On the frontline - 2009 archive

My name is James Fawcett, and I am the Project Manager for the Canaan Project. We are a small community organisation, which is part of THCC, the church Tony leads. Tony is also the Chair of the Canaan Project.

I have a range of different experiences working with young people; church contexts, generic and specialised, working with NEET young people (Not in Education Employment or Training), and 5 years working with young people in a drug and alcohol agency.

I am part of the wider leadership team at THCC and a trustee of a couple of charities. I am married to a beautiful woman and live in the occasionally beautiful Tower Hamlets. I enjoy reading, the company of my cat and the formula one, plus pretty well anything that is accompanied with good coffee!

What if we did not have computers and the Internet? What would our community work look like? I know there is a certain irony as I am typing this on a computer and uploading to the Internet and you are reading it on a computer, on the Internet!  It's just that I've been thinking about the amount of time I spend workingat my computer and asking myself what I am doing... Facebook? Internet Shopping? Crucial IT work for a grass-roots community project (which will clearly fall to pieces without it)?

There are a multitude of reasons why I find myself in front of a computer such as writing funding bids, emailing staff and partners organising events, keeping my diary, creating resources and doing research are just a few. But I often find myself drifting and not using my time efficiently, in ways that I would not do if I had a young person in front of me to keep my focus.

We seem to have very intimate relationships with our computers. A friend of mine is a church leader and told me he now often picks up pastoral issues via Facebook.  People share their lives on the Internet, from what feels like the safety of their living room with their computer, and so expose themselves to the world.

Before computers, I wonder if more people were seen actually in the community rather than stuck behind the computer screen in an office? Would William and Catherine Booth have influenced less of East London if they had had a couple of computers? Made less relationships? Been more ‘productive’?

Computers are said to make our work more organised and more structured, but I wonder if that is the case for community mission?

To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton: such are the advances of science that the Church could pick up a single microphone and address the entire world, now that the Church has nothing to say. Life has moved on far beyond the world of microphones, with the dawn of the Internet and mobile technology. Yet the challenge remains -  how can we best use this technology to develop our work and ultimately make disciples of the entire world?

I love some of the stuff Lifechurch.tv in America are beginning to do, the exciting ways they are using the internet encourages me. With youversion.com I can find less excuses to not read the Bible on myphone and link up with people all over the world who help to make a disciple of me.  Although I do believe that beyond powerpoint or a projector in church, the Church should lead the way in how we connect through technology, it should surely be with human and divine relationships first and foremost.

This week I want to tell the story of 'Abu',a young person we are working with.   Abu is a 17-year-old male, he is well known for his anti-social behaviour in the local area and has been known to try to get in to our project activities drunk on alcohol and having smoked cannabis.  He is also involved in motor crime, racing around the estate in old cars. Abu has had a difficult home life, with a distant and fractured relationship with his father, due to his father’s own criminal behaviour. Currently unemployed, Abu left schoolwith few qualifications having had a very turbulent time at school andending up under special school provision and the Pupil Referral Unit(PRU). Within the Canaan Project provision he has been verbally and physically threatening to staff and other young people.

We have been working with Abu since he walked in the door in September 2008 -  a couple of the volunteers have built significant relationships with him and we have seen real changes in his behaviour since the work started. In the beginning he was very aggressive both verbally and physically, including assaulting staff and other young people but over time we have challenged this behaviour and progressively walked with him to see change.

Although the full impact of any change is hard to assess, we have seen glimpses of Abu reaching his full potential and he is now more aware that much of his behaviour is not acceptable.  He now says, 'I find it hard, but I will try...’

Over the summer this year we took him away on a three day residential event and the centre manager asked Canaan Project workers to speak to Abu about his threatening behaviour toward other young people at the centre.  This was further opportunity to pick up on his leadership skills and challenge him on how he conducts himself around other young people who look up to him. Two weeks later in the club, a particularly difficult young person entered and was incredibly rude and aggressive toward a member of staff - Abu stepped in and spoke to the young person, totally resolving the situation and demonstrating incredible leadership skills. We are excited about working with Abu in the future and watching him develop as a local young leader, building his aspirations and beginning to understand his true value. This is the kind of work I really valueand encourage in our volunteers as  the essential work of the Canaan Project and every other youth project around the country.

I attended the Livability residential eventin Hothorpe Hall recently, and it was superb (I would like to add that no silver coins have crossed my palms to say that!).

