identified “protective factors” that seemed to be associated with individual resilience.
20 Tearfund, “Defining Resilience.” Accessed May 19, 2019. https://learn.tearfund.org/en/themes/resilience/defining_resilience/.
21 Platts-Fowler and Robinson, Neighbourhood Resilience in Sheffield, 22.
22 Ibid.
23 It also suffers from low productivity (in 2016, the Gross Value Added per head of the North East Local Economic Partnership area was £19,658, well below the GVA per head of England excluding London – £23,659 – and England as a whole – £27,060). North East Local Economic Partnership, “Our Economy 2018.” Accessed May 19, 2019. www.nelep.co.uk/oureconomy/.
24 Gregory, Skittled Out?, 32.
25 See Plender, After Grenfell.
26 This is a novel use of the term. Matthew Guest has used the term to describe “the flow of [spiritual] influences and resources acquired through the life course” of an individual. See Guest, The Sociology of Spirituality, 181–200.
27 Ford, The Shape of Living, xvii.