Just back from London where I attended the Seek the Welfare of the City Conference at Holy Trinity Brompton and St Paul’s Hammersmith.
The outline plan for the conference is at
http://www.htb.org.uk/events/seek-welfare-city-2-day-conference
I guess something over 100 people attended and as they were from a wide range of Christian backgrounds and experiences it was a good opportunity for networking and mutual learning. The majority I think were Anglican.. from both Anglo Catholic, Liberal and Evangelical streams of the church with Pentecostals and Non conformists also present. There was inevitably a bias to London and very few of us from the North.. and it was definitely a conference for leaders, professionals and academics rather than for grass roots working class Christians from council estates.
We had flying visits from the Bishop of London talking about beehives on St Paul’s Cathedral and the metaphor of colony collapse disease (beeg society?), and from Jim Wallis. However the substantial business was done through a series of panels with formal presentations from speakers with a short time for questions and discussions. There was also an irritating exhortation to text or tweet your questions or comments to some point in cyberspace that was linked to the organisers’ computer control centre. Personally I prefer direct heckling, and a more interactive small group style, though I know it’s much harder to document and share with the wider world.
Indeed the plan is to publish all the papers and audio recordings of the talks on the web at http://www.stmellitus.org/seek-welfare-city
The Keynote speaker on Thursday was Bishop Doug Myles with 40 years' experience of growing large churches and organising for justice in inner-city Baltimore.
The session on social enterprise involved a useful sharing of stories and case studies, for example Hope Citadel in Oldham where a partnership with the PCT has led to the development of community based GP practices working alongside the local church.
The first afternoon session on missional / emerging forms of church was stimulating and informative with some good case studies and some critical debates about the relationship between pioneer / incarnational ministries and traditional churches. Jason Clark’s paper on missional church is already at
http://jasonclark.ws/not-another-mapping-and-assessment-of-the-eme
A final session on Thursday covered urban spirituality. While there were some useful insights and analysis I felt it was not really touching base with the down to earth realities of life in deprived areas or working class people… All really felt a bit of upper middle class incomer introverted navel gazing..
The keynote speaker on Friday was Bishop John Inge (author of the award-winning 'A Christian Theology of Place'). This provoked some interesting discussion about the balance between faith and mission centred in a neighbourhood with the notion of journeying or pilgrimage which is maybe more fitting in contemporary “network society”.. and these two themes in scripture.
The morning panel included some really good stuff about ministry in multi-faith areas from people in the CofEs Presence and engagement network.. including case studies and reflections from inner Birmingham and the work of London Citizens in broad based multi-faith community organising.
web site at http://www.presenceandengagement.org.uk/
and the London local network at http://www.londonpen.org/
The final session on Friday afternoon was on political theology… and a response to Luke Bretherton’s recent book. Baroness Maeve Sherlock’s rapid fire contribution brought the enthusiasm of a political operator recently converted to Christ. The other contributions were from academic theologians were insightful if erudite. There are some good models and a developing theology for political involvement in the book.. though it does not cover Christians getting involved in party politics.. or address the reality that most Christians (with the exception of a few issues such as fair trade and world poverty) feel pretty uncomfortable about political talk and involvement..
Suggested Reading List
Luke Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1997).
Mark R. Gornik, To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City (Eerdmans, 2002)
John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (Ashgate, 2003)
Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2002).
Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination (Augsburg, 1986)
