Finding Abundance in the Scarcity of a Pandemic
by Revd Dr Sam Wells - April 2021
Sam Wells offers asset-based insights from the experience of St Martin in the Fields.
In trying to understand the last 12 months, I’ve come back to one scripture passage more than any other. Recall when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown, bound, into the fire in Daniel chapter 3. God is with them. There aren’t three figures walking in the flames; there are four. This is what Christians call salvation. Jesus is with us in the fire. The destiny of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is settled not before they reach the fire by some stunt that makes them avoid the flames; nor is there any dramatic rescue from the flames. Their salvation takes place in the flames, as they discover Emmanuel: God is with them in the flames. Our salvation is the same.
Here’s the bad news. God doesn’t spare us from the fire. God doesn’t rescue us from the fire. Here’s the good news. God is with us in the fire. ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me.’ You shall cross the barren desert; but you shall not die of thirst. You shall wander far in safety – though you do not know the way. If you pass through raging waters in the sea, you shall not drown. If you walk amid the burning flames, you shall not be harmed. If you stand before the power of hell and death is at your side, know that I am with you through it all. Be not afraid, says our God. I am with you like never before. That’s the gospel.
Not only do I believe Daniel 3 is the key passage for interpreting the pandemic; I believe Daniel 3 is the single most important story for understanding the Old Testament and how it came to be written. The fire represents Babylon. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego aren’t spared the fire, nor rescued from the fire; they find they’re with God in the fire. Somehow the fire is a fire not just for them but for God too. The same is true for Israel in Babylon. Israel isn’t spared exile. Israel isn’t rescued from exile. Israel finds in exile that God’s there too. The appearance of the fourth figure in the fire sums up the experience of exile for Israel. God is with us. That’s salvation. Exile is the place Israel wrote down the Bible. Exile is the time Israel found it was closer to God than it had ever been in the Promised Land. Exile was the lens through which the early Christians came to understand Jesus’ death. Jesus has his own fire, which we call the cross. Jesus isn’t spared the cross. Jesus isn’t rescued from the cross. Jesus is with God on the cross. The bonds of the Trinity are stretched to the limit; but not ultimately, broken. When we see the cross, we see that God is with us, however, whatever, wherever… forever. This is our faith.
I want to share with you the ways I have witnessed this word made flesh in the last 12 months, in the small corner of the world called St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, and through the many corners of the world, now four continents, touched by the HeartEdge movement arising out of St Martin’s but now far more dynamic and diverse than its origins.
It’s against my principles to start with scarcity but I need to give you some sense of the challenges the last year has brought to my community. St Martin’s a year ago had a pastoral and music staff of around 25, including six clergy, a commercial staff of 115, and a non-profit staff of around 100, running two homeless organisations and a development office; so 240 in all. Perhaps the bleakest day of the last year was when all the pastoral, music and commercial staff were called to a zoom meeting and we put everyone at risk of redundancy. After a relentless series of individual consultations lasting six weeks, followed by a second round some weeks later, I sat down to write 84 letters to those we could no longer keep on.
Doing so was distressing and humiliating. Humiliating, because I have spoken across the world about St Martin’s, its vision and its business; and now the business was disintegrating before my eyes. Humiliating also, because we have such a grand reputation for caring for the destitute, but here we had no resources to care for ourselves. It was an experience of failure and powerlessness. To ask a middle manager to consult with and make redundant her whole staff team is really hard; then to say, I’m afraid you too will need to leave, makes you feel both cruel and impotent. I haven’t felt I had the right to shed a tear, because others were materially affected so much more than me. But the last year has been about individual hardship, collective dismay and corporate impoverishment, and taking the three together has at times been overwhelming. I have nothing but admiration for the dignity and selflessness with which my colleagues left.
I wanted to say to every one of them in the words of Isaiah 43, ‘You are precious, honoured and loved.’ But you don’t say that to someone you’re making redundant. So instead I said, ‘You have been a blessing to this community, and those of us that remain are trying to work out how, without you, we can continue to be a blessing to others.’
The commercial profits of around $600,000 a year conventionally go about two-thirds of the way toward our covering the overheads of running our community. Since last March we’ve had almost zero commercial income, so we’ve been begging, borrowing and digging deep to make up the gap. We’re not out of the woods yet. Meanwhile like every community our people have been struggling with the fear of the disease, the economic cost of the consequences, the social isolation entailed, and the tension, disruption and confusion all around. That broadly covers the scarcity. I’m going to spend the rest of my time focusing on the abundance.
