The Challenge of the UrbanI was taught much of my church history by Methodist minister who became a lecturer at Bristol University -- John Kent who had an extremely pessimistic perspective on the church as indicated by the title of his book The End of the Line? He took the than traditional line (at the beginning of the 1980s) that the church had always been alienated from the urban working class and all its attempts to reach them were ultimately feeble failures. A key text was KS Inglis's Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England this book published in 1963 continues to exert a considerable influence (see Colin Marchant's The Story of Urban Mission in the UK). Since the 1980s, however, revisionist historians have been questioning this judgment and developing a more fine-grained understanding of what happened in Victorian England. A key early text was J. Cox's The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth 1870-1930 and the argument has been developed by the likes of Callum Brown in his influential book The Death of Christian Britain: understanding secularisation 1800-2000. Brown's argument is that the irreligion of the working classes was an idea constructed by Victorian middle-class Christians -- a clerical myth of the unholy city cemented into modern scholarship by the use modern historians have made of Victorian clerics as their main sources. John Kent is in particular cited as 'repeatedly returning to the theme of an alienated working class'. Brown identifies Dr Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) as the most influential voice in this developing fear of the large city (Brown 18-29). Much of this discourse was oriented towards gaining resources for urban missions, now competing with the increasingly popular foreign missions. Chalmers also made great use of statistics both for church attendance and on moral issues such as crime, prostitution, drink and gambling. More modern examination of these statistics makes it clear that church attendance in urban centres was significantly underestimated not least because of the problem, which I have encountered frequently in modern London, of even identifying all the places where people worship (Brown 145-9). Brown also analyses the key role which gender played in Victorian religion in a rich analysis which immediately resonated with my experience. I had more or less taken on the idea of the alienated working classes who didn't go to church but had found myself questioning it -- not least because of my family history of working class religiosity and a sneaking feeling that the impact of the myriad churches in urban Victorian communities was neither properly researched nor understood. Brown argues that the churches had a huge impact and that Victorian London from the poor to the rich was indisputably Christian. Working class religiosity might not manifest itself in exactly the same way as middle-class Christianity but that doesn't mean it wasn't a powerful force -- so ingrained in society was the Christian religion that we in modern Britain find it difficult to understand. In particular he indicates how the young researchers engaged in gathering oral history just aren't equipped to engage with the intensely religious upbringings of their older informants ( Brown 115-118). He finally argues that it just hasn't been in anyone's interest to acknowledge the existence of religious growth in an urban industrial society (Brown 29). The emergence of the urban church in Victorian LondonThe London Baptist AssociationThe religious history of Victorian London tends to concentrate on the exceptional rather than the mundane. Peter Ackroyd, for instance, focuses on the weird and wonderful fringe of religion and spirituality whilst virtually ignoring the huge influence of mainstream churches on Victorian London. Even more conventional historians tend to focus on the exceptional such as the Settlements, Christian socialism and the Salvation Army rather than the ordinary process of building congregations and church buildings in the expanding metropolis. What is important to remember is that London is an essentially Victorian city -- the shape of the city as we now know it was set in the 19th century, London in the 18th century and before was a small town compared to the metropolis that we now know. The vigour of the Victorian church therefore rooted churches in every part of the city. The exceptional was not unimportant in the history of the Victorian church. CH Spurgeon, for instance, had an enormous influence but not only as the preacher with the vast congregation that he is generally remembered for. He initiated the still influential Spurgeon's College, Spurgeon's Childcare and made a crucial contribution to the setting up of the London Baptist Association. The Association is particularly important because of its role in facilitating the planting of churches throughout a rapidly expanding London The number of churches in fellowship with the Association grew from 59 in 1865 to 131 in 1875... the Association had built 10 churches and rescued one from demise... London Baptists were advancing and now had many powerful churches. Denmark Place, Church Street (Edgware Road), Hackney, John Street (Holborn), John Street (Edgware Road), Praed Street (Paddington) and West London Tabernacle had over 500 members; Bloomsbury, Regent's Park, Camden Road and Hackney Road, over 600, St John's Wood and Westbourne Grove over 700, East London Tabernacle 1490 and Metropolitan Tabernacle 4880 Spurgeon