I warn you now- this is long!
RESTORING COMMUNITY IN AN INDIVIDUALISED WORLD
It is becoming and objectively recognised fact that levels of community trust and commitment have been majorly declining in most western societies for about four decades now. That's a critical opportunity for any and every follower of Jesus Christ if we just become aware, because for once it seems to me, here is a situation where church can reasonably and unambiguously be part of the solution rather than just thought of as part of the problem.
This seminar includes:
Ø Definition of social capital;
Ø Factual information, from the USA and the UK, relying more on studies in the USA where most work has been done;
Ø Diagnosis; and finally
Ø Critical ways in which individual Christians, and Christian communities, can actually be, not part of turning the clock back or the tide back, but in building the sort of communities we need in the future.
Definition of Social Capital
The buzz word around social policy makers at the moment is ‘social capital’. You’ve got ‘financial capital’ that you need to start a business; you have ‘intellectual capital’, the new understandings and the knowledge you’ve got; and this ‘social capital’ is an equivalent idea.
In Social Trends 2003 it is defined as: ‘networks together with shared norms, values and understandings that facilitate co-operation within or among groups.’
Much easier, Ann Morrisey: ‘Social capital could be described as the glue which holds societies together.’
If you want one word that sums up social capital, it’s this: ‘trust’. Not the level of trust amongst people who have known each other for thirty or forty years, but the sort of trust that enables you to do business with someone you hardly know and to believe that you don’t need too many lawyers involved. It’s not close, long-established, proven-relationships trust – it’s the level of trust that makes societies work. Trust is like society’s oil can - the engine seizes up without it.
One of the factors that tells you that social capital is in decline, is when the areas of life in which litigation is increasing and increasing, are becoming more and more. When a society loses the basis of mutual trust it uses law and bureaucracy as the way of safeguarding its unity, and those things can’t deliver everything that we actually need them to do.
Social capital is both personal and social. You develop a personal qualities that make you trustworthy, and if enough people do that, you develop a sort of society where people know they can trust one another. It’s therefore a very important bridge. If one of the problems is that our society is being more and more individualised, here is one of the characters that is in itself a bridge. Social capital by definition has a personal and a shared element.
American Robert Putnam says: “Trustworthiness lubricates social life.” Hence my ‘oil can’ idea.
There are two sorts of social: ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’.
BONDING CAPITAL sustains existing community. It means that in relationships you do have - the structures you’re already in, the place where you work, the community where you live, where you already have some sort of contact – trust deepens.
We need that. But what we need even more is bridging capital, that actually bridges you and your group into relationships with some other group - so that the fragmentation of society is reversed in some senses. Our greatest need as a society is for bridging capital. The capacity to establish relationships of trust with people who are not like us – who are not defined by the groups we’re in and by the choices we’ve made.
Analysis of the UK and US situations
The US and UK are significantly parallel in this. The great book on this is by the American Robert Putnam and is called “Bowling Alone”. People used to go out ten-pin bowling in groups, now they go out just them and their partner, or just them. It’s extraordinary – bowling alleys full of people bowling alone. Robert Putnam, on the basis of two very substantial studies of trends in America over four generations has done a hugely creditable piece of social analysis, as a result of which he has been invited to Downing Street, I think three times, in about the last four years. Because, as our government raises issues of citizenship and asks how we can create society where people are safe, feel safe, do trust, can trust – he’s one of the people they’ve been turning to.
Putnam says this: 'Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the (20th) century.' He says, there’s a four generation thing going on, over a period of time, and that all of the social capital indicators have gone down.
There has been a 50% cut in social capital over four generations – very scary indeed.
In the United States, 10% of that change is pressure of time and money, including in two career families to maintain payment of mortgages. Life is more stressful, life is more costly, maintaining your chosen standard of living involves all sorts of commitments. Something’s got to go, and its actually regularly meeting people in networks outside work, that build trust. That is the thing that has gone. That is 10% of the change.
Another 10% is what he calls suburbanization, commuting and ‘sprawl’. A wonderful American word for suburbs that go on and on across what once was countryside. Chunks of territory become indistinguishable from other chunks of territory. More and more people live in that kind of space; more and more people are mobile, and the more time they spending travelling and commuting, the less time they spend with neighbours and voluntary groups and things like these. That’s about another 10%.
TV and other electronic entertainment - privatised leisure time, is next. The Sony Walkman or the personalised CD player. The fact that all TV is now ‘narrow casting’ – everyone has they’re own tele’ in their own room. He puts that down for another quarter of the change.