But first, a word about HeartEdge. HeartEdge was founded in February 2017 on two theological principles. The first is that the people of God have tended to be closer to God in times of adversity than in periods of plenty. That’s what the story in Daniel 3 tells us. If we’re experiencing adversity in our church life right now, this is precisely the time we expect God to be close to us like never before. The second HeartEdge principle is that God gives the church everything it needs. But the church must be open to receiving that everything in the form God sends it: often those on the edge. We sometimes need help from one another to perceive where our abundant assets are truly to be found. Rather than bewail our scarcity, we need to sharpen our perceptions for the ways God is sending abundance. The name HeartEdge derives from the mission statement of St Martin-in-the-Fields: At the heart. On the edge. The heart refers to passion, faith, compassion, beauty, and the location of the church on Trafalgar Square, in the heart of London. The edge refers to St Martin’s association with social exclusion, but also to the cutting edge of creativity and hope.
The name HeartEdge recognises that often the edge is found in the heart, and the heart is found on the edge. HeartEdge’s mission is ‘Catalysing communities of hope that reimagine church and society through the 4 Cs: commerce, culture, compassion and congregational life.’ HeartEdge began with the recognition that a conventional church, committed to congregational life and compassionate outreach, but short on money and energy, and often numbers, could be revitalised in both by exploring commercial initiatives and developing cultural partnerships. That’s been the experience of St Martin-in-the-Fields for the last 35 years, and it’s a model we’ve been developing more recently with hub church partners around the UK and now on four continents. But what we’ve discovered in the last year is something different, though complementary. It’s that when our business is paralysed, the other 3 Cs rally round to compensate. This is how we’ve found abundance at a time of scarcity. Let me take each C in turn.
Compassion
St Martin’s has been active in work with homeless and destitute people for a hundred years. But in the last ten years we’ve talked increasingly about the shape of Jesus’ ministry. We’ve noticed that he spent just a week in Jerusalem working for people, doing what they couldn’t do for themselves. By contrast he spent three years in Galilee working with people, building a social movement, empowering disciples, cultivating people’s assets, building momentum by achieving small successes that led to bigger ones, transforming the self-confidence and aspirations of those he met. But astonishingly Jesus spent 30 years in Nazareth being with people, sharing their joys and sorrows, offering them attention, understanding, time, respect, delighting in their way of life, enjoying their rhythms and festivals, shouldering with them the yoke of their sufferings. Just look at those percentages: 1% working for, 9% working with, and a whopping 90% being with. Now we may say God was very inexperienced at incarnation, having never done it before, and we, in our great and perspicacious wisdom, of course reverse those percentages, and construe all social engagement as a rescue where we bring our mighty assets and visit them upon those in whom we only see deficits, never realising that the reason such people seldom say thank you is that we’ve humiliated them by exposing our conviction that they have no assets worth cultivating, and making them dependent on our bounty by only investing in forms of interaction that enhance our own self-worth.
Such reflections led us eight years ago to establish a ministry with asylum-seekers seeking to embody the convictions of being with. It’s proved a transformative experience for all parties. Asylum seekers have often left stable and accomplished circumstances at home to flee persecution and arrive in London. What they need is not so much food and shelter as companionship and respect. Eight years in, a lot of the people who began as guests now run the work themselves. Many have joined our congregation, a good number have entered our intentional non-residential Nazareth Community, and one now sits on our PCC (Vestry). One of the biggest tests through the pandemic and especially lockdown has been to keep this ministry going, because being with means not giving up on people even when circumstances make relationship very challenging. We’re not dogmatic, and there has been an element of working for – for instance finding accommodation for several of the group when the government was so concerned about the risk of infection, it was prepared to pay to house homeless people in hotels. But to date we’ve found ways to be with these most isolated people throughout the 48 weeks of the pandemic. Not out of pity or guilt: but because of our experience of seeing the face of Christ in one another. We found abundance amid scarcity when last summer our local Sikh restaurant saw my colleague Richard Carter talking about our asylum-seeker ministry on the television news, and offered to supply 50 curries a week, which they’re still doing. It’s only when you recognise your own fragility and know your need of God that you’re ready to realise that what’s coming towards you is an angel rather than a threat. God gives the church everything it needs, even in a pandemic, but it takes two to tango: the church has to be willing to acknowledge that God might come in the form of a Sikh.
We call it compassion but compassion’s an inadequate name really. We use grand words like solidarity but what really matters is putting yourself in a place where you can help break through the isolation that usually constitutes a person’s most fundamental form of alienation. My motto is ‘Poverty is a mask we put on a person because we’re unable or unwilling to perceive their true wealth. Wealth is a name we give to a person in whom we’re reluctant to perceive the true poverty.’ The experience of the asylum-seekers is a moment of abundance in a time of scarcity because they revealed true wealth at a time of presenting poverty. That’s what happens when God’s kingdom breaks in.
Culture
If St Martin’s has been engaged with homeless people since the First World War, it’s been just as closely associated with classical music since the foundation of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the world’s most-recorded orchestra, by Neville Marriner in 1958.
