Unreached: Growing Churches In Working-Class And Deprived Areas

Introduction

Think of the thriving evangelical churches in your area, and the chances are they will be in the ‘nice’ areas of town and their leaders will be middle class.

I once attended a lecture at which the speaker showed a map of my city, Sheffield. The council wards were coloured different shades, according to a series of social indicators: educational achievement, household income, benefit recipients, social housing, criminal activity, and so on. Slide after slide showed that the east side of the city was the needy, socially deprived half, compared to the more prosperous west. Where are the churches? Counting all the various tribes of evangelicalism, the large churches are on the west side. The working-class and deprived areas of our cities are not being reached with the gospel. There are many exciting exceptions, but the pattern is clear. According to Mez McConnell from Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh, of the fifty worst housing schemes in Scotland, half have no church, and most of the others only have a dying church. Very few have an evangelical witness. This book is about reaching those unreached areas.

Research conducted for Tearfund in 2007 shows that churchgoing in the UK is a middle-class pursuit.

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Adults in social grades AB (professionals, senior and middle management) are over-represented among both regular and occasional churchgoers. Meanwhile, adults of social grade C2 and D (skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual) have the highest proportion of non-churched. Julian Rebera from New Life Church in Brighton concludes, ‘There are very few churches on deprived estates. Those that exist are not attended by people from the estates, but by people outside the estates. And very few people from the estates travel out to our city-centre, largely white, middle-class churches.’

Yet it was not always like this. The Great Awakening was largely a working-class movement. Although its leaders were middle class, the Establishment treated their open-air preaching with scorn. Instead, it was working-class people who flocked to hear John Wesley and George Whitefield. Wesley organized converts into ‘classes’ and ‘societies’. These were lay-led, often by working-class or lower-middle-class individuals. Robert Wearmouth says,

Methodism gained its greatest successes among the socially distressed and ostracised among the labouring masses. Never claiming to be a class or partisan movement, always emphasising the universal love of God, its most urgent appeals were addressed to the common people...The higher classes in English society were scarcely touched by Methodist influence, but the working men and women were profoundly affected.

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The Industrial Revolution saw increased social stratification. It was during this time that middle-class and working-class identities began to emerge. And in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, evangelicalism appealed disproportionately to skilled artisans, according to historian David Bebbington.

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Skilled artisans made up 23% of the population, but 59% of evangelical Nonconformists fell into this category. Both unskilled labourers and the middle classes were under-represented in Nonconformist ranks. Methodists made a greater impact on labourers, but the proportion of Methodists who were labourers (16%) was still just below the proportion in society as a whole (17%). By the mid-1800s, perhaps half the UK population attended church. But contemporaries remarked that the labouring population was largely absent. Many congregations in mining areas were predominantly working class, but the majority of the working classes were not worshippers. In the late nineteenth century, the trend towards class-specific suburbs accelerated, and church attendance varied accordingly. Middle-class Ealing had 47% attendance, while working-class Fulham had 12%. Religious practice was becoming more directly associated with class. This was accentuated by the upward mobility of churchgoers. By the 1930s, almost half of Methodist members were in non-manual occupations, and by the 1970s it was three-quarters.

So why have we evangelicals been so ineffectual at reaching the urban poor, despite our origins? Here are a number of possible reasons.

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1. The parochial system of the Church of England was ill-equipped to cope with the rapid urbanization of the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, independent churches had no system for reallocating funds to the new urban centres, into which the population was moving. Today there are some good responses to this mismatch of resources. Christ Church, the large evangelical Anglican church in the prosperous Sheffield suburb of Fulwood, provides generous support to churches in poorer parishes in the region. Nevertheless, typically, urban churches are under-resourced.

2. Churchgoing has been perceived, both by non-churchgoers and many churchgoers, to be a respectable activity demanding ‘Sunday-best’ clothes and clean living. So the poor have often felt unable to attend, because their social conditions militated against this. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of people from disadvantaged areas feeling that they are not good enough to attend church.

3. The last century has seen an explosion of entertainment opportunities. From the 1870s onwards, the music hall and organized sport began to claim working-class allegiance. By 1905, there were 430 pubs in Lambeth, compared to 172 places of worship.

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These developments only accelerated throughout the twentieth century. My grandmother grew up in the northern, industrial working-class town of Darlington, marrying a steelworker and living in a classic two-up, two-down terraced house, with an outside toilet and a cobbled back lane for coal deliveries. She was just a few months old when the local Methodist chapel first opened, and she attended it for over ninety years. It was the central feature of her life – not only her spiritual life, but also her social life. Apart from the pub, the chapel was the only regular source of entertainment. It was not that the chapel forsook its calling to proclaim the gospel in favour of entertainment. But the chapel was the centre of community life, so community life was focused around it. The result was that people were regularly exposed to Christian witness. But the growth of the cinema, and then television, spectator sports, the internet and a myriad other entertainment possibilities, means that churches no longer play this key role in working-class communities.

4. In some parts of evangelicalism, there has been a deliberate strategy to target people of influence. Many churches choose to reach students, at the expense of indigenous people on their doorsteps. Whatever the merits of this, it has meant that we have not poured resources into disadvantaged areas. Moreover, it can create an image of an ideal church or churchgoer that is far removed from the experience of working-class people.

