Church of England: Holistic Missions

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise with great pleasure to follow the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle. It is not a good week to be a Methodist Minister, so I am hoping very much that the right reverend Prelate will recognise the sincerity of what I am about to say. The pair of us go back quite a long way. When I was on the management committee of an ecumenical project that he was running at Bar Hill, just outside Cambridge, I used to have to keep an eye on him to make sure that he was doing the right things. That is the right relationship of the Methodist Church to the Church of England. Subsequent to that, in Grasmere, when he was the Bishop of Penrith, we had a marvellous, county-wide effort and we met up again there. What he does in Cumbria for the cause of ecumenism is almost proverbial and is certainly trend-setting. I hope that since there are two other right reverend Prelates sitting there, they will learn from his example and follow the same route.

It is lovely to hear that extra dimension being drawn into the right reverend Prelate’s remarks. We must remember, as we concentrate on a debate that so specifically picks out the Church of England, that that is only one player in the field—of course, I want to draw attention to that. However, we look forward to many useful, helpful, edifying contributions from the right reverend Prelate. If they are not forthcoming, I will tell him so. Of course, I feel as if I am in the middle of a sandwich here, because I look forward with great interest to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, who has set a tone for British civil society and indeed for the national consciousness that we must all learn from. It is not for me to thank her for what she has not yet delivered, but I stand in great anticipation of what she will deliver.

On this debate, I have to say that my greatest anxiety is that it can delude us into thinking that the Church of England is where it all is. What does it mean to be a Methodist? It is often thought that John Wesley, when he started off, was a pietistic preacher, full of spiritual energy and indefatigable zeal. However, perhaps less is known about the fact that intrinsic to his ministry from the beginning were actions of social commitment that were totally convincing. He had a kind of mini health service, free at the point of need, which he ran from the place in City Road where I now work. He had a ministry to people on death row in Newgate Prison, a microfinance project with a commitment to helping the poor with their financial needs, and a ragged school, which attracted boys and girls from the Moorfield slums, clothing and feeding them if necessary. I can say only that the vital religion of a Methodist like John Wesley is coupled inevitably with a commitment to the transformation of society, so we do not have to think of it as an add-on at all. We think that we are not doing our job if we are not doing such things, and that is the end of the matter.

I have been the superintendent of the West London Mission for a number of years and was the boss of the late Lord Soper of Kingsway—although if anybody says that they were his boss, they need their head read—who initiated extraordinary work across the capital city that still exists to a large extent. That included a bail hostel with a day centre for over 25 year-olds—it is easy to get money for the needs of children and young people, but getting money for the needs of older homeless people is immensely difficult. There was total commitment, and it was open 365 days a year. He also initiated work with young offenders, a walk-in centre for people with addictions or substance abuse of one kind or another, which is multifaceted and free, again, for all who cross the threshold. That was a remarkable piece of work, with 80 employees and hundreds of volunteers who helped to keep it running. That, therefore, is of the essence; I have often said from the pulpit, “What’s the point of you having religion if you don’t bring a smile to someone’s face and make their lives a little easier?”. There does not seem to be much point otherwise.

I want simply to draw the circle outwards a little—no, I do not want even to do that. I do not like the compass having its fixed point in the Church of England, with ever larger circles drawn outside it. We are partners in this, and this whole thing must be seen in that sense. Why finish there? Why think that that is the range we are thinking of? My colleague, a very redoubtable Yorkshirewoman, is at this very minute standing up—if the programme that I have here is running to plan—to introduce someone from the Amida London Buddhist Centre. Ten minutes ago she introduced Mohammed Kozbar from the Finsbury Park Mosque as part of Inter Faith Week. Our work with the faiths is considerable.

John Wesley’s sermon on bigotry said that if someone else is doing a good piece of work, and it is recognised as being good, those of us who are Christian have no right to think that we cannot collaborate with them. You hold hands together and do the good, and that is the end of it. The work in the field of interfaith work has to be recognised at this point; there is so much of it around. I will give some figures: there are 289 social projects run by Islington faith-based organisations—that is 289 in one London borough. There are 536 volunteers, 68 full-time staff and 52 part-time staff. Some 74% of faith-based organisations work in partnerships across faiths and within faiths, and 65% are done in collaboration with people of good will who have no faith at all. At the end of the day, social need is social need, and you work together. If people who have faith feel that that is what motivates them, that is fine—but you do it with everybody else. Phrases such as the “unique place” of the Church of England, and self-aggrandising phrases like that, set my teeth on edge when I read this particular report.