Once again, in the area of culture, our experience has been to discover abundance in a time of scarcity. Last March, we realised the key to sustaining worship and music was going to lie in adapting to online platforms. We quickly reverted to our archive of choral music. We had to establish to what extent we could support our musicians. Among these, we had our contracted Choral Scholars, part of a year-long apprenticeship programme, our St Martin’s Voices, a company of freelance singers, most of them graduates of our scholarship programme, and our voluntary singers, notably the Choir of St Martin-in-the-Fields, but also our Children’s Voices and St Martin’s Chorus. Life as a freelance musician can be precarious at the best of times – but it was quickly apparent that opportunities were going to dry up almost entirely. Then, through broadcasting and HeartEdge, St Martin’s has a long tradition of supporting the wider church. Many local clergy and congregations found themselves bereft of ways to connect with and support their communities. The question was, could we put all of our challenges together and take initiatives that met all three considerations?
We experimented with ‘virtual’ recordings, made by singers in their own homes. We were in unknown territory. We engaged two keyboard players who had recording facilities at home. Then one of our conductors videoed herself conducting and singing along to the track. Then one of our programme team edited the audio and video together with the original organ track. The Choral Scholars sang along at home, sending back their audio. Finally we edited the different tracks together, adding acoustic effects to make it sound like St Martin’s building, to create an overall track. We were pretty much the only church in the world to keep our education programme going without a break. The choral scholars soon embarked on a programme of recording five pieces of music each week, which was offered freely to the Church of England through its ‘A Church Near You’ resource hub. The problem for local churches that were livestreaming services was that they didn’t have a rights-free resource of music to draw upon; so this provided one. The results were spectacular: we’ve had over a million downloads of the music.
Our professional choir, St Martin’s Voices, responded with ChoralCast – a daily podcast in which each of the Voices took it in turns to introduce a different piece of music each day, before the whole group sang it. We created 50 podcasts this way, attracting a quarter of a million views. Our flagship Great Sacred Music programme could not continue. In Great Sacred Music, two hymns and typically six choral pieces are grouped around a theme, and I provide spoken-word introductions and reflections on the theme over a presentation lasting 35 minutes. We decided on a change of approach, and are now three-quarters of the way through an introduction to the Christian faith, across four ten-programme sections: Scripture, Faith, Life and God. This something that, but for the pandemic, we’d never have found time for, and but for the impoverishment of our singers, we’d never have found the urgency to do.
But culture isn’t just about highly talented performers. Since my colleague Jonathan Evens joined our clergy team five years ago, we’ve built on our 20-year programme of art commissions and expanded our participation to unearth the limitless talents around our community. A congregation group of artists has grown and grown, and I’ve been amazed how many people I thought I knew well have a private passion for art that expresses creativity, longing, faith and prayer. The group has found ways to connect online, to harness technological opportunities, to reflect deeply and contemplate on scripture and theological themes, and to partner with artists around the world. In Jonathan’s words, ‘Artists are one of the groups in society whose regular practice involves elements of withdrawal and isolation…, meaning that their experience is different from the enforced restrictions of lockdown. Yet their experience of how to use isolation and withdrawal for creative ends holds out significant opportunities for society to learn ways to cope and make productive use of the lockdown experience…. We are not good, either as the church or as society, at identifying those within our midst who already having the experience and knowledge needed for the situation we are facing; but that is what God’s abundance always provides. We need to be more attuned to recognise the gifts God has sent, which we have overlooked. Artists are among those gifts.’
Congregational Life
Finally we turn to congregational life. This has been an area of exceptional fecundity. I want to pick out just three areas where scarcity has turned to abundance.
The first is around grief. My colleague Cath Duce perceived how profoundly the pandemic stirred up unresolved grief and persistent fear among our congregation members, and arranged a group for weekly online grief support sessions. People shared their very personal reactions, like keeping a toothbrush in the bathroom five years after a loved one died. Here are Cath’s words: ‘Buried feelings, memories and thoughts surfaced. The group was not overwhelmed by the intensity of the feelings, but members were able to sit, hold and be curious with each other about how they were doing. We were offered a different narrative for our grief, and this helped us find meaning in the death of those we loved. It helped us rise again…. The greatest opportunity of the past six months has been for individuals to seize the invitation to live God’s future now fearlessly and courageously, and to live in the light of eternity.’