When one adds all those together, Putnam has about 45% of the change, and he allows about 5% for assorted factors.
He then says, half the change is ‘generational change’. In other words there has been a slippage between each of the four generations – it wasn’t happening before - but there is a slippage from the generation that came through the Second World War down to the generation that are the current teens and students. Every generation has committed itself less. This is half the change, this slippage – as if each generation in the last 50 years has lost sight of something that was ‘just what you did’ in the generation before, and the pace has continued.
Putnam writes that “Members of any given generation are investing as much time in organizational activity as they ever were, but each successive generation is investing less”.
Social capital can be the bridge club, it can be the local working men’s club, or the Parents and Teachers Association of your child’s school, or Age Concern. What matters is that you’re regularly with people on a social basis. It doesn’t really matter for social capital, whether it’s for leisure or for the good of the community, but its membership of voluntary communities, and it’s getting less and less.
Now you wouldn’t think it’s the case, because membership of campaigning bodies like Amnesty or Greenpeace, can seem to grow and grow. But the vast majority of these people are not meeting face to face in an action group – they have signed up for a regular newsletter. Therefore, they belong to an organisation but it doesn’t involve them in regular face to face meeting, and you need some level of regular face to face meeting to get some level of social capital.
There are a lot of organisations being run by people who are really quite elderly now, they are long retired – maybe in their 70s or even their 80s – and they’re running something for three reasons.
The first is, they grew up to be told ‘you did your bit!’. It’s just a generational thing. You do it, you don’t think about it! And you think people who don’t do it, have lost something – you don’t know what’s wrong with the generations that follow – you just do!
The next reason you’re doing it, is that you didn’t expect to live as long as you have, as healthily as you have. People are living longer and health care is getting better. You keep going longer - the wheels haven’t dropped off yet.
The third reason you do it, is that you can’t find anybody younger than you to take over! All over my bit of Kent I know of scouts and guide groups who don’t have a problem about getting kids to join, but they have a problem about getting leaders.
That’s decline in social capital. It’s literally generational slippage and it accounts for half the loss of social capital over four generations.
But Putnam is not a determinist. It has not been slipping since eternity. Something happened to the generation after WWII – my generation, the ‘boomer’ generation, and the three generations to follow. Putnam says that “Generational effects means that society changes, even though individuals do not”. So a whole generation keep getting ‘stuck in’ to the level they consider normal, but because the next generation doesn’t, society changes.
Moving on to the UK, and looking at the current edition of Social Trends (2003). The first essay is on social capital. If you still experience relatively high social capital (the slippage still takes place in the UK), you are more likely to live outside London than in it; you’re more likely to be 30 and above, rather than 29 and below; you’re more likely to be a woman than a man; you’re more likely to be married than single; you’re more likely to be highly educated than to have had little or no education; you’re more likely to be higher income than lower income; to be employed than unemployed; to be in a least deprived area than a most deprived area; to be a homeowner than a private renter; and to have lived where you do for more than five years.
This is not an even slippage. So it seems in social capital that the poor get poorer, and the rich and mobile enjoy more social capital than others do. So there is a justice, rich and poor, thing in here, as well as a slippage generation to generation.
A number of things are identical for both the States and the UK. The younger you are, the less you feel the culture, the neighbourhood and society, is trustworthy. There's a table in Social Trends 2003 about trust in neighbours. The figures were taken in 2000/2001. If you were 16-29 years old, less than 40% believed that the people around them could be trusted. If you were 70 or over, it was nearly 80%. That's exactly repeated in America.
But are we talking about the way things are, or are we talking about perceptions? There are perceptions that there are evil paedophiles everywhere, but the reality is that the vast majority of sexual abuse of children is done by a close relative. But if people feel people can't be trusted, the tragic result is that they end up not trusting them. So perception is significant here.
The scariest bit of it, established in both the States and the UK, is this. When my dad came through the Second World War, for his generation, the time of life in which you were most vulnerable to suicide or attempted suicide, was late in life, when as it were, the pressures grew and grew and the latest thing became one too many. I'm highly aware of that because that's the way my mum got out of the pressures she was experiencing when I was 16.
The age now, in both Britain and America, when you are most vulnerable to suicide, is teen-age. I'm up to my eyes in Soul Survivor and youth events, and this just about enrages me. I think it's an outrage, that somehow whatever changes right and wrong, and all change is not bad, that somehow in four generations we have moved to a situation when it's teenage young people, it's adolescents, who are most likely to attempt to end it all. It is evidence that there is something profoundly sick in our nation. If nothing else this should make you say something's got to change. If any of you know funeral directors, clergy and so on, ask them about the increase in teenage funerals. Many of them will give you very painful stories.
