Looking After Each Other
by Patrick Coldstream - February 2021
A suggestion from Patrick Coldstream in response to the GRA:CE Report
As Covid retreats, CUF should lay hold quickly and decisively of the proposal in the report it commissioned, Growing Good Growing Good: Growth, Social Action and Discipleship in the Church of England by Hannah Rich is the final report of the GRA:CE Project, sponsored by Theos and Church Urban Fund. , that the Church establish a national volunteering scheme. CUF should promptly enrich and enlarge that idea to be the core for a new national strategy for Caring. A partnership of Church with State might be called “Looking After Each Other”.
As Britain’s population enjoys the blessing of longer and longer life, so more people, left behind on earth by families that have predeceased them, will need much more than professional medical or social care. They will need also to be nourished and encouraged by affectionate, loving companionship, and the help and reinforcement that has hitherto been given by family and contemporaries. The Church’s tradition of caring for its own dates to its earliest days. Care for the wider community is spreading too now, as food banks and support projects have mushroomed into poorer communities. It must spread wider, faster and even more effectively.
Growing Good comments: The response to calls for community and volunteering assistance during the pandemic evidenced that our collective desire to contribute to the common good and the wellbeing of our neighbours is a huge and untapped force the church might be well placed to mobilise…[Nearly a million individuals signed up to be NHS volunteer responders]… National government is too distant from the communities and local government has been pared back to bare essentials, and seemingly lacks the capacity or creativity to open up these reserves of social capital.
Parish churches could be an excellent vehicle to engage people of all faiths and none in looking to the needs of their neighbours. As we have said, different congregations engage with the different levels of sophistication, but even the smallest and weakest congregations have the power to befriend, tackling issues around loneliness and isolation. A Church of England volunteering service could see people register to help and be immediately directed to opportunities in their locality. Churches are already used to vetting, training and supporting people in volunteering roles.
Local piloting
CUF might begin by choosing, or establishing, say four church-based local volunteer projects to study in detail, to learn how volunteers are best, attracted, trained, deployed and assessed. The study would be hard-headed in assessing effectiveness. This is a matter of mapping local need and potential need against the volunteer time, inclinations, skills and talents on offer around local churches and studying what rules for assessing and safeguarding work effectively. The author of Growing Growth should be able to help with choosing contrasting parishes, large/small, rural/urban.
These pilots, though Church-led, would be asked to go out of their way to invite non-Church-going volunteers to join in as well as volunteers from other Christian denominations. A local movement should soon attract people who weren’t members of the usual worshipping church. In any case local congregations themselves will probably have to work on rota and relay systems so that volunteers’ offers of occasional, part-time help can be matched against people’s ongoing needs.
New theological reflection would certainly arise. Volunteers could soon develop modes of worship, often more informal and sometimes trans-denominational, giving thanks for what they were enabled to do and praying for strength and perseverance to learn and to carry on. (It would not be surprising if those on the ground began to see ‘faith’ and ‘works’ as two sides of the same coin!)
The sooner such local experiment could begin the better, to take advantage of the good community spirit that has developed during the month of the epidemic. CUF is well-placed for that because it already has a small infrastructure (“joint ventures”) in many dioceses to help local Church-community action projects get going and find their own momentum. How could these already energetic initiatives be multiplied to national scale?
A National Enquiry
Simultaneously CUF should launch a Church-led Commission with expert and eminent members, to propose a future national strategy and shape for “Caring” in a maturing society. The strategy should assume a generous role for the Church alongside the State and public services, particularly the NHS. The Church has carried out several such national inquiries in recent decades. Faith in the City led to a Church Urban Fund with £25m (say at least £60m in today’s money) raised by churches across the country, and the Churches Enquiry into Unemployment and the Future of Work was an extended Christian commentary on national economic policy.
Those strategic investigations as well as suggesting future opinion, policies and action to the Church itself have also much increased its standing to press for reform or changes in Government policies. The Church could now be in the lead in pressing loudly for government policies and budgets for the long-term provision of Adult Social Care.
The volunteering pilots would be a visible example in action-on-the-ground for the Enquiry, and the Enquiry the more credible for their developing work.
Both the local and national activities will need to be properly funded. Fundraising, however, will have a strong following wind in that a main purpose of the whole project will indeed be to bring into play for the future new human resources on a large scale.
Both Faith in the City and the Commission on the Future of Work had a powerful ecumenical drive behind them. Both owed much to the joint experience of the two Bishops of Liverpool, Anglican Sheppard and Roman Catholic Warlock, in working together to tackle unemployment and deprivation in the North West of the UK. The two-pronged strategy (pilots plus national Enquiry), proposed here, needs likewise to draw gratefully from the beginning on the insights and presence of the Free Churches, and the Catholics. The body of thought known as Catholic Social Teaching offers a much-respected theological framework. The idea of The Common Good, which underpins it, is (by happy coincidence) being strongly promoted under the banner of “Together for the Common Good” by Jenny Sinclair, Bishop Sheppard’s daughter. There are many sources of thinking here that could contribute to a Caring Commission’s work.
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Some words of Graham Tomlin, Bishop of Kensington, in A Theology of Compassionate Communities, are encouraging:
As we seek to become closer disciples or followers of Jesus, imitating him in acting out the compassion of God in our communities through our words and our lives, we point people to the God in whom they can find true meaning and purpose. As people both hear the invitation of the good news of the gospel and are able to taste and see the goodness of God in acts of compassion, they are drawn both to belong to the church and then also to participate in the church's mission to bear witness to the God who has called us out of da
Patrick Coldstream, now retired from 20 years CUF Trusteeship, chaired the Churches’ Enquiry into Unemployment and the Future of Work. He was Chairman of Hymns Ancient and Modern and the Church Times and was made CBE for leading the Council for Industry and Higher Education. Earlier he was a joint founder of Fullemploy and South East Training, initiatives to involve major companies in training those at greatest disadvantage in getting work. Patrick’s poems have appeared in journals that include The Tablet and Westminster Cathedral’s magazine.