5. The gospel often travels along relational lines. A Christian tells a friend about Jesus or invites a relative to an evangelistic event. Middle-class individuals typically have wide social networks that transcend geography. Working-class commu­nities, by contrast, are still largely defined by neighbourhood. Friendship evangelism is great, but it does not enable the gospel to travel beyond our social networks, unless there are intentional attempts to build friendships with people who are not like us. John Mark Hobbins of London City Mission says, ‘Many people live in networks which take precedence over their address, and many churches have grown because of this. But the reality for many people living in social housing or in cheaper housing is that their address is very likely to define their daily life.’

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6. A significant factor among converts is the phenomenon of ‘social lift’. The gospel brings about change in people’s lives: they stop drinking, care for their families, value literacy and education, work hard and save for the future. In time, this can make them – or their children – wealthier and perhaps less working class. David Bebbington says, ‘There was a natural tendency for converted characters to gain skills, find regular employment and so rise out of the lowest ranks of society. Evangelical religion, as many commented at the time, was itself an avenue of upward social mobility.’

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Whatever the historical reasons, we are left with a situation in which working-class and deprived areas in the UK are not being reached with the gospel. There is a renewed concern among evangelicals for church planting, which is leading in turn to a growing concern to reach working-class people. As churches recognize areas in their locality with no gospel witness, they often identify areas of deprivation – areas with a social culture very different from their own. At the same time, Christians from such areas are beginning to make their voice heard.

In 2008, Steve Casey from Speke in Liverpool began canvassing opinion on how evangelicals could be encouraged to engage with the needs of working-class and deprived areas in the UK. This led to an informal working group of around fifteen to twenty practitioners, a mix of both Christian leaders who had grown up in deprived areas and middle-class Christians now ministering in such areas. The aim was to share issues and identify best practice. In 2009, Matt Banks organized a conference under the auspices of the South-East Gospel Partnership, with the title: ‘Reaching the Unreached’, which was held at St Helen’s Bishopsgate in central London. This has now developed into an annual conference.

These two processes have merged to become ‘Reaching the Unreached’, an informal network of evangelical church leaders and church planters, mostly working in deprived areas (www.reachingtheunreached.org.uk).

The Reaching the Unreached working group includes:

Matt Banks, studying at Oak Hill College

Alan Black and John Mark Hobbins from London City Mission

Efrem Buckle from Calvary Chapel, south London

Steve Casey from Speke Baptist Church, Liverpool

Duncan Forbes from New Life Church in Roehampton, south London

Peter Froggatt from St Peter’s Rock Ferry, Birkenhead on the Wirral

Dai Hankey from Hill City Church in Trevethin, South Wales

Andrew Holt from St Helen’s Bishopsgate, London

Pete Jackson from St Andrew’s Kendray, Barnsley

Jo McKenzie from Durham University, undertaking doctoral research into evangelicalism and social class

Andy Mason from St John’s, World’s End, London

Julian Rebera from New Life Church, Brighton

Simon Smallwood from St George’s Church, Dagenham

Dan Strange, Lecturer in Culture, Religion and Public Theology at Oak Hill College

Andy Toovey from Thirsty Church, Garndiffaith

Myself, Tim Chester from The Crowded House, Sheffield

This book is the product of the working group. Our concern is not primarily to answer the question of why evangelicals should reach deprived areas, but to move on to explore how we can reach them. It arose from our consultations, the work of individuals within the group, the Reaching the Unreached blog (www.reachingtheunreached.org.uk) and my own work on this topic. It is common for authors to attribute the strength of a book to the contribution of other people, while taking responsibility for its weaknesses. This was never more true than with the present volume

In 1982, Roy Joslin published his landmark book, Urban Harvest.

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It challenged evangelicals to reach working-class people and explored what this might look like. But that was 1982. Thirty years on, not only has working-class culture changed hugely, but, as we shall see, the category itself not longer does the job it once did.

Equally striking is the fact that nothing comparable has been written on this topic in the intervening years. The church in the West is awash with material on reaching postmoderns and engaging with postmodern culture. The theme seems almost ubiquitous, with a plethora of books, conferences, seminars and programmes. And all this is entirely appropriate. We need to engage with, and endeavour to identify, the appropriate apologetics for postmoderns. But the reality is that what is being addressed is largely a middle-class, professional or student culture.

Compared to this wealth of resources, it is striking how little there is on reaching working-class and deprived areas. This is not to say that nothing has been written on urban mission or mission among the poor. There are resources on the importance of this ministry, and resources on the necessity to address socio-economic needs. But there is very little on how to evangelize and disciple people in these areas, little on understanding their culture or contextualizing the gospel in their situation. Missional discussions on reaching deprived areas seem to stop at the observation that we need to run social projects.

Let me suggest three possible reasons why little has been written.

First, because the culture of the working class is generally a less literate culture, ministry in this context has not generated a body of literature, and lessons learned through experience have not been widely disseminated. In short, those producing theological reflection in written form are unlikely to be involved in coalface urban ministry, and those involved in urban ministry are unlikely to produce theological reflection in written form.

Secondly, it may reflect the suspicion with which social action has sometimes been regarded. The necessity to address social needs or focus on the marginalized has been the subject of much debate, and therefore of much literature. Those committed to the urban poor have felt the need to defend that focus. But there may be a danger that, in the process, we have taken our