The Church in the Urban Community

This paper seeks to observe the church from the outside. Not in order to reduce it to a series of purely material processes but in order to bring fresh light on it for us as Baptist Christians. I therefore seek to locate our churches within their urban communities, seeking to understand what their role is within a wider context. First I will make some brief remarks about the present state of the sociology of religion and the churches’ understanding of itself. This will explain why I feel the approach I take in this paper is necessary.

The sociology of religion and the local urban church

As a 1988 paper by Brian Wilson[i] demonstrates the sociology of religion has focused its attention during the past 30 years away from the study of churches. It has turn its gaze towards the study of religious attitudes within the whole population. This is due to the secularisation thesis which believes that institutional religion is of declining importance and that religion has been privatised. Therefore studies of individual churches are no longer considered useful in comparison to generalised surveys of the population. There has therefore been very little detailed study of churches in Britain in the last 30 years; I have been unable to locate any serious ethnographies of churches in this period. This lack of academic interest in the local church has not been balanced by an attempt from within the church to understand itself. This may be because we have an increasingly instrumental theology of the church. That is not seeing it as something of value in itself but only as an instrument for conversion (the church growth model) or an instrument of the kingdom (the radical model). This is not to say that there has been no interest in the church, Greg Smith’s work - especially Christianity in the Inner City stands out as does the work of Hornsby-Smith amongst Catholic churches. The church growth tradition has created some interest in using the insights of sociology. This has, however, suffered from a rather naive attachment to the dated methods of functionalism[ii] and an orientation towards limited and short-term ends[iii]. This leads us into a situation where there is increasing ignorance about the church. Many people, nowadays, grow up without an experience of church and without any published information on churches they have no way to gain a sophisticated understanding of the church. This is despite the interest in the church generated by Faith in the City, for example. People, therefore have rather naive expectations of the church and are unable to understand what churches can and cannot contribute to their communities. I have come across this repeatedly, e.g. the Director of Social Services who was amazed at research which demonstrated the amount of caring work that was carried on in churches. This lack of understanding tends to isolate churches from their communities, I am therefore hoping that this paper will be a step towards enabling the church to take a higher profile in practical and policy issues concerning urban communities. More directly relevant perhaps, is that by taking this approach we might be able to reflect more wisely upon what our churches can and should be doing within our urban communities. 

Case Studies

I will proceed by detailing the work that I have done with 3 urban churches in London. From these three examples I will draw out some key themes which I hope we may find it fruitful to discuss. I see this paper as a provisional one and am only too aware of its limitations. I hope that together we may move forward our understanding and develop some shared sense of the place of the church within the urban community. Because I feel my work is rather provisional I will be concentrating on the internal nature of the church. It seems to me that we are unable to understand the role something plays before we understand the nature of it. Nonetheless my reflections on the nature of the urban church are presented from the perspective of the wider community which I hope may give some freshness to them.

Trinity church

My first example is drawn from a small church on an isolated estate in east London. I was employed by the church between October 1995 and February 1996 to conduct a community profile and help the church decide on its future. A case study of the church is available. Two themes can be taken from this case study: 

The church as family. The small congregation of Trinity all know each other and relate in a friendly manner. A number like the very smallness of the congregation whilst others are more aware of the problems that this creates. This family atmosphere does not, however, extend much beyond the Sunday morning service as there are few other regular activities. Visiting of some of the older members is undertaken and occasional events organised, but the ongoing contact is nothing like the day-to-day contact experienced by members of a family. The church also seems not to provide the kind of real financial and practical support that the extended family might. The understanding of it as a family, although, strongly embedded is therefore not as straightforward as it might appear.

The importance of the church building. Trinity’s buildings are substantial and designed to provide a focus for the community. They are well kept up and through the leasing of the hall enable the church to be financially viable. Nonetheless they are under used and the decor fairly minimal. The building is therefore both the church’s greatest asset and resource and a source of problems. It is intimately linked to both the church’s internal finances and its role and place in the community. That is it points the church outwards into the community by its very presence but turns the church inwards as it seeks to maintain and protect its asset. The building is therefore something of a paradox. 