It was a wonderful setting in the middle of the countryside - including no mobile signal which is refreshing in itself!  It  involved an eclectic mix of people with different experiences and we heard stories from all over the place, but there was one common thread- community mission - ie ordinary people making a difference in their communities.

The title of the residential was ‘Inner Change: Living Deep in aShallow World’ and we were lead in our reflections by John and Deanna Hayes from Inner Change. There were a variety of sessions around the main topic, and in one of the sessions entitled ‘Living deep for the long-term, moving from surviving to thriving: avoiding burn-out and cynicism’ Deanna mentioned the importance of 'Sabbath' time to rest. This really seemed to strike a resonance with lots of people during the session and afterwards.

It struck me that if you put the 10 Commandments in Exodus 20 in order of importance with the first being the most important and the tenth less essential, then 'Remembering the Sabbath' comes before murderingand stealing! It is not just an Old Testament thing either; did you know Sabbath is mentioned more in the New Testament than the Old?

It did not really surprise me that in a room full of activists they struggled with the concept/praxis of Sabbath rest, but it is a serious issue. My wife is a ‘doer’, she has the capacity to ‘do’ more than most people and her Sabbath still contains 'doing' things but it's important that it has a different focus and so she sews - and this constitutes rest for her.

Building this rhythm of appropriate rest into our lives - however difficult - is really important. Not only did God tell us to do this in Exodus 20  through the Ten Commandments, in one of the most direct ways God has spoken to us, but he underlined it by demonstrating it to us in the creation story when he worked for six days and rested for one.   Maybe it's something we each need to revisit weekly, asking ourselves the question, 'when is my Sabbath?'.

Personally I'm convinced that stopping enables us to carry on and that radical action leads from radical contemplation. What do you think?

What is it with people from different organisations or churches start fighting? I attended a meeting the other day and all we seemed to do was throw statistics at each other about how bad our comparative areas were, as if we were looking to get one up on each other (and I include myself in the group).  ‘I work in Murder Mile’ ;’56% of people on my estate are unemployed’; ‘there are gangs roaming the streets’; ‘this is London’s most challenging area’; ‘this area is the worse in London for….’ and so it continues. I worry we create these stats in order to keep us in jobs.

Please do not get me wrong, I think it is important to record information about those we meet. I also know about the tension of creating a picture in order to create a ‘fundable’ project, but at what cost?

I think the risk is that we create statistics and forget the individual behind them. In my context (working with young people) it is much more attractive to ask for money or paint a picture of working with young people involved in gangs using knives.  I do work with some of those young people but actually most of them are struggling with just being a teenager which is rather less dramatic! I could choose to overlook most of the people I work with and focus on the few, but need to work out exactly what Jesus is calling me to do.

Surely we should be praying for and celebrating the statistics coming down, following the interventions of  our quality work as part of our desire to transform our communities. I'd rather see a fact fight ove rthe positive elements in our communities as we strive to work ourselves out of our jobs!

I have a heart to see people on council estates reached. Some of the challenges that people who live on them face are enormous, and often churches find it difficult to effectively engage with them. I think that this passion comes largely from mybackground. I grew up on a large, rough estate, called the Henry Prince Estate in south London. My mum and dad had six kids and that meant thateight of us lived in a smallish flat on the top floor of our block. My dad had health problems, which meant that he couldn’t work much and so we grew up mostly on benefits. At church that made us the odd ones out, but for where we lived it was quite a normal story.

It meant that we got exposed at a young age to things that most people don’t see. As a boy of about eight I remember watching a woman coming screaming out of our block with blood pouring from her head after her husband had hit her with a meat cleaver. Similarly, I’ve seen people stabbed, beaten, and also our favourite activity as nine year olds was tormenting the glue sniffers who hung out on the stairs of the next door block by pulling open the door, throwing stones at them and running off.

However, I think that despite these things, I had a really enjoyable childhood. The point I’m making is that for all their downsides, estates can be good places. We grew up knowing our neighbours well (with so many people living so close to one another it's hard to be anonymous), having lots of friends and a genuine sense of community and belonging. I have to say that there was a real and authentic community feel to the place, something that I have not experienced since.

Because of this, I believe firmly that estates are fertile ground for Christians who are prepared to live out their faith and take an interest in them. In the case of my family, the people who brought us to the Lord were hopelessly equipped to do so. They were from the local Crusader group, they were middle class, massively out of touch and lived a couple of miles away. The key thing though was that they cared. Because of their love for God they got involved in our lives and as a result most of my family became Christians along with quite a few other kids who lived on our estate. You see the thing is, because everybody knew what everyone else was up to, when we became Christians, others knew and also got touched.  It’s a dynamic connection that God can use enormously.