was an important individual for inspiring and initiating this growth -- even today many Baptist churches are aware of the role that Spurgeon had in their founding. But this should not blind us to the role of many largely forgotten people in establishing Baptist churches throughout the capital. Someone like Daniel Katterns, Minister of the Hackney church, for instance, was influential in planting three more churches in Hackney area which have become the backbone of the Baptist presence in the borough. Each of these churches was the centre for all kinds of activity such as mission halls and Sunday schools, they emerged as grassroots urban institutions with a worshipping core facilitating outreach activities. It is probable that as Robin Gill has argued the church building side of this institution planting went too far -- the Anglicans built too many churches and the nonconformists too grand ones. But even still, it has left a rich legacy of significant plant which with energy and creativity can be redeveloped for new generations and new communities. London City missionIf the denominations were important in keeping up with the rapid growth of London and planting churches in what were then the suburbs and is now called the inner-city, it is particularly the missions which established themselves in the poorer areas of the capital. The most widespread of these were the London City missions which spread throughout London. LCM was begun by David Naismith in 1835. Naismith successfully made use of the concerns about the urban poor and their immorality and irreligion to organise large numbers of missionaries and mission centres. He did not set up churches himself but saw his work as essentially evangelistic which would then feedback into the churches. This enabled him to fundraise within the established churches rather than appear as a threat to them. Naismith also targeted particular groups of workers in London such as cabmen. The whole work involved evangelism, literature distribution, medical care, basic education, public health schemes, advocacy at court, and prison visitation. But LCM was only one of many such missions, 16 being identified in Islington alone (the original borough of Islington and not the larger modern one) London City mission, Mildmay, Albany Mission, Moody and Sankey mission, Paget memorial mission hall, St. Giles's christian mission, Blackstock Rd -- Highbury Vale, Finsbury Pk. mission to poor children, Tollington Pk. People's mission hall, Memorial hall., Trent hall, N. Lond. Evangelical mission, Hazelville room, St, St. Bernard Ch. of Divine Healing, Fishers of Men mission hall., Kingsdown Christian mission, Most of these have now disappeared though some such as the Mildmay have developed into substantial institutions "One of most influential home and overseas missionary organizations in Eng., which led to founding of many other bodies". The Mildmay is now a hospital with a focus on AIDS care. The Salvation Army is perhaps the most remarkable example of this missionary impulse. In its time it was a remarkably creative response to the realities of late Victorian London -- pushing beyond the institutional church into new and uncharted territory. Its distinction from the institutional church is perhaps best symbolised by its rejection of a sacramental practice. These missions were a focus for much of the energy of the Victorian church -- mirroring their overseas missionary effort, enabling Victorian Christians to give expression to their impulse for martyrdom -- the giving of their lives for a greater cause. The Chalmerian discourse of urban degradation and irreligion was crucial in providing this opportunity -- it wasn't just Africa that could provide the opportunity to carry the white man's burden -- it could be done in the slums of London as well! It is easy to satirise this impulse (see Michael Pailin's film The Missionary) but this doesn't help us understand how important and serious religion was in Victorian London. Driven by the twin impulse to create enduring institutions and engage in self giving mission the church embedded itself into the emerging expanses of Metropolitan London. Settlements and slum priestsThe established church also engaged in this pattern of institution building alongside missionary expansion. Evangelical Anglicans, in particular, were not very different from their nonconformist rivals. The growth of Anglo-Catholic Anglicanism did, however, bring a different dimension into urban church life -- still driven by the evangelical energy of the times but having a particular expression through so-called slum ritualism. As the followers of Pusey tried to reintroduce Catholicism into the Anglican Church they suffered considerable opposition and found it difficult to find parishes in which to work. They therefore tended to be sent to the unpopular slum parishes and there developed a distinctive practice of high ritual with committed missionary endeavour. It was in this atmosphere that the distinctive social theology of FD Maurice began to find expression in the stirrings of Christian socialism particularly through the pioneering work of Stewart Headlam (Orens 2003). The significance of this for the Victorian church has probably been overemphasised, it was a relatively small movement, but it has had an enduring impact on urban mission in the 20th century. (Kent 198 ) Turn-of-the-century optimism and concernAs the 19th-century drew to a close urban mission began to look more seriously at the city in which it was engaged. Its institutions and missions had penetrated all sectors of it but its problems were very far from being solved. Some people saw this as a call to renewed vigour in the conversion of individuals but others began to question society more profoundly and to search for ways that Christianity could be involved in its fundamental transformation. FD Maurice and Stewart Headlam were pioneers in these developments but the spirit affected all sections of Christian church, one expression of this was the West London Mission of the Methodist Church. In