Riverside church

My second example draws on a much larger church in west London. I undertook some research at this church as part of my MA, the theme and direction of the research was determined by the church leadership, however. This was a deliberate tactic on my part to avoid being an outside researcher imposing my perspective on the church, but rather participate with the church in the research process. Four key issues can be identified from this work:

Race in the church as family. The exercise was set up, in part, to explore the different views of the different ethnic groups within the church and it did demonstrate some clear differences and conflicts between the groups. The research doesn’t provide sufficient evidence to suggest any conclusive differences between ethnic groups in our churches but it is perhaps suggestive. It certainly highlights how critical the issue of race is for the church. 

The role of clergy and paid staff. The research pinpoints a clear contradiction between how the church leadership see themselves and how they are perceived by the congregation i.e. the congregation perceive them to be more important than they perceive themselves. This issue is particularly important for the Riverside church because it has a large institutional presence. It has a minister, a lay assistant, an administrator, a caretaker and a community worker despite having a congregation of around 50.

The centrality of the Sunday morning service. We noticed this in the Fabianville situation. The congregation feel that this event is the heart of the church; in some ways it is church. 

Prayer was identified as the most important activity for the church. Exactly what is meant by prayer, however, is unclear and, indeed, is a source of contention.

Battersea chapel

My final case study is of my own church: Battersea Chapel and the estates surrounding it. This is based on a number of pieces of work over the past 6 years and my own participant observation over the same period. Work on the internal workings of the church has indicated these themes: 

The localness of the church. Increasingly the membership is based on the estates surrounding the church, the main reason for people joining the church appears to be that it is nearby.

Gender and age issues. The congregation is dominated by women, outnumbering men by 3 to 1, this is particularly apparent at the older age range - half the congregation are women over 60. Most of the men that do get involved in the church become deacons, whereas this is unusual for women. The large number of elderly people is related to the presence of a Shaftesbury Society sheltered housing scheme two minutes walk from the church. 

Church as family. The church is generally seen as a friendly place rather than as a family. The description of it as a family, however was used by a few of the very well established white members.

The church building. The chapel has been historically under used, mainly, it seems because of a fear of losing control of it. There has been an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with this as many see it as the best opportunity the church has of reaching the community. Certainly it is centrally placed in a very rundown estate lacking in a communal focus. In recent years a new leadership have taken charge and have begun to take steps to refurbish the building, which has a leaking roof and various other problems. This has been helped by gaining grants from the council of around £50, 000. 

The Sunday morning service is again the key event. The traditional midweek Bible study and women’s meeting continue but with declining numbers, other meetings of various kinds have been undertaken - but they tend to flourish and die fairly quickly. In fact they are increasingly being planned as time-limited projects to meet needs as they arise.

A further piece of work looked not so much at the church as at the community. This provided some interesting and, perhaps, surprising information. 

The extent of churchgoing. A surprisingly high number of people claimed to attend church, attendance was particularly high amongst black people (two thirds, compared to one third of white people). This would reinforce the previously identified importance of race to churches. Churchgoing was also highest in the most rundown and notorious areas of the estate, the gentrified areas recorded the lowest rates of churchgoing.

Attitudes towards the church. There was an emphasis on the church as a source of sociability. Many people saw the church as particularly able to ‘bring people together’ and regular churchgoers emphasised the church as a place of friendship. The church was also identified as a place which ‘helped people’. Regular churchgoers also emphasised the religious aspects of church which again should caution us against an over emphasis on the role of sociability in the church, important as it is. 

Exploration of Themes

Having examined these three situations I will now go on to examine some of the themes raised in more detail. Hopefully this will provide us with some food for thought and further discussion.

The metaphor of church as family.

I believe that this theme is crucial to understanding the urban church for it seems clear that sociability is central to any effective urban church. The word family, however, is a problematic one and requires caution in its use. Nonetheless I hope to demonstrate that it is a word that is still worth using.

Family church

It is first necessary to distinguish between church as family and the notion of family church. I understand by family church the church which is oriented towards meeting the needs of individual nuclear families. This seems to be a common suburban model for the church. My experience in inner London suggests that there are a lack of families attending churches as units, very often the woman and child come but the man stays at home. The model of church as family sees the church itself as a family. This does not mean, however, that the church provides what a family provides - the church provides friendship, a religious World View and some limited amount of practical support but is not able, for instance, to provide day-to-day domesticity or financial support.