I go back to Islington, as all good people do in the end. Of the social projects run by faith-based organisations in Islington, 32 are in the area of education, 20 in housing and homelessness, 25 in art and music, 19 to do with drug abuse, 20 in the field of health, 14 in the area of business and enterprise, and 13 in the area of employment. That is absolutely fantastic. Just two days ago, in the Cholmondeley Room—I hope one day that someone will tell me why it is pronounced “Chumley”; I am sure that there is a reason—we had a reception for Action for Children, which is a charity that I have supported all my life. It used to be the National Children’s Home, a good Methodist charity. There were 92 volunteers receiving their annual Stephenson awards. As was said in one of the speeches, the monetary value of the voluntary work being done there amounts to £500,000. It would cost the organisation that amount to buy in those services.

We recognise all the good that is done and have no reason to boast about it, because if we were not doing it we would not be the people of faith that we claim to be. There is no need to make a song and dance about it; it is the essence of our very being that we translate what we believe into action of the kinds that we have been talking about.

I am a little bit dubious, too, about the proposals and recommendations that have been made in the ResPublica document. Who wants an office in the Cabinet Office to centre all of this stuff? The Department for Communities and Local Government already has a base there, and it has accomplished a great deal in bringing faith groups together as one means of helping to build an integrated society in Britain. In 2008 the Department for Communities and Local Government produced a report called Face to Face, Side by Side, offering a framework for partnership in our multifaith society. Those are the notes that we need to hear because, at the end of the day, people of good will, whether of faith or not, and those of us who are of faith, know that we must make allegiances and common cause against deprivation and need of every kind.

I offer these remarks not to sink anybody’s ship or rattle anybody’s skeleton cupboard but rather to honour the Church of England as the state church for all the work that it does and recognise that it has a historic role in British society to do just this. But I plead with its representatives to see, in an instinctual way, the existence of others out there not as people for whom to broker involvement in the provision of answers to social need but as partners ready and willing to do our bit as best we can.

I am very grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester for bringing this subject to the Floor of the House. I know that our concentrated thinking on this will raise the profile of the work being done but, perhaps, also challenge us to go on doing it in a more imaginative and colourful way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, it is my pleasant duty to start by congratulating the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle on speaking to us from the depths of history as well as the depths of theology to prove that the Anglican Church is well founded and likely to survive many storms, as it has survived many before.

I also warmly welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, and congratulate her on a most moving speech, which revealed the new and valuable dimension that she brings to our collective knowledge. I welcome her commitment to sharing that experience with us whenever it is appropriate. If anything is valuable in a democratic Chamber, it is direct experience of the realities of life, however harsh, in which Parliament can take a hand. She is very welcome here.

This debate is principally about the welfare state, which is not what it was. I have two personal memories about what it was, or that are relevant to it. The first was at the age of 12, sitting with some 300 other of my schoolfellows in the school assembly hall listening to a very enthusiastic young man with horn-rimmed glasses and wild hair talking to us about something called the Beveridge report. I recall him telling us that, when it was implemented, the world, and particularly this country, would be a better place, that a new era would dawn and that everything would be lovely. There was no examination on the subject, so I apologise to your Lordships for not recollecting more of the talk than that.

Some six years after that, I was walking with my father one evening in the fields near our house and he said to me, “I joined the Labour Party in order to achieve various things. With the passage on to the statute book of the National Health Act and the National Insurance Act, all those objectives have been achieved”. I see the contented smiles on the Front Bench opposite, so I regret to say that he then said, “That being so, I see no purpose whatever in remaining in any political party and I’m going to sit on the Cross Benches”. Those are my two memories; they are the sort of marker buoys for the start of a sailing race which brings us to where we are, and it is somewhere very different indeed.

I find it very difficult to unthread the tangled collection of ideas raised during this short debate and in the report. The report I welcome warmly, because it has triggered this very badly needed discussion. It has some shortcomings. If I can be really petulant and elderly, I would say that the principal ones are the very small type, the use of white print on blue and the use of semi-colons instead of full stops practically throughout, which means that you never have a capital letter to go back to when you are sitting in an ill-lit passenger seat in a car trying to read the thing going up the M4. On a purely practical point, I ask ResPublica to revise its publishing criteria.

