“IT MAY not seem like it but, there is always hope.” When Matthew Barber-Rowell was asked in an interview about his key message to his readers, that was his answer. Unlike him, I am old enough to have heard David Jenkins’s 1984 enthronement sermon in Durham Cathedral. It is a tribute to this book that it immediately rekindled my memory of that extraordinarily hopeful occasion — a “space of hope”, if ever there was one — in the midst of the miners’ strike. The Bishop’s words joined rhetoric to detail, and faith to what appeared to be a totally intractable situation.
Although not discussed in this book, Jenkins was deeply involved in the life and work of the William Temple Foundation. He was in every way part of the Temple legacy. Billed evocatively as both an “epilogue” to the Temple tradition and yet as a “prologue” to this book, the account given here of that tradition, and of the ways in which it has been continued, holds together the insights of Archbishop Temple with the question raised for our time by his being an Establishment figure. He was, for all that, an embodiment of the kind of “transformational leadership” that is required for times no less testing than his own or those of the 1984 miners’ strike.
Autobiography is an important element throughout the book, not least in the account of “liminality” in both the author’s personal experience and in society’s challenges. The author is a practitioner in a range of contexts: the William Temple Foundation, Liverpool Hope University, and, as a “transformation officer”, Manchester diocese. It is within that experience that curating “spaces of hope” is both a challenge and an opportunity. The author, founder of the Spaces of Hope movement, is generous in his descriptions of his own liminal times. Readers will surely be led to reflect on their own, as well as on this post-pandemic world of many concurrent crises.
Keen to place his reflections and the William Temple tradition alongside a significant political philosopher, so as to show the place of “intellectuals” in transformational leadership, Barber-Rowell devotes a chapter to the thought of Antonio Gramsci, and ways in which Spaces of Hope reflects Gramsci’s approach in gathering together groups of workers on the basis that all are philosophers. What readers are offered here is an account of the range of inspirations and practices that “radical hope” — hope nourished by attention to roots — requires in a time of such diverse critical challenges.
The book is described as a “political theology of leadership”, although the theological tradition since Temple is not examined. What would emerge about what specifically Christian eschatology has to say about transformation from putting the insights offered here alongside the work of Jürgen Moltmann and the theologians of liberation? In other areas, the book displays enormous erudition, as well as passion. Some of the vocabulary is strained, but the main message comes through.
In his interview about the book, Barber-Rowell expresses a desire to reach “those who are taking part in the existential search that is shaping society and the world today”. For him, that is, by definition, a search for hope and the transformational leadership that it requires. His engagement and reflection, as described here, are in themselves spaces of hope and a source of encouragement not to give up on the search.
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.
Curating Spaces of Hope: Transformational leadership for uncertain times
Matthew Barber-Rowell
SCM Press £40
(978-0-334-085120-4)
Church Times Bookshop £32