Now having said this, the danger is that this turns into a typical evangelical seminar - society is bad, all change is wrong, things are going from bad to worse, we must do something about it. That's nonsense. People are still made in the image of God and as fallen as they were one generation, two three four or fifteen or twenty years ago. There is no point of gain in trying to turn back the clock, especially to forms of society that we start to idealise. When we are losing something, we tend to remember the good bits and we forget the bad bits.
Reverse through the clock is not what we need but we do need to play our part in guiding the future.
For instance, this is an age of mobility. One writer called it the end of the era of space and the emergence of the era of speed. Who you relate to is not now dependent on who is physically near to you, but how fast you, or a message from you, can travel. And that's a reality and there's loads of good in that. It's part of a change that has happened, and you simply can't get back to the old idea of creating the traditional neighbourhood, which probably wasn't as nice as you think it was now that you think you miss it.
One writer put it like this, a professor at Roehampton. "The communities of this age generally have no local centre; people living in the same street will have fleeting relationships with each other, having widely different lifestyles and household arrangements, and have common interest only the maintainance of certain shared facilities they take for granted”. In other words if you want social capital in your street, you probably need a dustman’s strike!
People make different lifestyle choices, and like it or not, they relate largely to the people that make lifestyle choices that they do. Which means that neighbourhood is no more the issue. German sociologist Ulrich Beck wrote: “To live in one place no longer means to live together, and living together no longer means living in the same place.” David Morley says: “Places are no longer the clear supports of our identity.”
We’ve got to forget the idea that communities have some sort of distinct boundary; you know, here’s the boundary, and you’re in the community if you live here, and you’re out of it if you live there. A favourite sociologist of mine, Zygmunt Bauman writes “All boundaries are tenuous, frail and porous. … Geographical discontinuity no longer matters.” We interact with far more people and make what another writer calls ‘loose connections’ (Robert Wuthrow).
Now all that’s a given. How we handle those choices is an issue. We’re not trying to go back to some previous form of society. We’re trying to learn how faithfulness and commitment can work, out in the actual world and society we live in, and the pressures people are under.
If there has been this extraordinary shift over four generations, there have got to be substantial social factors that are involved in it; there have got to be some things at work in our society. You grow up as the next generation and take some stuff for granted that the previous generation didn’t.
Key factors in loss of social capital
I’d like to suggest there are three main factors involved in that:
Ø The first has the title ‘dis-embedding’;
Ø the second, in sociological language, is ‘individualistion’; and
Ø the third is better known, it’s ‘consumerism’.
What happens when there’s major technologically driven social change is that old forms of society begin to be taken apart. At the time of the industrial revolution people who were the rural poor were ‘dug up’ (notice ‘dis-embedding’ is a sort of gardening term). They were dis-embedded. Moved into cities to run the factories. We begun to get the development of the cities; where they were re-embedded, or replanted. So the way modernity has worked for a long time is that it breaks down traditional forms of society and re-shapes new forms of society.
What the writers are saying now is, that the pace of social change is so great, that the “dis-embedding process continues but there’s never time to re-embed.”
Therefore people like Baumann talk about a ‘liquid society’ in his book ‘Liquid modernity’. Pete Ward’s book ‘Liquid Church’ is also written in Baumann’s terms. With things that are liquid, there is never time for them to freeze or become solid again. That implies a permanence of change.
David Lyons, a Christian sociologist, in a wonderful book called ‘Jesus in Disneyland’, a book about what happens to religion in this sort of culture, says that the danger of talking about ‘post-modernity’, is that it might imply we were in this solid thing called ‘modernity’, we’re now in this transition called ‘post-modernity’, and we’ll end up with a solid thing afterwards. He says that’s a misunderstanding, and that what we’re talking about is a society of ‘electronically mediated images that restlessly circle the globe in a constant flux’.
It’s never going to settle down. It stays liquid. Richard Scace, a Professor at the University of Kent, who seems to me to be the Professor for predicting the future of everything, says the trouble facing young adults as they hit the workplace, is that they are ‘Constantly having to live in a temporary world.’
The same thing has happened to families. Nuclear family units break down so fast and so often now, that Baumann says that ‘The chances that the family will survive any of its members gets slimmer by the year: the life-expectation of the individual mortal body seems an eternity by comparison.’