so far as one event contributed to founding of the West London Mission it was
the publication, in October 1883, of Andrew Mearns' 20 page penny pamphlet with
the arresting title of The Bitter Cry of
Outcast London. This has been
described as perhaps the most influential single piece of writing about the
poor England has ever seen. In his pamphlet, Mearns warned that: Whilst we have been building of
churches and solacing ourselves with our religion and dreaming that the
millennium was coming, the poor have been growing poorer and the gulf has been
daily widening which separates the lowest classes of the community from our
churches and chapels, and from all decency and civilisation One of those greatly influenced by The Bitter Cry was the Rev Hugh Price Hughes, a young and very energetic Wesleyan minister Hughes was an important leader in what has become known as the Nonconformist Conscience which brought the nonconformist churches into the centre of national life in a strong if imperfect alliance with the Liberal party. This began to widen the horizons of nonconformist churches making them believe that they could fundamentally change society. This was mirrored within the Church of England as FD Maurice's Christian socialism began to penetrate deeper into the Anglican hierarchies -- not in a way that Stewart Headlam might have approved of, but in a much more conservative desire to challenge the divisive effects of capitalism and create social harmony. It was often expressed as a nostalgia for medieval Christianity were church and state worked closely together and Christian theology dominated civil society. Consolidation in the interwar yearsIt was perhaps in the first decade in the 20th century that churchgoing reached its peak in Britain, after this churchgoing declined but not church membership (Brown 2000). Thus the country remained fundamentally Christian with an institutional commitment to the church being axiomatic, but people found other things to do with their time rather than go to church twice or more on Sunday. In urban London situation was slightly different as the church struggled with the changing context of population decline and flight to the suburbs. Significant inner London churches such as Westbourne Park Baptist church, where John Clifford exercised a ministry similar to Hugh Price Hughes struggled to maintain their energy and congregation. London was beginning to take shape as the modern city which we now know -- a large central business district with a small and mobile resident population, a ring around this of decline and deprivation, and further out the prosperous suburbs, speckled with less prosperous public housing estates. By the 1930s the inner ring of deprivation was being affected by gentrification in areas such as Chelsea thus completing the picture. This pattern was fixed by the creation of the Green Belt in 1947 which stopped the expansion of London. The interwar period was therefore a time of consolidation where inner London churches began to take on the identity of struggling institutions engaged in mission to the poor and dependent on their more affluent suburban cousins. New mission initiatives were taken such as West Ham central mission under charismatic leaders like Rowntree Clifford. But things were radically shaken by the Second World War -- or more particularly the Blitz. The disruption and death caused by the war was significant but people can be remarkably resilient in these circumstances, what was new was the extensive bombing of metropolitan London and the destruction or damaging of many London churches. The impact of this can hardly be overestimated, in both listening to people who remembered that time and reading the accounts in church histories one is struck by the deeply impact which the destruction of the church building had. The building of course was critical to the churches identity as a grassroots urban institution, its destruction was a symbolic act which shook all those who in anyway identified with it as a symbol of continuity and permanence (see for instance Edgar Bonsall The Dream of an Ideal City -- Westbourne Park 1877-1977) The sight of the fire-scarred shell awakened poignant memories.. The outer walls, sadly damaged, nevertheless stood with a dignity of their own, making their last brave stand against the blast and fury of war. Graceful lines were still in evidence. Familiar doorways were there, though they lead only to heaps of blackened timbers and twisted metal. Windows, which in bygone winter evenings had glowed softly with light within, were strange but still beautiful against the sky. Post-war LondonThe war and its aftermath reinforced the image of inner London as a place of struggle and deprivation. Certainly energy was still present not least in the efforts to rebuild urban churches but other forms of rebuilding caused the church's problems as communities were further disrupted and the organic emergence of neighbourhoods replaced by rational