Two articles about the ‘city’

Two old articles about the ‘city’ – On Finding Faith in the City (1987) and Images of the City and the Shaping of Humanity (1989) – are published again today on this blog.

Why bring these two old articles about the ‘city’ out of the shadows just now?

The Grenfell Enquiry, or rather the Disaster itself, brings into view all the components of the ‘city’, the embracing complex human society which enables and disables human living. Agencies from top to bottom, which we can see are helpful when they work together adequately, produce catastrophe when they don’t.    

The key question is not so much Who failed? Who is to blame? but How to do better? and Will we, not they, do better?   

Faith in the City (1985) arose from wide-ranging concerns about the state of our society. UPAs (Urban Priority Areas) were found all over the place, but they served like the blackened-whitened Grenfell towers to focus the failure of the city at both local, parochial, and national levels.  

The report analysed the trouble. But it was driven by the hope that we could do better.  The Church gave voice and promised localised active commitment – and challenged people and government sharply enough for some to denounce the report as Marxist. It did bear fruit – locally and nationally. We were engaged in the ecumenical Leeds Community Project. And Barnardos were inspired to inaugurate their Churches and Neighbourhood project which gave Hilary a job for ten years, and it continued afterwards, led later by Tony Parry, now the Bishop of New Testament Church of God in Yorkshire.   

I was enthused by all this – hence these papers, and other things I said and did then. It affected my teaching, I remember I put on an MA course on Local Church and Social Responsibility. I felt I was swimming with a strong current.   

Faith in the City seems to me a final flaming of the dying star of the post-1945 consensus.¹My view of the making and meaning of the ‘consensus’ has been shaped and chastened by Paul Addison, The Road to 1945.  The Epilogue, in the second edition, 1994, (pp279-292) is specially relevant. By the 1980s, some were determined to have done with it. In that context, the burst of hopeful activity sparked by Faith in the City did not signal any great, well-founded renewal of society. Labour in 1997 made significant valuable changes before it collapsed, via Iraq and financial crisis, leaving us with the coalition of austerity. So we came to Grenfell in 2017 and now we know it was not an accident, but was predictable, all its deaths ‘preventable’, the fruit of glib faith in de-regulation, ‘freedom-from’ for some, rather than ‘freedom-to’ engaging all.  

Grenfell is not just a London failure. We have rotten-clad buildings in Leeds.

And in many public services and badly regulated commercial businesses there is bad practice, bad outcomes. Individual and corporate consciences are unheeded, go soft through being ignored and laughed out of hearing by the power of profit.  

And the openness of Church to the idea of Faith in the city has not been sustained. There are occasional gestures.  Some people in church engage enough to get their hands dirty and wear themselves out working in the world. But at least in the church I know, it is possible to live in church without being disturbed by the call to serve more widely. We pray for the world, in words, but not in costly projects, let alone in hard thinking and argument. Church is struggling to keep itself going as a religious minority, seeing that as its task, and as though it does not have a call to go about in the world doing good.   

William Temple was the wartime Archbishop of Canterbury, who wrote the popular Penguin, Christianity and the Social Order (1943). It should still be read and built on in my view. Could anything like it be written today and get so many readers, boosting the vote for change in 1945 with a profoundly Christian-human vision and commitment?   

Faced with our society and world today, do we too easily give place to ‘weak resignation to the evils we deplore‘? (a hymn I never get the chance to sing nowadays.) Are we near to living in the security of a covenant with death (Isaiah 28.14-22)? 

The Grenfell enquiry has taken seven years. There is still much known cladding that is unremoved. Prosecutions will take years, and reforms need time, if they are indeed possible. Inertia is another strand in the ‘brokenness’ of our society.

So perhaps it is simply nostalgic to republish these articles. They lived in a context that is now ancient history for many. They had meaning then as they shared in a living conversation, now do they not fall as words without context, without tentacles? I would like them to be heard and felt as a challenge and encouragement today, offering some clues about what needs to be done now, if we are to get beyond feeling broken, beyond merely waiting for government to ‘deliver’ as though that can be done without the people coming together with vision and resolve to join effectively in doing something useful together.

I think of Britain in 1940, and Churchill’s speeches and leadership then. People were waiting to be rallied – he helped at a crucial time, people got a sense of what had to be done, and what they had to be ready to give and to bear. 

It is a big question whether anything or anyone today could bring us together to sustain a national renewal project, long-lasting and deep enough to be significant. The frequently expressed disappointment with Starmer’s inability to inspire, to articulate a vision, is one bit of evidence for this pessimism, on top, of course, of our long recent experience of Tory bluster masquerading as vision. But the bluster has now been chastened, and we don’t have to leave vision to one man alone. The city brings people together to achieve more fully human living, of all, for all. While it is still day, while even a narrow gate to life is open, we do not give up.

Notes

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  My view of the making and meaning of the ‘consensus’ has been shaped and chastened by Paul Addison, The Road to 1945.  The Epilogue, in the second edition, 1994, (pp279-292) is specially relevant.