Church as extended family

Does the church then operate as a substitute for the extended family rather than the nuclear family? This is the thesis developed by Greg Smith in reflecting upon a survey of churchgoers in Newham. I would however question the value of too material a link between the church as family and the old extended family of the East End. The East End extended family was characterised by a daily contact and a pattern of shared consumption[iv]. My experience suggests that daily contact is very rare amongst church members - weekly is much more the normal pattern and shared consumption is virtually unknown. We can therefore see that there is a faint echo of the extended family in a loving, committed church family but it is stretching it way too far to say the church can replace the extended family.

The family ideal

Robin Gamble also makes use of the notion of church as family in his book The Irrelevant Church. He uses the idea more as an ideal to aim for than relating it too directly to existing experiences of family or extended family. This, however, still makes one wonder why bother to use the word family at all - wouldn’t a less loaded word be community? Or a more biblical one be household or covenant-community?

The church as organisation

The most extended discussion of church as family that I have encountered is that by Dave Cave in his book Jesus is my best mate. In this book he distinguishes between a family and an organisation. He characterises an organisation as being concerned with structures, competition and institution, family, on the contrary, is to do with relationship, informality and co-operation. At the end of his book he states: 

Certainly family as God intends it should be, as been the basis of the whole of my Christian ministry, and those points where I have failed have been when I have ignored this pattern for God’s people.

Dave, therefore, seems to be using the family as a metaphor by which to understand how an urban church can successfully operate. I believe that this gets to the heart of the notion of church as family. Family is a word that has many associations this makes it very useful for us in describing the church. Most crucially it is a word which people can identify with - unlike household, for instance. As Greg Smith notes it is very common currency in social and political discourse; it is something that we aspire to create and support (see Gamble above). It speaks to us of relationship, trust and informality - qualities which can, indeed, be experienced in the urban church. 

The church and race

This discussion of church as family leads us into one of the most critical issues for the urban church, namely, that of race. When I raised the issue of church as family with groups in Riverside church the discussion turned towards the issue of colour, culture and racism. As we saw above it seems certain that black people are disproportionately present within urban churches, they have, indeed, sustained many churches that would otherwise have closed. The multi-cultural diversity of many urban churches is, in many ways, their greatest joy and strength. Nonetheless, as evidenced by Riverside, it raises its own problems as the different cultures try to understand each other and the pervading influence of racism is experienced. In London we are increasingly experiencing a three-way cultural divide between Caribbean, African and white English. The colour issue, however, is still the dominant one. Previously black people were excluded from our churches, now they are received but the extent of their acceptance is variable. In some churches there is still a struggle to see black people become fully accepted within the church as family. The more conservative minded (often this seems to be the elderly) feel that black members of the congregation prevent the achievement of church as family. Many churches, at the moment, are, also, struggling to find ways of including the many Africans who drift in and out of their churches into the church family. When churches feel that they have managed to create a multi-cultural church as family it seems to give them a great sense of confidence and achievement - it is as if the ideal of church as family has truly been achieved. Often however it would appear that black people are less certain that the ideal has been achieved, this, perhaps, is because few churches have solved the critical issue of black leadership. Within the Baptist church black people are still heavily under represented at ministerial level, which, remains, perhaps, the central issue. Many black people have achieved recognition as deacons, but my impression is that the real leaders in multi-cultural churches tend to be white even if black people are in the majority. Our churches still suffer from a white-bias. This is a denial of the ideal of church as family, nonetheless when white-bias is overcome then the church can play a crucial role within its community. Certainly churches have played a key role in the organisation of black communities, especially Black-led churches but also the traditional determinations[v].

How then does the notion of church as family help us locate the urban church within its community? I find the work of Margaret Harris convincing. In her study Care by Congregation. She concludes with this paragraph: 

Thus, the possibility of expanding the formal welfare providing role of religious congregations may be limited. But the extent and range of their informal, “quiet care”, and the special features of congregations which facilitate it, deserve wider recognition.

Harris identifies a number of limitations to the ability of congregations to undertake formal welfare projects e.g. that they must compete for resources with a range of other important congregational activities. This connects with our suggestion of the centrality of the church as family. The church as family is better at informal activities, it is able to support formal projects but it is not central to its basic mode of operation. Certain other aspects of the church do, however, make formal projects a more likely dimension of the role of the urban church, in particular the existence of church buildings. 

