The church must reconnect with the poor and deprived: a bishop’s swing and a miss

Dec 5, 2016 by Jill

by Stephen Kneale:

In a recent article for the Church Times, the Bishop of Burnley – Philip North – has taken the Church of England to task for failing to listen to the working classes. He argued:

For the most part, the Church of England has reacted to the election of Donald Trump (News, 11 November) and the UK’s vote to leave the EU (News, 1 July) (the “Trump-Brexit phenomenon”) by jumping on to the middle-class Establishment bandwagon of outrage and horror. As if set to auto-pilot, the C of E has joined in with those who are decrying the collapse of the liberal consensus and bemoaning a new mood of division in our public life.

The Bishop stated ‘The Church’s agenda is being set not by the poor, but by academia, the moneyed elites, and certain sections of the secular media’. Going on to claim ‘it is their preoccupations that dictate the terms of the Church’s debate, and that pose the questions that it expends its energy on answering’. He goes on to aver that the Church of England has ‘become so disconnected from many of these [deprived] communities that it no longer hears what they are saying, let alone amplifies their voices to the nation. And, until the Church re-invests in urban ministry, places the best leaders in the most deprived parishes, and returns to the estates it has abandoned, these voices will continue to go unheard’. You can read his full article in the Church Times which has since been picked up by the mainstream media.

In many ways, this is surely right. The Anglican Communion is dominated by the middle classes, whose concerns take precedence, and discussion is inevitably driven by the concerns of its academic leaders. Nor should we think this is a uniquely Anglican problem. As I have commented here and here (amongst other posts), other denominations also seem to be dominated by middle class professionals who have become somewhat detached from deprived communities and do not always understand, or encourage, those from poorer backgrounds to join, serve, lead or plant churches.

And yet, the Bishop of Burnley errs. The issue is not, as he claims, that the debate on sexuality, ‘has come to dominate the Church’s agenda to an extraordinary extent’.

Read here