City Links Leaders' Forum, 30th July 2009

Archbishop John Sentamu, Bishop of York was our guest speaker on Thursday July 30th. Leaders from across the North-West gathered for a great time of networking and inspirational teaching (some notes from the talk below). The talk was recorded and is available in our web site shop. 
 

Guests included worship leaders: Noel Robinson and Lynn Swart and the day was hosted by Debra Green and the City Links team. We had 3 Workshops with: Compassion UK; Redeeming Our Communities and Hope for Justice. It was good to have Bishop Chris Edmondson from Bolton with us and Laurent and Chantelle Mbanda from Compassion in Rwanda and Ben Cooley from Hope for Justice.

Here is a  summary of the Archbishop's talk:

"William Temple was the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 and he was responding to the publication of the Beveridge Report in December 1942. I hope, to show you why he believed it was so important "to embody the whole spirit of the Christian ethic in an Act of Parliament"; and what we could learn from this.

First of all, to explore the 'big vision' that Beveridge and others had for Britain in the 1940s. Then I will argue that, for a variety of reasons, we have lost that vision and why understanding this loss matters. In the final part of my lecture, I will put the case why we need to regain a 'big vision' for Britain today and how we might achieve this.

I The Big Vision of Beveridge

Forty years before Archbishop Temple's affirmation of the Beveridge Report, three young men first met at Balliol College, Oxford. Between them, they were to develop and realise a major vision for Britain. They were the selfsame William Temple, son of Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Tawney and William Beveridge.

One man in particular, had a major influence over the whole Balliol student community at that time. He was the Master of the College, the eminent Scottish philosopher Edward Caird. Deeply influenced by the poverty he had witnessed in his native Glasgow, he had campaigned for social reform.

At Balliol he encouraged his undergraduates to become involved with the university settlements in the East End of London in Bethnal Green, Whitechapel and Bermondsey, in South London.

Whilst at Oxford the three young men were challenged to go to the East End of London to 'find friends among the poor, as well as finding out what poverty is and what can be done about it.' In the East End their consciences were pricked by poverty: visible, audible, and smellable.

William Temple was increasingly troubled by the poverty and deprivation he had witnessed as Bishop of Manchester and latterly as Archbishop of York and then of Canterbury. In his seminal work Christianity and the Social Order (1942), he called on the government to set themselves six objectives to address the crisis.

These were (1) proper housing for children, (2) decent education, (3) a proper income for workers and the unemployed, (4) opportunities for workers to have a voice in the running of their firms, (5) adequate leisure and (b) liberty.

Many of the reforms which William Temple had called for were realized in the Beveridge's Report. The Report offered three guiding principles for its recommendations: 

1. proposals for the future should not be limited by "sectional interests" in learning from experience and that "a revolutionary movement in the world's history is a time for revolutions, not for patching". Not sowing a new cloth on a worn-out garment. It is a time for setting aside personal agendas, encouraging the change of heart and empowering all people to tear down the walls of fear, cruelty and hatred. 

2. social insurance is only one part of a "comprehensive policy of social progress". The five giants (taken from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress) which were obstacles on the road to reconstruction were: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness". All five giants had to be tackled together. A piecemeal approach was inadequate to create a fire-break. 

3.  policies of social security "must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual" with the state securing the service and contributions. The state "should not stifle incentive, opportunity, and responsibility: in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family".

The social reforms implemented by the Labour Party after the 1945 General Election, led to the creation of the Welfare State. The range of Acts including the Family Allowances Act 1945, the National Insurance Act 1946 and the National Health Service Act 1946, addressed the five giants of deprivation.


The reforms which Tawney, Temple and Beveridge achieved in the 1940s represented the apogee of a shared 'big vision' for Britain in the last century. Intellectuals, church leaders and government agreed both on the big vision and on the ways in which it could be delivered.

It is a tragedy that we have increasingly lost this big vision.

We have all contributed to this. Blaming it all on the Government confirms in my mind that we are truly a BSE nation: B.S.E = Blame Someone Else!

How have we lost the big vision and how has it affected us? These questions are important because we live in a radically different world today. Increasingly we are living in a society which is ill at ease with itself. The reason for this is, I believe, because we have lost our vision of what we are about. We have also lost our confidence to develop a new vision. Consensus and magnanimity are lo longer national characteristics.
In many places our sense of community has been weakened not only by the centralism of successive governments, but by the determinedly individualistic ethos of the past decades. Communities are far weaker in our country than they were sixty years ago when Beveridge, Tawney and Temple implemented their reforms. Fear and unfamiliarity with our neighbours has meant that there is far less sense of fraternity, of commitment and of playing a role in our local communities.

So how do we regain a big vision for Britain? How do we regain a vision such as that which Beveridge, Tawney and Temple developed so successfully?

For it is essential that we have a big vision for 'without a vision, the people perish' (Proverbs 29:18).

I think the answer lies in going back to this original vision and seeing what lessons it has to teach us. In particular, I believe that the principles that inspired William Temple are highly illuminating.

In his Christianity and the Social Order, William Temple identified three core social principles.