The church building.

Church buildings are often centrally located in urban communities, they are constructed to be a focal point of the community. Therefore if they fail to provide a community focus they are working against their environment. I am suggesting that geography and architecture can impose a certain role-expectation upon churches. A number of factors, however, can work against this imposed role. The first of these is finance. Buildings are expensive to maintain and, particularly expensive to maintain to the standard that is now expected of community facilities. Sometimes this expense can be offset by income derived from buildings. Even then problems can be caused when expensive repairs are needed, or when seeking to upgrade facilities so that they can be made available to the community in the first place. Secondly, there is the problem of attitude. This can be caused by theological beliefs or orientations or by a narrow and exclusive sense of church as family.

There is a growing appreciation of the importance of church buildings for the urban church[vi]. It is, indeed, difficult for churches to undertake any kind of social ministry without possession of a building. Even churches born of a radical commitment to being based on people, rather than buildings, such as Ichthus, are re-evaluating and seeing the worth in possessing church buildings. Similarly the hunger that Black-led churches display for buildings and the struggle they are prepared to undergo in order to acquire them is illustrative of the symbolic role that the church building has. It locates the church within a particular community, giving it a significant and role that it would otherwise be difficult to attain. From a community perspective it is perhaps the church building that gives the church its clearest role. This is given particular significance when viewed in the light of the struggles over expensive and valuable urban land. 

There is continual competition over the use of urban land. A significant source of conflict is that between churches and English Heritage. English Heritage seeks to impose a certain cultural perspective on churches without having responsibility for the financial burden that buildings impose upon small urban congregations. They have an agenda which emerges from the discourse of the cultural elite. It is a discourse which emerges out of the ruling class and their desire for an aesthetically pleasing urban landscape which expresses their own sense of pride in Britain. For they consider themselves to have created this country and what is of value in it. They, perhaps, expect that churches should be their allies in this discourse. They are angry when churches have an agenda which places the aesthetics of the urban landscape a distant third behind their own needs as a church family and the needs of their own deprived communities. This is illustrated by the case of a church tower on my estate. It became unsafe and the council required it to be encased in scaffolding. They proceeded to argue with English Heritage over who should pay for its repair, in the meantime the parish had to pay the cost of the scaffolding for over a year. In the end the tower was demolished. English Heritage lost a minor skirmish in its battle to impose its cultural discourse but the parish suffered a financial disaster which consumed all its resources - carefully acquired over many years for the purpose of building a new church building. To add insult to injury the church was the target of a typically scurrilous attack from Private Eye - illustrating that despite the radical posturings of the magazine it is only another mouthpiece of the cultural elite.

A consideration of the church building can therefore lead us into a discussion of important issues concerning culture, class and the ownership of urban land. By possessing buildings churches become central rather than marginal in the urban community, this tends to impose certain responsibilities upon them which they would often rather not have. 

The role of the religious professional.

The religious professional has a (perhaps, the) key role to play within the urban church. Traditionally they have been the point of the pyramid providing spiritual and practical leadership. Their role is unusually powerful for they combine the roles that are divided in secular voluntary organisations between the chair and the senior worker. Although in Baptist churches they are theoretically accountable to the church meeting it is considered highly unacceptable for a church to remove a minister for anything other than gross misconduct. The idea of imposing, for instance, five year contracts on ministers is unheard of, ministers are free to move between churches as they desire. Churches, however, are not free to replace a minister with someone with more appropriate skills. Even when a situation has become a very different one from the one to which the minister was appointed 10 years previously. Structurally ministers have great power but this is heightened by their perceived theological competence - they are the interpreters of the biblical tradition on which the church is based. The minister is also the key actor at the Sunday morning service to be discussed later. All these things give the minister a strong base from which to innovate and bring change, and it is generally the minister who is the key to both reviving ‘dead’ churches and enabling ‘lively’ churches to continue to develop. Generally, given a supply of good ministers the system does not work too badly, if the ministers can cope with the stresses imposed upon them.

