Better together

Thank you for taking the time to look at this blog. I am a relatively virgin blogger (can you be relatively virgin?) having written just a few blog posts over the last few months in my role as Chair of the Church Urban Fund. In that role I have spent the last year or two travelling all over the country meeting people from poor communities, both those who live there and the professionals who work with them. I have also done a fair amount of reading and thinking on why things are as they are, how they came about, and what the prospects are for changing them.

I have to make clear from the beginning that, as I travel around the country, things look bad to me.  In fact, as I have spoken to groups of people about the issues I am going to blog about I constantly have the feeling that I need to apologise for being a bit of a Jeremiah. From where I stand, we are in a perfect storm. There is no part of our society that is not in some way in crisis: our economy, our politics - the relationship between the citizen and the state - and more generally, the wider relationships with each other in society. It is becoming problematic for people to answer the question “What do I owe to my neighbour?” 

I do not speak for the poor or on their behalf; when they get a chance they can speak rather eloquently and vocally for themselves. I speak as a Christian who believes we have a responsibility to engage with issues of social wellbeing. There is a Christian imperative, which can best be summed up in the statement “that there are no spare people.” God made lots of human beings and they can be very different to each other; they can have some very strange views (as we shall see when we look at the world of economics!) and they can be, on the whole, better or worse in their behaviour towards their neighbour. But none of them are ‘spare’, not least those who are financially, socially and in some cases psychologically disadvantaged in their encounter with others in society. There is a responsibility on us as Christian people to speak and act in ways that reflect the idea of an inclusive society. This has clearly got lost in our society.

So my blogging comes from four places: Church Urban Fund and its ethos of loving, relational action; from a desire to tell some of the stories I hear about the reality of poverty in this country; from on going relationships with people on the ground trying to make the world a better place and then, last but not least, from years of reflecting theologically and biblically on what it is to be a human being in society. I want a society where people are treated with kindness and respect and where there is a sense of human dignity. At Church Urban Fund, this is what our 'Together' campaign is about recognising: the responsibility we all share for each other and that all of us are made whole through our relationships with others.

This is a key moment, because the current economic climate has given us a place to ask some fundamental questions about the state of our society. For some, this is simply a blip in the economic cycle; at the other end of the scale there are those who want to see an end to capitalism. We are somewhere in the middle. We want a fairer society; we want human beings to be considered with dignity, and we want some sense of virtue and morality in the way people relate to each other. We are made to be better together!