All sorts of things that were stable; in culture, family life and in work are no longer so. Read Richard Sennet’s book ‘The Corrosion of Character’; where roughly what he says is, that long term involvement in the workplace, which for a long time was long term involvement in the same workplace, and also with the same firm, used to have an indirect result of creating qualities of faithfulness and loyalty. Now with so much down-sizing, reapplying for your own job, contracting out etc, that disappears. He did a major study with some American workers and then came back twenty years later to see how it had changed. A father he interviews says: ‘If I talk to my kids about loyalty and commitment, they just laugh, because there is nothing in their experience that measures to that”.
Baumann sums up like this: “A flexible identity, a constant readiness to change and the ability to change at short notice, and an absence of commitments of the “till death us do part” style, appears to be the least risky of conceivable life strategies.’ In other words, commitment is too much of risk if everything changes so fast.
And so, I begin to get my head around why each generation is a bit less inclined to commit than the one before.
Indivualisation. The whole pressure of social change is to convince you that your personal freedom is the most important thing, that your right to make your personal choices is the most important thing, and that the key unit of society is the individual.
Now I happen to believe as a Christian that God didn’t make us as individuals; but that he made us as persons who become who we are through relationships. So we are right at the heart of a Christian understanding of being human. But the whole cultural forming of our society says to us that you are an individual.
Beck says we are all asked to seek biographical solutions, that is, personal solutions, in our own story. Personal solutions to what he calls ‘systemic contradictions’. These are fundamental contradictions in our culture created by forces that individually we cannot control. So we’re told that we’ve got to have community and good neighborhoods, but everything is actually driving us towards individualism.
You’re meant to solve it yourself. But individuals by themselves can’t solve it. A fundamental contradiction.
It also bears on this business of teenage suicide. An American sociologist Martin Seligman, quoted by Putnam, says this 'Individualism need not lead to depression as long as you can fall back on large institutions – religion, country, family. When you fail to reach some of your personal goals, as we all must, you can turn to these larger institutions for hope …” But it’s exactly those institutions that have been breaking down, and we’ve been told not to trust them, because they threaten our individual freedom and choice.
And then he says (and I find this very disturbing) “…But in a self standing alone without the buffer of larger beliefs, helplessness and failure can all too easily become hopelessness and despair”'
The biographical answer does not deal with something that is systemic in our culture.
Consumerism. Roughly speaking, shopping has outgrown it’s true territory and has become a metaphor for how you deal with the whole of life. So you choose everything, from relationships to values the same way you choose the latest style of shirt. It’s the bait for individualism. David Lyons wrote this: “Identities are constructed through consuming. We shape our malleable image by what we buy - our clothing, our kitchens, and our cars tell the story of who we are (becoming).”
Rowan Williams has written about the danger of having an idea about ‘the self’ that you construct as though you are going around the supermarket on a shopping trip. This ‘bit’ I like, and that ‘bit’ I like, and my choices make me ‘me’.
Lyon believes the challenge of consumerism has simply not been taken seriously by the churches at all, and by Christian communities at all.
Now if you put all those things together: the dis-embedding – it’s all liquid, nothing stays the same for long enough; you put the pressure that it’s the individual you who must make all your choices in an increasingly multi-choice world; and you then get a consumer culture that is continually multiplying the choices; and I think you get at least some of the forces that have made it obvious to each generation that they shouldn’t trust as much as mum and dad.
What can be done?
The critical question is what can we do about it. No one who believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, as something in which God’s future for the whole world has broken into the present and starts to change it now, can be a determinist. No one can sit back and say there’s nothing we can do about it, it’s all great big social forces; individuals can’t deal with systemic problems, and so on.
We need to recognise that faith based communities are an essential resource for wider community. Putnam wrote this: “Faith based communities remain such a crucial reservoir of social capital in America that it is hard to see how we could address the erosion of the last several decades without a major religious contribution.”
British writers have taken this up as well. The reality is that if you have good social capital you get less teenage pregnancy; if you have good social capital you get less kids dropping out of school; and if you have good social capital you get more commitment in the workplace. It’s like a catalyst. It’s quantifiable that it makes a very very significant actual social difference. It is not pie in the sky where you die. It is life better and more pleasant for everyone. It is significantly impacting all sorts of areas.
So as the Chairman of the Church of England’s Working Party on Church Planting and New Expressions of Church, I’ll say this: every time you plant a church or a new Christian community, you’ve got to think about ‘bridging social capital’, you’ve got to think about establishing the possibility of new relationships of trust with people you’ve previously had no relationship with whatsoever.
If the Gospel of Christ not only breaks down the barrier between you and God, but also reconciles you with others, as Ephesians 2 says, there is something inherit in the Gospel and in Christian mission that is about the building of community and the blessing of others.