The minister is, however, presented with two problems. One is common to all churches, the other is particularly an urban problem. I will take the urban problem first: this is that the vast majority of ministers are drawn from outside the urban communities to which they minister. They are alien to the culture of their congregation, and particularly, of their community. The training of ministers tends to reinforce this problem as it inculturates them into a world of academia and books which is difficult to integrate with the day-to-day experience of urban communities. What seems particularly difficult is this integration, it is all too easy to relapse into an anti-intellectual rejection of all theology or drift into a cerebral failure to engage with the urban context. A further problem, perhaps, is that the pressures of life as a minister, consequent upon the power s/he holds and the many roles s/he needs to play doesn’t give the individual the space in which the integration could be achieved. Secondly the minister is always aware that the church is a voluntary association. Despite the power that the minister exercises within the structure of the church, without creating a cult-like system s/he has no real power over people. Ultimately people can always vote with their feet if they don’t like what is going on and if they don’t want to do that we are all only too aware how stubborn a congregation is capable of being. A minister also needs a group of committed and capable people who are willing to accept the minister’s leadership and implement the church’s policy. Where this policy comes from is variable but my experience would suggest that the minister is nearly always the key creator of policy. Certainly nothing new is going to happen in a church if the minister doesn’t want it to[vii]. 

In the Riverside church we saw how the ministerial leadership tended to underestimate its power. I would argue that a modern emphasis upon team leadership and enabling styles of ministry tends to mask the immense structural power that the minister still holds. This is particularly apparent when comparing the church with other voluntary associations in urban communities where power is more carefully shared between management and workers. The situation does mean that the urban minister has great scope for making a creative impact on the urban community through the means of a committed church family and a well-managed church building.

The Sunday morning service.

As we saw from the studies of urban churches the Sunday morning service is the key event around which the church organises its life. There is a strong tendency for people to identify the church with this event. It would appear to have two defining characteristics. Firstly it is a social gathering. Therefore it is the event which, most centrally, expresses the reality of church as family. It is a coming together of a variety of people within the church building under the direction of the minister, vicar, priest or pastor. It therefore combines all the aspects of the church previously delineated. From a community perspective it is one of the few occasions when such a variety of people is regularly and purposefully gathered together, it is therefore a good occasion to share information and, perhaps, is one of the building blocks of an organised community. It may be particularly important as an opportunity to organise amongst the black community given their over representation in churches and the domination of most other voluntary associations by white people. Secondly, however, it is a time of prayer. It is communion with God that makes sense of, energises and creates the social gathering. Reducing it to a material event, influenced as it is by material processes, is to radically misunderstand it. Contrary to a Durkheimian analysis we would argue that once the spiritual dimension is removed the socially integrating force of the church disintegrates. To seek to replace the role a church can play with a secular alternative is futile. We will go on to examine the theme of church as prayer in more detail later. 

Gender issues.

It is a commonplace observation that women are more committed churchgoers than men. It is also unsurprising that the case studies showed that such men as did attend regularly tended to assume leadership positions within the church. This is a gender division which is commonly observed throughout our society. The research on the estates in Battersea, however, seemed to indicate a more regular attendance from men than from women, the women were much more likely to be occasional attenders. This is open to a number of interpretations:

1.  The research may give an inaccurate picture of the general pattern i.e. it is a freak result.

2.  Male attendance might be stronger amongst the ethnic and Pentecostal churches which are outside the mainstream.

3.  Women may be the majority of churchgoers but their attendance is comparatively fickle. Men, on the other hand are likely to be committed if they actually do attend. 

I think the key is found in the fact that a high percentage of male churchgoers are in a position of leadership. If men are unable to achieve a leadership position within a church they are likely to move church or cease attending altogether. Women are more comfortable in a passive position. I think the research picked up this dynamic but rather overstated what is the general position.

Churches therefore provide men the opportunity to experience leadership. This is sometimes helped by a theological bias against female leadership which reinforces the cultural bias within the urban community. At a ministerial level, however, there seems to be a larger number of female ministers in the urban context than elsewhere. This would seem to be because women find it difficult to find positions in the more popular suburban, small town and rural churches and therefore end up with urban churches who find it difficult to attract ministers.

This has been a rather limited exploration of gender within the urban church and perhaps serves to do no more than indicate that it is a key issue. 

The church as prayer.