I do believe though that to really make an impact on estates takes commitment. Normally (though not exclusively) it means being committedt o living on them, and this can be a challenge in itself. It also means being committed for the long haul.These aren’t the kind of places where it’s possible just to show up and see change instantly. Lastly I think it also involves a commitment to doing things with other Christians – creating a community within a community.

That might sound like a silly question,because obviously it's our faith that makes us want to do what we do.But I want you to take just a little bit of time to consider that question. I think that we often assume our community projects are Christian, simply because we are. If that’s our reasoning, then I thinkit's problematic.

I recently sat in a meeting of pastors talking about the community projects that they run - the idea was that we all shared what we were doing and what we needed prayer for. As we went round the room, leader after leader shared about innovative and cutting edge projects. The interesting thing was that when it came to praying, the requests were all the same, funding and buildings. Listening to what was on peoples' hearts you would think that was the point. Not one of them mentioned salvation, or integration into Church. This bugged me! Our mission is to make disciples, and community projects are part of this, but they must not become the mission itself.

The fact is that as Christians we can spend a lot of time and resources on community projects that often, by their very nature, exclude any mention of the Gospel. Often we rationalise this away by saying that the Gospel element is that people will be touched by our serving and the way we run these projects. That might sometimes be the case, but alot of the time it's just a way of avoiding more difficult discussions. In fact as our community work thrives and we take on more staff and become more dependent on funding we can become even less willing to take a risk by having any “Christian” side to it.

The bottom line is that we need to put the Mission back in to Community Mission. We need to be clear about how our work will lead to people encountering the risen Jesus. We need to ask ourselves how does what we do contribute to people coming to faith and becoming part of a church that will see them realise God’s call on their life?

If we don’t think about these things, our community work can move from being missional to being about making peoples' journey to hell a little bit more comfortable. That’s mission drift with disastrous consequences. I know that’s inflammatory and I don’t say it lightly,but sadly, I think it's true.

Last weekend we had a church weekend away.It was a fantastic time. About 120 of us went  down to Sussex together. Times like that are really important for us, especially because we area church full of activists, where everyone always seems to be permanently busy, so it's great to have good times together. One of the things I love about these times is the fact that we always take a real mix of people away. Often we take a whole bunch of unchurched youth with us which keeps things interesting and has lead to us being banned from a few Christian retreat centres!! This time however, due to the venue having more limited space, it was mostly just our church regulars.

This gave me an opportunity to talk about something I’m really passionate about. I talked from John 17 about the need for us to live in the world and not retreat from it, but also being realistic about how the word of God, active in our lives will cause us as Christians to be rejected and despised. One of the things that disturbs me is that at times, we as Christians want to be accepted too much. We’ve lost the sense of being people who have a confrontational message.

This is often especially true of churches that are very community focused. That’s churches like ours and as you're reading this on the Community Mission website, probably like yours too. It's easy to go from having a love and commitment to serving those around us to the point of not wanting to offend them. The fact is that the Gospel is a threat. It threatens humanity’s desire to live its own way,it threatens our notions of tolerance and most importantly calls sinners to repent and turn from their sin. Such a message is to many ears offensive.

Jesus prays in John 17 (look particularly at v14 –19) for his disciples, and part of the prayer makes it clear that they would be rejected because of the word of God at work in their lives. His prayer is that his followers be sanctified (and that certainly includes being set aside for God’s purposes) by the Word. The problem is that many of us want to be accepted and so back off from anything that may offend. When we do that we lose what makes us distinctively Christian. I’d go so far as to say that if there is nothing confrontational in what we are doing, it is no longer Christian, even if that’s what we think it is. The fact is that we don’t love people when we back away from truth.

It’s Thursday night and I’m walking around one of the most depressing places I have ever been to. I’m out with Naomi Davidge and the team from Nea Zoi as they walk around one of Athens' Red light districts. They are doing what they do several timesa week - reaching out to women who are working on the streets.  As we walked from their office, we went through the area populated mostly by Greek drug-using women, through the area worked mostly by Bulgarian transsexuals and finally arrive at the couple of streets filled with Nigerian women.

These women have virtually all been trafficked here from Africa and are to one degree or another forced to do what they are doing against their will. It seems hard to imagine that something as sinister as this can be happening as openly as it is on the streets of one of Europe’s major capital cities.