I want to be a bit more precise than this, and spend the last part of this talk, on one key issue.
If we are in an increasingly mobile community, and we can’t change that, we shouldn’t try. If people will move on more quickly from lots of things in life because that’s the shape of life; and if it’s the choices which we make under pressure from society as individuals and as consumers that is the key; then the vital thing that must happen is that we develop a character which is able to be trustworthy, which is able to be faithful when it’s right.
We need to know when to say ‘no’ to moving on when it’s the wrong thing for the benefit of others. We need to have the capacity to remain faithful to other people irrespective of whether they are faithful to us. What has actually being eroded is the human capacity for commitment and faithfulness. Not just a general thing about trust. If you don’t trust, you don’t stay in there. If you don’t stay in there, you don’t learn what commitment is. That’s the bottom line.
Our characters are formed by choices. Therefore, a loss of a sense of trust robs us of all sorts of opportunities to become people who are trustworthy and who are recognised as that. There’s a guy called Vernon White written a book called ‘Identity’. I’d recommend it to you but only if you read a bit of philosophy and theology – it is not an easy read. This last part of the seminar is based on some excellent stuff of his.
Let’s ask ourselves, are human beings capable of faithfulness? There are those who say ‘blokes are meant to be predators’, ‘animals’, ‘they move on from thing to thing’. ‘We’re just animals aren’t we?’ ‘Faithfulness and staying with anyone for long is not something that goes with being human, at least not something that goes with being male’. These are some of the versions I’ve heard.
As a Christian, I cannot accept that. Rowan Williams wrote this in “Lost Icons”: that the self is, not because of need; meaning, I need this sort of stuff and as I respond it tells me that I am me; but because of gift. If you were created by a God that is faithful and trustworthy, in the image of that God, you have within you the seed of the possibility of becoming a person who is faithful or trustworthy.
So a very belief in God and the doctrine of Creation, tells that there must be a capacity to change this; there must be a capacity to shape the future so that whatever it’s socially like, it is marked by trustworthiness.
Vernon White says a number of things are the basic structure of human identity and they make it possible for us to be faithful. The first is, (in plainer language than in Vernon), there is a core, real, as created by God, undivided you, that God made. Identity is only in part something that you create. It is actually something that was given you. There is a real you in God. That real you in God, grows through life. Is it as though there is a real you, but the you that you become, is what you make of the real you. There is a real given, but you’re a partner in God in making you what you’re going to be.
Above all, the real ‘you’ grows and develops as God intended, through relationships. So the degree to which you keep people distant is the degree to which your development might become distorted. I know we’re introverts and extroverts, and I’m an introvert, but it’s not about that. Fundamentally we are made for relationships in the image of a triune God. We’re defined by relationships in community; and of course we change; but the key thing about how we change is that it is through the decisions we make in relationship with other people through our lives. We can choose under God to make choices and make relationships, so that bit by bit we grow into people who are faithful. From Vernon White: “We act largely out of a character formed by our response in our relationships and the events of our story”.
You have spent your life making yourself the ‘you’ that you are. In God there is freedom to change the direction of that story.
The church is stuffed full of social capital, and though we sometimes knock it, it’s actually full of people who have tried to the best of their ability to faithfully follow God and do what’s right all their lives. That simply makes you someone who becomes trustworthy. You might not be someone who understands; you might not be someone who is cool; you might have missed the great social changes; but something has happened in you that people can trust you.
That is the crucial element of social capital! If you start then making new relationships, getting involved in your community, making connections at festivals such as this, and being trustworthy, social capital starts to grow. In one sense it really is as simple as that. The answer is before your face.
You know the story of the new curate who arrives and is sent to the Sunday school. He decides to ask them just a few questions first, just to warm them up. He asks; ‘what’s grey and has a big bushy tail, and sleeps in the winter and eats nuts?’. The little boy sticks his hand up and says ‘I know the answer is meant to be Jesus, but it stills sounds like a squirrel to me’.
The answer is as obvious as the answer is Jesus. If you want social capital, be a person who is trustworthy and start reaching out to make relationships with people you didn’t know before. You literally start to turn the tide. It doesn’t matter if your relationships are in one community where you commute, another where you shop, another where you play, another where you go to church. Wherever you are, people will start to trust you, because you have learned to be trustworthy.
Human beings can be faithful, and we have to learn to make consistent choices. There’s an idea around that no choice you make restricts your freedom, because then you make another one. But every choice you’ve made changes you and most of them you can’t go back on. There’s some absolute nonsense about that, so learn to make consistent choices before God.