However, its research criteria are excellent. The research base for the report is pretty narrow. Nineteen parishes out of 43 dioceses do not amount to a great deal. It is not enough to come to conclusions on, but it is plenty to start the discussion. I think that we can all endorse, and everybody has endorsed, the extraordinary variety of the existing interventions of the Anglican community into social efforts to improve the life of all.

The noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Burry Port, hit the nail on its head when he pointed out that, actually, the Church of England is not the only church. That chimes in with one paragraph on page 8 of the report, on the social and spiritual mission of the church, where it was thought necessary to start with a little apologia about the necessity of the church taking social action at all. That rather took my breath away, because surely the duty of the church is not to run churches like a chain of theatres around the country trying to fill the house with suitable programmes; it is to be the body of Christ in the community. You cannot be the whole body of Christ if you are only one church when there are many churches. We must have a broad co-operation in this.

What puts the Church of England at centre field in this country is the existence of its organisation and its resources in the form of buildings. The report refers to the church in many communities being the only landmark at the moment. It seems to say that there were other landmarks—there were pubs and schools, which were of course the social landmarks. More and more villages and towns have lost most of their pubs and schools, and some have lost all of them. The church is the last visible central link; its spire puts it ahead of the chapel, which does not make it any better than the chapel, just more visible. It is also apt to be bigger and can house more people. However, the church is ultimately conservative with a small c, which means that it is full of pews. If churches are to diversify their activities, they need to make a clean sweep. I think I see agonised expressions on the faces of the right reverend Prelates to my left because if there is anything more divisive and difficult to do to a medieval church than remove the pews, I do not know what it is. But the fact is that it is done very successfully. The church ought to publish a brochure showing that, extolling the fact that the atmosphere of the place can still be spiritual, and explaining that far more members of the community can make use of the church. Incidentally, members of the existing congregation, which may possibly grow, will also find that they are able to do new and inventive things. That is another spin-off of the report.

Like my noble friend Lady Berridge, who made a very good speech, I attended a meeting recently in the Jerusalem Chamber, where the final version of the authorised version of the Bible was agreed, to hear Professor Linda Woodhead of Lancaster University give a PowerPoint presentation. She gave a most illuminating account of the position, outlook and membership of the Church of England. I strongly recommend that account to my episcopal friends and ask them to distribute it as it was a suitable forerunner to the great declamation by the noble and right Revd Lord, Lord Carey, in Shropshire, which nobody has yet had the bad manners to mention, which warned of the end of the church unless something changed. We now have to look at whether what is being proposed is the right change. A good deal of reservation has been expressed about that, not merely because it puts everything in the hands of one church but because of its rather obscurely articulated union with government. The union of government and church is a very dangerous institution, indeed. If the church is seen to co-operate with the Government, de facto it is not co-operating with the Opposition and it is likely to get all the flak that the Government get for things that go wrong which are not the fault of either of them.

I turn to the practical difficulties of what is proposed. The subject of how the two organisations can co-operate and make use of their respective resources is a very fruitful one, and the Cabinet Office is possibly the right body to engage in it. However, what really matters is what happens at the bottom end in the parish. Parishes vary very much, as do churches. I lead a fragmented life which means that I worship in three churches regularly and in a fourth from time to time. One of the churches, in which I was for some years a licensed lay minister, and in which I now have the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford’s permission to serve, is a tiny chamber about four times the size of the Bishops’ Bar. It has a thriving life but no room to expand. Apart from arousing great hostility, taking the pews out would not increase the congregation. I also worship fairly regularly in a church in south London, which I suppose is rather bigger than the Peers’ Guest Room. I fear that this speech is going to read very badly in Hansard. That church’s congregation is rather more black and ethnic minority in origin than it is white. It is a very harmonious congregation. Then we go to a very big church in west London, which is humming with activity and full of people, and which has a completely different ability to help. We do not want to think that one size fits all but we want to realise that it is not only the Anglican parishes that are there when there are all the denominations which your Lordships have just heard recapitulated. I will not run through them.

So what is it that the Church of England has to offer? Because it is becoming increasingly ecumenically minded, it has the ability to focus the activities and interests of all the Christian family—the Kingdom of God on earth, as it strives to be—and to arrange the interlocution between the churches and the Government, not to be the only voice but to orchestrate it. I am warming to my theme and have just thought of all the clear principles that I should adduce, but the time stands at 12 minutes and I am grateful to your Lordships for your indulgence.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

Perhaps I might suggest, as the Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, that the Lord Roberts of Burry Port is a hybrid creature who is not yet a Member of your Lordships’ House.