The Riverside church was united by a common commitment to the centrality of prayer. Group discussions, however, revealed highly variable understandings of what prayer involved, prayer could be any of the following:

·      A thank you to God for safely crossing the road.

·      A corporate activity in which the whole congregation prayed aloud together.

·      A short offering of a person’s name up to God.

·      A powerful technique by which mighty things were achieved.

·      A recognition of God’s grace in enabling one to live another day. 

Whilst it is possible that these could all be integrated into a unified practice of prayer it was clear that they did in fact represent conflicting attitudes to prayer. This is clearly an issue which every church needs to address and resolve but I think that the more interesting issue is the universally acknowledged importance of prayer, however it is understood. I believe that it illustrates that for churchgoers the church is a family, event and structure that is based on communicating with God. The whole process of church life is itself prayer - communicating and responding to God. When people talk about the centrality of prayer they are asserting the centrality of God. The fundamental question therefore about the role of the church in the urban community is about what role does such a public and committed acknowledgement of God have to play. There is plenty of belief and interest in spiritual things within our urban communities but the church proclaims the shocking belief that this is something to be publicly celebrated and corporately engaged with. For those who believe that God is, at best, something to be done in private amongst consenting adults the role of the church is not something to be discussed but something to be discouraged. This illustrates that the role of the church is not an unproblematic issue which everyone will agree on if only it can be rationality discussed and understood - it is a contested issue. It seems possible, therefore, that the church might increasingly take a role in the urban community which can be called resistance. That is it bears witness to a set of values and actions which are at odds with the hegemonic values of liberal rationalism and the national state. An interesting example of this is the practice of Sanctuary. This is rooted in a practice of Christendom. It has long been removed from the statute books but has been revived because of its ability to focus media attention upon the unmerciful actions of government in deporting foreign nationals who are well-established in our urban communities. It is also based in the role-expectation of church buildings and the practical support of a church family. The government response to Faith in the City was also a good demonstration of the role of the church as a place of resistance. Two dimensions need to be born in mind, however. Firstly the resistance rooted in churches is not the same as leftist resistance, although the two may be allied in something like a sanctuary. Church's resistance is born out of their identity as places of prayer and are as likely to be opposed to left as to right, to moderate as to radical. Secondly resistance always requires a certain amount of accommodation. To take an example from Jamaica. When runaway slaves successfully established a free community in the mountains of central Jamaica they entered into a treaty with the colonial government which recognised their free status but also required that they return any further runaway slaves who tried to join their community. Churches experience this when they engage in social action - they find themselves having to take account of local authority bureaucracy and central government legislation such as the Children Act. This invariably limits their freedom of action. The dilemmas of resistance-accommodation can only be avoided by the alternative option of retreat. That is churches ignore the role-expectation of possessing church buildings and seek to operate within a context that is entirely uncontaminated by the world. This is often encouraged by the training of ministers who can be produced ill-equipped to engage with their urban community.

Summary

From a community perspective we can therefore perceive churches to be understood as a gathering of people, best understood through the metaphor of family. It becomes particularly significant when it gains control over a building, the very act of possessing a building tends to impose a role upon the church. This twin dynamic of a ‘family’ of people located in a specific building is focused and organised through the presence of an identified leader and becomes most clearly visible in the event of the regular weekly Sunday morning service. It tends to attract disproportionately large numbers of women and black (i.e. Caribbean and African) people although these are generally under represented in the leadership. Finally it is energised by prayer - the process by which the family communicates with and responds to God.
 



[i]  The Functions Of Religion: A Reappraisal. Religion 18, 199-216.

[ii] Harvie Conn Looking for a Method in Exploring Church Growth ed. WR Shenk. Eerdmans:1983.

[iii]  James Hopewell. Congregation: stories and structures SCM 1987.

[iv]  Ronald Frankenberg Communities in Britain Penguin:1966.

[v]  e.g. Clubland Methodist in Walworth (Vic Watson in 10 Growing Churches) or Fernhead Rd. Methodist in Paddington (James Ashdown in A Canal Runs Through It)

[vi]  Stephen Greasley Working Class Christianity Unpublished sabbatical report 1995.

[vii]  That is unless it has fairly autonomous sub-groups such as a strong youth work.