Three theological bits.
1. Live from the cross. There is a bit of me that isn’t trustworthy. There’s a bit of me that will make all sorts of self-centred choices. There’s a bit of me that will screw up any relationship or start relationships I shouldn’t start in the first place. That bit needs to go to the cross.
Theologian Miroslav Volf, writes that if you read St Paul, and Galatians 2:19-20, ‘I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live’; you find that Paul presumes that we do have a real ‘us’, there’s a centred ‘us’ that is making all these consumer choices and so on, but it’s wrongly centred, and it needs to be de-centred by being nailed to the cross, by being crucified with Christ. Volf interprets that 'Whichever way the centering takes place and whatever its result, the self should be de-centred, claims Paul ... then a recentering of that same self can take place ... The centre is Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected who has become part and parcel of the very structure of the self. ... At the centre of the (new) self lies self giving love.'
That’s very dense. Let’s go through it with the text. ‘I’ve been crucified with Christ, it’s no longer I who live’. The old me, I’ve allowed to be nailed to the cross with Jesus, because the old me is not trustworthy before God or other people. I have allowed the old me to be put out of the centre of my life, and the life I now live, I live not by trust in my ability, but by faith in Jesus Christ, who loved me and gave himself for me. That Christ is now not far away from me. He lives in the very core of my being, and his nature is self-giving love. If the one who loves me and gave himself for me, lives in me, and the old me is kept at the foot of the cross, then I can develop a character which is self giving love. It is the character of the Lord who lives in me.
It seems to me that those who would live lives that are faithful and trustworthy and grow social capital are people who know quite a lot about kneeling at the cross of Jesus. Quite a lot about seeking him to be at the centre and his character transforming.
Live in the Light of the Resurrection
If Jesus raised from the dead in the middle of history is God’s absolute guarantee that all those who believe in him will be raised from the dead at the end of history; that the whole universe will be transformed; then it’s worth keeping going. It’s worth making consistent choices in the light of my faith. If you don’t make consistent choices in the light of your faith you won’t become someone who is part of society’s social capital.
It’s ‘hope’ that keeps you going. So the response to four generations of decline in social capital is not ‘O my Lord, what if that keeps going’; but to thank God for the resurrection of Jesus. Whatever happens to society I’m going there.
So there is an encounter with the cross; there is hope in the resurrection; and the last thing is Paul’s challenge to walk in the Holy Spirit.
Walk in the Holy Spirit
Walking by the Spirit means keeping in step with the Holy Spirit. Eugene Petersen, who wrote ‘The Message’, calls it ‘the long obedience in the same direction’. A life that, understanding the ways that Christians should live, open to scripture, open to the Christian tradition, but with habits of prayer where you hear God; a life that says as it were “yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord…” It is literally ‘the long obedience in the same direction’.
Paul says: if your life style is one of obedient trust to the Spirit, through the long obedience in the same direction, something grows called ‘the fruit of the Spirit’. One key element of the fruit of the Spirit is faithfulness. Faithfulness grows by a life before the cross, a hope based on the resurrection, and a daily obedience to the Spirit of God. Which puts you into a transforming relationship with God.
So we are back down to a basic evangelical version of being a Christian. I don’t care whether you’re high, low, radical, middle, evangelical, charismatic or have buried the chandeliers. But live in the light of the cross and the resurrection, and live every day to the best of your ability in humble obedience to the Spirit. Paul says, ‘faithfulness’ then becomes part of you.
The role of the church
The key to the reversal of the decline in social capital is people whose character makes them trustworthy. The church of Jesus locally, and on wider levels, is actually a production plant on faithfulness.
Now I know you’ve seen a few that work in the opposite direction, but if they only but know it, one of the keys to reversing this decline is ordinary, un-exciting Christians. Ordinary who have learnt to be trustworthy through walking with God. If we just learn to be trustworthy: and most of us are doing it because we know no better, we don’t know we’re the answer to a social problem, we’re just doing what we do because we’re Christians. In might just be going to the Book of Common Prayer, to Holy Communion at 8 o’clock every Sunday morning, something you’ve done for the last sixty years; but all other things being equal, it’s turned you into someone you can trust.
If those who are trustworthy, will now not only use it for ‘bonding’ social capital (we get on very well when we all believe the same thing) but turn it into ‘bridging’ social capital (we will take the risk of getting involved in different areas of our community, with people we don’t at the moment know), social capital will spread.
Trustworthy people are trusted. Ordinary church members without special projects can actually be part of the reversal of this thing, everywhere that they are. Of course there are projects that help, bridging projects that you do together, but the fundamental issue is not projects, it is trustworthiness.
