Church and family

Earlier in the week I came across an article in The Guardian about the government's Troubled Families programme. You might remember its launch with David Cameron's pledge to turn around the lives of 120,000 of England's most 'troubled' families within the current parliament. I suggest you read the article - it's about a family intervention worker in Manchester and the impact she's had on the lives of a couple of the families she's worked with.

The one slight drawback with the article is that it implies that once a family has an intervention worker it's just a matter of time until all the children are happy and achieving at school, that family relationships are functioning well and all the grown-ups have a useful job that pays a living wage. But the stories suggest that this intensive, hands-on approach is working.

There are some helpful contributions from those who know about this kind of thing towards the end of the article - it seems that there's evidence that family intervention has a good track record - but some inevitable criticism of the time frames set by the Department for Communities and Local Government (the programme is due to report its results in time for the general election in 2015) and the payment-by-results approach to financing the programme, plus the closing down of existing early intervention programmes like Sure Start and the reduction of funding to other community programmes.

But one of the things that struck me as I read was that this is the kind of thing that I think the church should be involved in - I'm not sure how that would work, but instinctively I think it ought to.

Things can only get better?

For my birthday this year I was given, amongst other lovely things, a book about the Clapham Sect entitled - imaginatively - The Clapham Sect. There's been quite a lot going on in the two weeks since I received it but I have managed to read the first three or four chapters and the thing that has struck me most forcefully is the fact that as a nation Britain still faces many of the social, economic and (whisper it) moral issues that were prevalent two hundred years ago, a observation reinforced by an article I read in The Economist this morning.

Church in a bubble

One of the interesting things about getting involved in a new church is the process of finding out how the church functions and what its priorities are. I’m really enjoying being part of a small village congregation with a tangible sense of community but I’m also beginning to see how this can all too easily lead to a highly individualised approach to faith and a lack of engagement in the wider world.

Last Sunday I was struck by the fact that despite the news being full of the momentous and historic events unfolding in the Arab world there was no mention of these in the service at all. The irony is that the theme of the sermon was the freedom from oppression that comes from the power of God at work – an allusion to the (largely) peaceful overthrow of an oppressive regime in Egypt two weeks ago would have been timely and appropriate, and yet it never came. Nor did we pray for those situations, in either abstract or specific terms.

Over the last few years I've learnt to appreciate the Anglican approach to prayer, particularly intercessory prayer, or prayer for others. I'm sure this must be due, in some part, to being the state church - an Empire church, indeed, for some part of the last five hundred years - and that must give you something of a global perspective. The other irony is, of course, that my church has a long-standing commitment to the work of oversees missionaries which means they clearly realise what happens in the village on a Sunday impacts the other side of the world. But I wonder whether somehow that's remained a purely spiritual dynamic, divorced from social and political realities.

A couple of weeks ago I was leading staff prayers at work and was reminded of the quote attributed to the theologian Karl Barth – “Read with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other”. While it’s obviously entirely appropriate to spend time in corporate worship reflecting on areas in which we need to grow and mature in our individual walks with God, it’s also vital that we acknowledge that we live in a world which needs to be shaped by the grace and compassion of God and to engage as a community with the responsibility we have to be part of that process.

It's fair to say that I struggled a little bit with church on Sunday but I'm very much aware that if I want to see things change, I have to take responsibility for making change happen and not just blog about my frustrations!