Naomi and the team are faithfully trying to serve these women, offering them a sympathetic ear and the hope, albeit a distant one, of the possibility of a different life. This is work that is heart-breaking, long term and costly.

Heart-breaking in that you cannot help but be moved by the reality that these women live with. Being forced to parade for any passing punter,competing with the women next to them in the hope of being selected. As we watch we hear a screeching of wheels and see the women start to scatter in all directions and a car speeds down the street recklessly chasing the women. Two men leap from the car, violent and intimidating. They are local vigilantes who despise the women fleeing before them.

The work that Nea Zoi do is long term in that they are committed to continue reaching out with the love of Christ week in and week out.  At times it's hard; gaining the trust of such vulnerable people does not come easily.It’s a long term process and requires consistency and patience - things that must be hard when the need is so great.

The work is above all things costly. Costly because loving the broken hurts. Costly for Gary and Naomi as they have left family and friends in London to live and raise their children in a place that many of us would rather avoid. It’s also costly for us as a church. Supporting them financially is one of the biggest financial commitments that our church has, but it’s certainly worth it. These people are really making a difference. It makes me excited to thinkabout what they are doing, but it also reminds me of the need to ensure that our church back in Tower Hamlets is being effective in our outreach.

I left feeling shocked, frustrated by the injustice of it all, but also inspired by what Gary and Naomi (and others like them) are doing. As an inner city church, we don’t have lots of money, but supporting people doing this kind of work is a priority.

One of the challenges we face as a Church is around figuring out how a diverse congregation in the inner city shape sitself.  Let me explain.  As an area, Tower Hamlets is incredibly diverse. On the one hand it's often talked about for its poverty and social deprivation, but it's also now home to many extremely wealthy people - Canary Wharf and the upmarket Docklands developments are all in the borough. Add to this the vibrant arty nightlife of the area around Brick Lane and the presence of one of the UK’s largest Muslim communities and you can see what a melting pot it appears to be!

The trouble is that 'melting pot' is a far from accurate description.For a large part these communities are entirely separate from one another and there is very little meaningful crossover. People simply do not mix. They seem to live totally separate lives, and seem ill at ease with each other.

That’s where Church comes in! I love the fact that in our church you will find a highly skilled hospital consultant living on what has a reputation of being one of East London‘s worst estates, and that people who have lead horrendous lives scarred by poverty and abuse can share a table with people from very stable and affluent backgrounds.  Whilst this is great, it does also bring difficulties. I know that there are good people in our church who get frustrated because keeping our church broad means at times being inconsistent or even messy.

The reason that communities here don’t often interact is because life is more comfortable (if somewhat more boring!) with people who think exactly like you do. When it comes to church, this makes ours a difficult place to be. In one sense we could make it much easier for people by focusing on a niche group, or having home cells made up of similar people.  At times it's tempting!  We would ask less of people and would probably find that our church grows faster. However we are committed to the principle that Kingdom living requires us to to step out of our cultural boundaries and be people who GENUINELY embrace those who are different to us.

I love the fact that Jesus called disciples to share life together who would normally be at each other's throats. Amongst the twelve were a tax collector and a Zealot. The crazy thing is that Zealots despised tax collectors - they were happy to see them killed.  In miniature itwould be like Jesus calling someone from the BNP to work alongside a Guardian-reading liberal. The point is that true Kingdom living means that we find our identity firstly as believers and secondly in our culture or upbringing. Yousee, Jesus wants to challenge our selfishness and ego. Generally He does this most effectively through those who are different to us.

I’ve said to our people on numerous occasions, that if church becomes just like they might want it to be then we have failed.  It’s important to remember that each of us is someone else’s idea of a nightmare and that if church only reflects us, then it's too narrow.

Having worked for inner city churches for most of the last 13years, one of the things that most winds me up is people who show up atchurch and tell you that they have a heart for the poor. Now, Iunderstand the sentiment, but often it's just that, sentiment.

As I write this I think of a church I know that has had a lotof young professionals join it. They are  people with great intentionsand all claimed to have a heart for the poor,  and indeed have set upsome interesting community projects. The telling thing is that theyhave changed that church to such a degree that most of “ the poor” haveleft. They may have had a “heart for the poor” but despite setting upcommunity projects, they somehow forgot to show those “ poor” peoplethat they cared. They tried to connect through programmes but missedout on investing in heart relationships.

Luther translated Isaiah 58 v10  as “let thehungry find your heart”. Serving the poor is one thing, giving themyour heart is something far more costly…