A last illustration. Rowan Williams went to speak at the national memorial to the Victoria and George Cross. Rowan’s not big on violence, so going to something about heroes, he really had to think very hard about what he as going to say. He made the distinction in his talk between ‘what comes naturally’ and ‘second nature’. He said he had no respect for violence, even violence that expressed great courage, if it was just what came naturally. You were a really aggressive bloke and you ended up in the army and you went for it. Heroic or not that didn’t touch him. But when people have lived a way of life, so that at whatever the cost they would give themselves up to others, as ‘second nature’, it wasn’t the first nature, it wasn’t the way they were, it is what they have become, it is almost contrary to what you are inclined to be, that he said is a courage he treats with the highest respect.
I believe we need Christians who are trustworthy by second nature. Who have actually made serious investments in their life before God to become people of trust, and then become people like Jesus who cross boundaries to folk they don’t know. Most of the rest of what we want to do as Christians, in terms of evangelism and social change, will work a lot better if we do that anyway.
If you going to share good news, you’ve got to be good news. In a time of decline of social capital, the best news you can be is to be trustworthy in a culture where less and less people feel that there is anywhere that they can trust.
Seminar given by Graham Cray, Bishop of Maidstone, at Greenbelt 2003. Transcribed with the author’s permission.
It is becoming and objectively recognised fact that levels of community trust and commitment have been majorly declining in most western societies for about four decades now. That's a critical opportunity for any and every follower of Jesus Christ if we just become aware, because for once it seems to me, here is a situation where church can reasonably and unambiguously be part of the solution rather than just thought of as part of the problem.
This seminar includes:
Ø Definition of social capital;
Ø Factual information, from the USA and the UK, relying more on studies in the USA where most work has been done;
Ø Diagnosis; and finally
Ø Critical ways in which individual Christians, and Christian communities, can actually be, not part of turning the clock back or the tide back, but in building the sort of communities we need in the future.
Definition of Social Capital
The buzz word around social policy makers at the moment is ‘social capital’. You’ve got ‘financial capital’ that you need to start a business; you have ‘intellectual capital’, the new understandings and the knowledge you’ve got; and this ‘social capital’ is an equivalent idea.
In Social Trends 2003 it is defined as: ‘networks together with shared norms, values and understandings that facilitate co-operation within or among groups.’
Much easier, Ann Morrisey: ‘Social capital could be described as the glue which holds societies together.’
If you want one word that sums up social capital, it’s this: ‘trust’. Not the level of trust amongst people who have known each other for thirty or forty years, but the sort of trust that enables you to do business with someone you hardly know and to believe that you don’t need too many lawyers involved. It’s not close, long-established, proven-relationships trust – it’s the level of trust that makes societies work. Trust is like society’s oil can - the engine seizes up without it.
One of the factors that tells you that social capital is in decline, is when the areas of life in which litigation is increasing and increasing, are becoming more and more. When a society loses the basis of mutual trust it uses law and bureaucracy as the way of safeguarding its unity, and those things can’t deliver everything that we actually need them to do.
Social capital is both personal and social. You develop a personal qualities that make you trustworthy, and if enough people do that, you develop a sort of society where people know they can trust one another. It’s therefore a very important bridge. If one of the problems is that our society is being more and more individualised, here is one of the characters that is in itself a bridge. Social capital by definition has a personal and a shared element.
American Robert Putnam says: “Trustworthiness lubricates social life.” Hence my ‘oil can’ idea.
There are two sorts of social: ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’.
BONDING CAPITAL sustains existing community. It means that in relationships you do have - the structures you’re already in, the place where you work, the community where you live, where you already have some sort of contact – trust deepens.
We need that. But what we need even more is bridging capital, that actually bridges you and your group into relationships with some other group - so that the fragmentation of society is reversed in some senses. Our greatest need as a society is for bridging capital. The capacity to establish relationships of trust with people who are not like us – who are not defined by the groups we’re in and by the choices we’ve made.
Analysis of the UK and US situations
The US and UK are significantly parallel in this. The great book on this is by the American Robert Putnam and is called “Bowling Alone”. People used to go out ten-pin bowling in groups, now they go out just them and their partner, or just them. It’s extraordinary – bowling alleys full of people bowling alone. Robert Putnam, on the basis of two very substantial studies of trends in America over four generations has done a hugely creditable piece of social analysis, as a result of which he has been invited to Downing Street, I think three times, in about the last four years. Because, as our government raises issues of citizenship and asks how we can create society where people are safe, feel safe, do trust, can trust – he’s one of the people they’ve been turning to.