planning. Nonetheless the 1950s seem to have been a period of religious revival (Brown 2000), perhaps as people clung to the church as a place of stability after the disruptions of war, although it is also clear that Billy Graham's campaigns had a significant impact. But perhaps the most significant development for London churches in the 1950s was the arrival of significant numbers of black Christians in the metropolis. Black people had been a feature of London life for decades and they had at times made a significant impact on the life of the churches in the capital e.g. Celestine Edwards. But the Fifties saw a large-scale immigration that was unprecedented. Many churches found it difficult to welcome the deeply religious Caribbean islanders and alienated significant sections from the church but others responded more positively and black people began to make up significant proportions of inner-city congregations. They still tended to be excluded from leadership positions but many were tenacious enough to hang in there and keep churches going which were struggling in the face of the massive redevelopment of their communities. Black people also brought their own, mainly pentecostal, churches and these found a ready market in people alienated from traditional churches and looking to recapture the warmth and community spirit of Caribbean churches. This meant that these churches tended to be essentially conservative, despite the efforts of pioneers such as Philip Mohabir who strove to break down denominational barriers and kickstart an urban revival. They have therefore struggled to engage second and third generations but many churches, when they managed to get hold of a decent building and resist the temptations of nostalgia, have become important institutions within the black community. (Io Smith An Ebony Cross, Ira Brooks Another Gentleman to the Ministry, Philip Mohabir Building Bridges) The Sixties and secularisationThe Sixties were a difficult time for inner London churches. Women began to reject the church, as the pill and the Beatles opened up the prospect of liberation from the constrictions of Christian morality (Brown 2000), redevelopment intensified with much slum clearance and subsequent decline in population, and the impact of black Christianity was yet to be truly felt. Yet it was also a time of optimism and re-examination of the nature of Christianity. Industrial mission, originating from the work of Ted Wickham in Sheffield, began to spread its message of a mild Christian socialism and industrial chaplains. Harvey Cox welcomed the Secular City even if Jacques Ellul rejected it in the Meaning of the City and liberal Christianity popularised by John Robinson began to search for new ways of doing urban mission, responding amongst other things to the liberation theology that was emerging from Latin America. There was something of a rejection of institutional Christianity, a questioning of the need for buildings and a reassertion of the left wing and missional character of urban mission. Change was required, attitudes to black people, in particular, needed to be challenged and it was liberals on the left of the church who first began to explore relationships with the emerging black majority churches as well as challenging racism -- eg in the work of Paul Charman and Tony Holden with the Zebra project. And if we follow Callum Brown's analysis there was a fundamental change in the religious context of Britain in the Sixties which needed some new responses from urban mission to emerge out of the deconstruction of the old institutions. The resurgence of Urban faithThe unsecular cityPerhaps from the 1980s London began to look less like the secular city that Harvey Cox had celebrated. It was becoming obvious to observers close to the ground that religion was still, and perhaps a growing, part of day-to-day life in London. In particular there was the growth of Pentecostalism which Harvey Cox, himself, recognised in his 1990 book Fire From Above. The Caribbean churches had become an important part of the church scene and African churches were beginning to grow at an increasing rate by the time the 1990s started, they are becoming increasingly important and a literature from them is beginning to emerge eg Chigor Chike's African Christianity in Britain and Mark Sturge See What the Lord has done. Also other faith communities -- Muslim, Hindu and Sikh were beginning to get established, acquire property and become visible to the wider community such that by 2000 Greg Smith could write an influential article on The Unsecular City. Faith in the cityNew networks were also developing from the 1970s -- Frontier Youth Trust, Evangelical Race Relations Group and the Evangelical Urban Training Project came together to form The Evangelical Coalition for Urban Mission after the Brixton riots in 1982. In the United Reformed Church the Urban Churches Support Group was formed in 1990 and similar urban initiatives can be noticed in other churches and groupings around this time. The growth of interest in urban mission was perhaps focused in the Anglican Faith in the City which was published in 1985. Perhaps the notoriety it gained from the uninformed criticisms from government ministers during the high watermark of Thatcherism gave it its totemic status within urban mission and beyond. Certainly it reinforced the left wing bias of urban mission and the Church Urban Fund which grew out of it has been a very important resource for urban mission in the subsequent years. The emphasis on