These were seminal and were to inspire the reforms he called for and which were largely realised in the Beveridge Report. They were: 

1. Freedom: the person is primary and not the state. The first aim of social progress is to give fullest scope to personal powers of which the highest is the power to choose. Freedom therefore is the goal of politics. Power to the people.

However, it should be freedom for as well as freedom from. In other words, people are called to contribute as well as receive liberty. 

2. Social fellowship: we are social beings and belong in community. The family and local community are of paramount importance. The government must recognise the importance of voluntary groups such a churches, trade unions, etc. 

3.  Service: we should continually ask ourselves, 'where can I give my best service?'

These principles give a framework in which we can begin to build up a big vision for our time. Let me show you why I believe this is the case.

William Temple's first two principles that the person is primary and that we are social beings remind us of an important truth.

That is: that any analysis of society which treats people either as just individuals with no collective responsibility or on the other hand, as mere objects of economic and social forces is bound to fail. We are not just individuals confronted by the state. Instead, we belong to society through many different communities, geographical, ideological, faith and in many other ways.

Any big vision, therefore, must recognise both the primacy of the individual and the fact that we belong together in community. But is it still relevant and pertinent that our new vision for Britain have a faith and ethical undergirding as Beveridge's did?

Of course I am going to say yes! Just let us bear in mind our current context. We live in a society in which there is still a strong faith tradition. The 2001 census showed that just over three quarters of the UK population reported having a religion.

I believe that reclaiming our faith heritage is central to regaining our big vision for Britain. Over the past fifty years, we have become less confident as a nation and as faith groups to talk about faith in God in public life.

One of the key ways the Church and all religious communities can contribute here is by helping people to rediscover the quality of fraternity. We have focused, particularly in the last fifty years, on liberty and equality. But we have tended to underestimate the importance of fraternity. Yet without fraternity neither true liberty nor true equality can be achieved.

For fraternity is about learning to live together using the family as model. We don't choose our families any more than they choose us. One of the great lessons of growing up is learning to live together, to accept, tolerate, negotiate and love each other. Our churches when they are working well, are good models of this. For in them, we find all ages and people from all walks of life learning to worship, share their faith and serve the community together. Yes, when they are truly living the Good News of God in Jesus Christ they are communities of reconciliation: confronting the four great issues of St Paul's day and still the great issues of our day – idolatry, class, ethnicity and sex.

The Church has the power to overcome idolatry and then work for the reconciliation of class, ethnicity and sex; especially for trust, confidence, respect and reconciliation.

This community of forgiven and forgiving sinners (a fraternity) is also modelled in the parish system in the Church of England where the priest serves and is available to help each person who lives in that parish, whether or not they are a churchgoer or even a Christian.

Fraternity serves as model for living together in our local communities. It is not about choosing who we care to live with but about saying, "how can I learn to live alongside and contribute to our common life in this community?"

This is so important for it is only by building real and effective communities at a local level that we shall achieve a new and lasting vision for our country. How can we do this?

One way is, as we have seen, for the government to live up to its rhetoric and to return power to local communities. In this way, people can make real choices about how they can live together and make a difference.

Another way is by encouraging the development of the voluntary sector. The church and all religious communities can make a real contribution because they are already doing this work on the ground. They can provide models and advice as how this can be done.

The scale of the Church's contribution in the voluntary sector was highlighted in a recent report by the Von Hügel Institute. This showed, for example, that members of Church of England congregations were giving 23 million hours of voluntary service to their communities each year. The report identified that congregations, clergy and volunteers were running an enormous range of services from asylum rights centres, homeless outreach, job creation and economic regeneration programmes, youth clubs and projects to help developing countries.


In their work, they were also doing a great deal to build up the 'faithful capital' and skills of the communities they served.

So we need to rediscover again that quality of fraternity as a key to rebuilding our big vision for Britain.

The Church again can help by acting prophetically in that third sense of speaking out against injustice. It has done so in the past against slavery and more recently against apartheid and poverty. It continues to speak out against injustice shown to asylum seekers and others in need. Now at a time when we face unprecedented crisis in our economic systems, it is a call for the big vision we build together, based on respect of the individual, care for each other in the community through fraternity and service to one another. And speaking prophetically is not the same as condemning other people's failures. But rather one of helping us all towards the acceptance of common goals which uplift the heart.

We must also do this in the wider context of our world. It makes me proud to live in a country where the people and the present Government are spending almost three times on poverty reduction programmes in developing countries than in our recent past. Through DfID, Poverty, Health, Education, Aid and Debt Relief are being imaginatively addressed. The commitment to the Millennium Goals is a top priority for the Government and we must hold them to it.

I want to end with another quotation this time from one of my favourite story-tellers, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who expresses perfectly the essence of what I have called for

"If you want to build a ship

Don't herd people together to collect or buy wood

Don't summon them to prepare tools,

And don't assign them tasks and work;

But rather teach them and inspire in them a yearning for

The endless immensity of the sea."

Let us all do it. Let us all do it now."

The CD of the Archbishops talk from 30th July will be available to buy on our website shop.
Notes of his lecture is available at www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2127 .  This is not exactly what was said on 30th July, bot does refer to some of the same information.