LIKE all good titles, the four words Faith in the City (FitC)stimulated a range of reflections, questions, and disturbances far more fertile than the prosaic subtitle A Call to action by Church and nation, the report of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas. So there appeared numerous further reflections and responses, rippling out from those four original, suggestive, words: Stay in the City and Theology in the City, not to mention the local versions, such as Faith in the City of Birmingham — and even, to make a particular point, Faith in the City of London!
The title Celebrating Forty Years of “Faith in the City” brings with it a similar range of suggestive thoughts, all of which find expression in the various essays that make up this very worthwhile book. Certainly, this is a well-deserved tribute to the 1985 publication, the vision that caused the Commission to be formed in the first place, the energy and creativity of its members, and, perhaps most of all, the model of attentive listening in meetings held the length and breadth of the nations of the UK.
Yet the 1985 publication is not by any means all that is being celebrated here. The 40 years since have generated inspiration and commitment, and projects and movements galore that are their own tribute and celebration. Even if intense controversy and rejection of FitC represent a somewhat backhanded tribute, it is a tribute none the less — maybe, even if through gritted teeth, we need to pay tribute to Margaret Thatcher, whose ideological fervour was an important ingredient in generating the critical ideas in the report, and even those ministers whose trenchant opposition gave the report legs that it might otherwise have lacked.
The 12 celebrants (yes, 12) whose essays make up the book all speak with the authority of reflection and practice: their essays are all substantial pieces with the capacity to raise issues and deepen understanding.
Given a likely readership for whom the events of 40 years ago will be unknown, Andrew Bradstock’s opening essay telling the story of the emergence of the Archbishops’ Commission and of the report is a very useful beginning to the “celebration”.
Three very different “personal” perspectives follow: Alan Billings writes as an insider to the process with much careful evaluation; Ian Duffield organises his impressions as four phases, a time of anticipation, a period when Faith in the City was dominant for him, a period of disappointment, and then what he identifies as a “life after” phase, which he found gave him reasons to be “cheerful”; and David Walker, the Bishop of Manchester, ordained when the report was very much part of the life of the Church, describes in graphic detail the way in which it has inspired, animated and shaped his ministry.
These three perspectives (in descending order of age) are by people for whom FitC has a real and lasting personal significance. Any reader reaching the end of those essays will sense a question: what part is played by FitC in the lives those who were not part of the period from which it emerged?
The next six essays are the celebratory response to that question. They describe and reflect on authentic ministry in diverse urban settings: John Perumbalath on developments and challenges for Liverpool; Terry Drummond on the variety of responses within the Church of England; and Susan Lucas on the paradoxes and opportunities of the parish and the challenges and opportunities of building relationships — and the call of the Church in the various arenas of “contestation”.
Faith in the City, published by the Church Information Office in 1985
Susan Valentine Cowan writes a radical piece clearly formed by a life lived to a great extent on estates, echoing in her closing comment a deeply challenging quotation from the report: “The unwillingness to provide financial support for estate churches is pervasive and not accidental. It is organised and imposed within our own institutions which represent each of us.”
It is fair to say that this “celebratory” volume resounds with such radical criticism, of which the essay by Angus Ritchie and Averil Pooten-Watan on the very different approach of community organising recalls most strongly the trenchant criticism of the FitC approach by Kenneth Leech.
The book closes with two important reflective essays. Joseph Forde considers the part that the C of E has played in the emergence of the welfare state since the Second World War, basing its thinking on Temple’s “middle axiom” approach, and gently suggesting that there might be some need to re-examine that and also to reprioritise its efforts away from the internal matters that have dominated its life (he is not alone!).
Jenny Sinclair writes as one who, as the daughter of Bishop David Sheppard, literally grew up with the FitC agenda, in a house constantly visited by the illustrious progenitors of FitC (I was a no less frequent if less illustrious visitor), but now, as founder of Together for the Common Good, finds more inspiration in the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, raising, as it does, as searching, if different, a set of questions as those pressed upon Church and society by the Archbishop’s Commission.
Although the editors are to be commended for a really worthwhile collection, like many of its kind it leaves the reader wishing that there had been time from them to reflect together at greater length on what this collection as a whole has to say. Some of the essayists make no secret of their view that FitC reflects too much of the inability of the Established Church — and the Establishment generally — to escape from a propensity for top-down solutions whose inadequacy the past 40 years have made very obvious.
That is, in my view, a very simplistic perspective: we live in a world in which power is exercised, and governments and churches make decisions, and they must expect, and all must accept responsibility to ensure, that they are challenged to do their job better and care for the vulnerable.
The other rather wistful note that comes through at many points is that of the C of E’s decline in membership and influence since the mid-1980s. It is well expressed in a question posed by Walker in his essay: “Would any cabinet minister today feel a church report with which they disagreed merited a sustained public attack rather than simply ignoring it?” Of course.
But might it not be that rather than worry about, and strategise about, that reality, the calling of the Church is to prioritise the social issues with which FitC concerned itself, for the truth’s sake, and for the sake of God’s preferred ones, the poor.
The Rt Revd Dr Peter Selby is an Honorary Visiting Professor in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London. He is a former Bishop of Worcester, Bishop to HM Prisons, and President of the National Council for Independent Monitoring Boards.
Celebrating Forty Years of “Faith in the City”
Terry Drummond and Joseph Forde, editors
Sacristy Press £19.99
(978-1-78959-394-5)
Church Times Bookshop £17.99