networking has also been important. It has encouraged ecumenical cooperation and has made many urban mission practitioners look to fellow practitioners in other denominations rather than their suburban codenominationalists for resources and support. Thus it has weakened institutional bonds and, at least in my view, not helped an appreciation of the potential of churches as grassroots urban institutions. Certainly in recent years there has been a growing appreciation of the importance of buildings -- perhaps best exemplified in the experience of Ichthus. Ichthus is one of the few charismatic house churches that has made an urban impact -- it grew spectacularly through south London in the 1980s but has subsequently found that it is difficult to sustain truly urban churches without a building and has tended to gather back its many urban congregations into the few places where it managed to acquire buildings. As the value of land inner London has increased buildings have become a more and more important issue, black majority churches in particular have been very keen to acquire property. The older, more conservative Caribbean churches have often been happy to share the building of an existing church but the more thrusting African churches have been much more insistent on acquiring their own property. This sometimes desperate search for property has been in contrast to the despair which many established churches felt in trying to maintain and renovate their decaying Victorian buildings. GentrificationThis question of property values is an important part of the phenomenon of gentrification which began in Chelsea in the 1930s but was only really noticed in Islington in the 1950s where the elegant squares which had fallen into disrepair were renovated by an informal alliance of property developers, estate agents and a growing professional class who didn't want to move to the suburbs. Gentrification has subsequently affected all areas in a London even penetrating to the least salubrious areas of Hackney by the new millennium. Gentrification has generally been viewed sceptically by the left inclined practitioners of urban mission who tend to see it as colonisation by the middle-class. Ironically these very practitioners can often be pioneers of gentrification as they deliberately move into deprived areas and begin to do up properties in order to make decent homes for themselves. Many churches have been transformed by this influx of professionals and some have very intriguing mixes of the affluent and the poor. In the Isle of Dogs for instance the introduction of middle-class housing into solidly working class communities has enabled new churches to be planted which have succeeded in reaching both middle-class and working class. Others have found it difficult to respond to this radical change in their community, especially churches that became strongholds for Caribbean Christians, many of whom are now returning home. Holy Trinity Brompton and its increasing programme of taking over Anglican parishes has particularly benefited from gentrification, establishing large churches in areas such as south Battersea where gentrification has really taken a hold. Generally church growth is now happening either because of gentrification or because of African Christians. Some church planting initiatives such as Urban Expression, planting churches especially in Bangladeshi dominated Tower Hamlets are going against this trend, but it is unusual. Neighbourhood renewal and faith communitiesThe final factor in modern urban mission in London is the adoption of the language of faith by government. London government had become increasingly secular. Left wing Labour councils, in particular, were not interested in the contribution of churches, let alone other faith communities. The Conservatives in the early 1990s began to look at the role of faith communities in regeneration particularly through the creation of the Inner Cities Religious Council. Subsequently the New Labour neighbourhood renewal agenda has begun to make mention of faith communities as a potentially significant partner in urban regeneration. There is still much confusion and misunderstanding and it can be difficult for faith communities to access funding but there is no doubt that there has been a sea change in attitude and it is increasingly expected that faith communities should be represented on Local Strategic Partnerships. However government still shows little understanding of the nature of religious congregations as institutions where spirituality and work for the welfare of all are symbiotically linked. Rather a tendency to focus only on the projects which are not obviously evangelistic can be discerned. But as Margaret Harris indicates whilst these can be important they are only one part of how churches operate in communities (Harris 1998). BibliographyJohn Richard Orens: Stewart Headlam's Radical Anglicanism: The mass, the masses and the music hall. University of Illinois Press, 2003. John Kent The End of the Line? KS Inglis's Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England Colin Marchant's The
Story of Urban Mission in the UK J. Cox's The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth 1870-1930 Callum Brown The Death
of Christian Britain: understanding secularisation 1800-2000 W Charles Johnson Encounter in London the story of the London Baptist Association Edgar Bonsall The Dream of an Ideal City Philip Bagwell Outcast London Mare Street Baptist history Margaret Harris Organising Gods Work |