The second area is around disability. A humbling discovery that arose when we went online was of just how many people joined us who’d been excluded from our in-person ministry because of physical disability, neurodiverse challenges, or mental health constraints. As one neurodiverse person put it, ‘You’re all getting a glimpse of what I experience all the time, and just listen to what a fuss you’re making.’ While interacting online proved challenging for some, it opened up realms of possibility for a great many. Our ninth annual conference on theology and disability, distinctive because the great majority of presenters and participants have themselves lived experience, became in October the focal point for the many ways diverse kinds of scarcity came together to find abundance. Hitherto the conference has always struggled with the paradox that it stood for safe space and inclusion, but it required people to be able to travel to central London. Now people could join from anywhere. In the words of Fiona MacMillan, chair of our Disability Advisory Group, ‘The conference drew delegates from across the country, most of whom would never have come to London. Some were in ministry, others on the edges of churches and communities; several had not been to church for a long time, some were on their first zoom call. Many began the day with their cameras off and ended with them on; most were still with us for the closing liturgy.’ Out of the conference came an online seminar series Shut In, Shut Out, Shut Up – which explores the experience of disabled and neurodivergent Christians and is ongoing.
The third area is around faith sharing. At the end of two of our Christmas Eve carol services in 2019, my colleague Sally Hitchiner announced, ‘In any group this size there will be a few people who would like to explore the Christian faith for the first time, or the first time after a significant break. If that’s you, you’re in luck; we have a new course starting in January. If this is you, find me at the end and give me your details.’ Six people did. After the first week a couple of them brought friends. We had our first Being With group. In no time we transferred to zoom, and suddenly we had the opportunity to run groups not just on Sunday lunchtimes but at almost any hour of the week. We’ve struggled to keep up with demand, and have run training sessions for people in Australia, New Zealand, the US and continental Europe at the same time. People seem more comfortable being honest and open from the security of their living rooms, and disability or childcare issues are less pressing. We’ve spent the year adapting the course to new contexts, and are now looking at producing five further courses. There’s so much we’d love to do we can’t do – eat together, touch, cook for each other, hug – but there’s so much we can do, and again we’ve realised how many people our ministry was never reaching because we were oblivious to the exclusion caused by being unable to leave one’s home. Once again, scarcity has yielded abundance.
Conclusion
Anyone familiar with the practices of improvisation in the theatre will recognise the impulses of HeartEdge. One is overaccepting. When an actor says ‘no,’ or refuses to accept the premise of what’s being said or done by others, it’s known as a block. When an actor says ‘yes,’ and inhabits the implied story proposed by others’ words or actions, it’s called accepting. But here’s the crucial thing: there’s a third option. Overaccepting means fitting the smaller story of what’s in front of you into the larger story of God. The most obvious example is the cross. Jesus doesn’t block the cross – he doesn’t escape; neither does he accept the cross – passively yielding to his fate. Instead, he overaccepts the cross. In his resurrection he takes the rejection, cruelty and death into himself and makes them part of a greater story. On an even grander level, God does not block Israel’s faltering embodiment of the covenant; neither does God simply accept it: in Jesus God overaccepts the covenant and opens it out to the whole world. Once spotted, this move can be discovered everywhere in the Bible. It’s the secret of every single one of the examples I’ve given today. It’s the heart of HeartEdge.
The second improvisatory practice is reincorporation. At the end of a Dickens novel or Shakespeare comedy, the characters reassemble on stage, and unresolved antagonisms or misunderstandings are reintroduced and addressed. This is an image of what Jesus calls the kingdom of God. In the kingdom, the neglected, lost and rejected reappear as a gift. Jesus’ ministry reassembles the outcast, the scorned and the discarded and embraces each as a person with a role to play in God’s future. At the end of the feeding of the five thousand story, the disciples collect up twelve baskets of leftover food – an act of reincorporating that anticipates the way, in God’s kingdom, nothing is wasted. Jesus’ words ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the head of the corner’ outline the way his own reincorporation after rejection by his people heralds manifold forms of subsequent reincorporation of those thought to be outside God’s promises. This is the edge of HeartEdge.
The pandemic has been a ghastly nightmare we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy. But I hope the ways we at St Martin’s have been shown abundance in scarcity has inspired you to recognise the same pattern of overaccepting and reincorporation in your own settings. These aren’t big-budget initiatives born from carefully crafted strategic plans: they’re all on a shoestring, from an organisation with no reserves in the bank. They aren’t clever spontaneous ideas in a vacuum by ecclesial entrepreneurs: they’re practices emerging from the logic of what we were already doing, and from the angels God sends us. It hasn’t been happy; but there’ve been ways in which the Holy Spirit has made it beautiful. Best of all, as John Wesley said in his dying breath, God is with us.
Revd Dr Sam Wells is Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, and a widely known preacher, pastor, writer, broadcaster, and theologian. He has served as a Church of England parish priest for 23 years. He also spent 7 years in North Carolina, where he was Dean of Duke University Chapel.
Sam is also Visiting Professor of Christian Ethics at King’s College London. He has published 39 books, including academic studies and textbooks in Christian ethics, and explorations of liturgy, preaching, faith, welfare, and mission. His most recent book is A Cross in the Heart of God (Canterbury 2019).