Putnam says this: 'Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the (20th) century.' He says, there’s a four generation thing going on, over a period of time, and that all of the social capital indicators have gone down.
There has been a 50% cut in social capital over four generations – very scary indeed.
In the United States, 10% of that change is pressure of time and money, including in two career families to maintain payment of mortgages. Life is more stressful, life is more costly, maintaining your chosen standard of living involves all sorts of commitments. Something’s got to go, and its actually regularly meeting people in networks outside work, that build trust. That is the thing that has gone. That is 10% of the change.
Another 10% is what he calls suburbanization, commuting and ‘sprawl’. A wonderful American word for suburbs that go on and on across what once was countryside. Chunks of territory become indistinguishable from other chunks of territory. More and more people live in that kind of space; more and more people are mobile, and the more time they spending travelling and commuting, the less time they spend with neighbours and voluntary groups and things like these. That’s about another 10%.
TV and other electronic entertainment - privatised leisure time, is next. The Sony Walkman or the personalised CD player. The fact that all TV is now ‘narrow casting’ – everyone has they’re own tele’ in their own room. He puts that down for another quarter of the change.
When one adds all those together, Putnam has about 45% of the change, and he allows about 5% for assorted factors.
He then says, half the change is ‘generational change’. In other words there has been a slippage between each of the four generations – it wasn’t happening before - but there is a slippage from the generation that came through the Second World War down to the generation that are the current teens and students. Every generation has committed itself less. This is half the change, this slippage – as if each generation in the last 50 years has lost sight of something that was ‘just what you did’ in the generation before, and the pace has continued.
Putnam writes that “Members of any given generation are investing as much time in organizational activity as they ever were, but each successive generation is investing less”.
Social capital can be the bridge club, it can be the local working men’s club, or the Parents and Teachers Association of your child’s school, or Age Concern. What matters is that you’re regularly with people on a social basis. It doesn’t really matter for social capital, whether it’s for leisure or for the good of the community, but its membership of voluntary communities, and it’s getting less and less.
Now you wouldn’t think it’s the case, because membership of campaigning bodies like Amnesty or Greenpeace, can seem to grow and grow. But the vast majority of these people are not meeting face to face in an action group – they have signed up for a regular newsletter. Therefore, they belong to an organisation but it doesn’t involve them in regular face to face meeting, and you need some level of regular face to face meeting to get some level of social capital.
There are a lot of organisations being run by people who are really quite elderly now, they are long retired – maybe in their 70s or even their 80s – and they’re running something for three reasons.
The first is, they grew up to be told ‘you did your bit!’. It’s just a generational thing. You do it, you don’t think about it! And you think people who don’t do it, have lost something – you don’t know what’s wrong with the generations that follow – you just do!
The next reason you’re doing it, is that you didn’t expect to live as long as you have, as healthily as you have. People are living longer and health care is getting better. You keep going longer - the wheels haven’t dropped off yet.
The third reason you do it, is that you can’t find anybody younger than you to take over! All over my bit of Kent I know of scouts and guide groups who don’t have a problem about getting kids to join, but they have a problem about getting leaders.
That’s decline in social capital. It’s literally generational slippage and it accounts for half the loss of social capital over four generations.
But Putnam is not a determinist. It has not been slipping since eternity. Something happened to the generation after WWII – my generation, the ‘boomer’ generation, and the three generations to follow. Putnam says that “Generational effects means that society changes, even though individuals do not”. So a whole generation keep getting ‘stuck in’ to the level they consider normal, but because the next generation doesn’t, society changes.
Moving on to the UK, and looking at the current edition of Social Trends (2003). The first essay is on social capital. If you still experience relatively high social capital (the slippage still takes place in the UK), you are more likely to live outside London than in it; you’re more likely to be 30 and above, rather than 29 and below; you’re more likely to be a woman than a man; you’re more likely to be married than single; you’re more likely to be highly educated than to have had little or no education; you’re more likely to be higher income than lower income; to be employed than unemployed; to be in a least deprived area than a most deprived area; to be a homeowner than a private renter; and to have lived where you do for more than five years.
This is not an even slippage. So it seems in social capital that the poor get poorer, and the rich and mobile enjoy more social capital than others do. So there is a justice, rich and poor, thing in here, as well as a slippage generation to generation.
A number of things are identical for both the States and the UK. The younger you are, the less you feel the culture, the neighbourhood and society, is trustworthy. There's a table in Social Trends 2003 about trust in neighbours. The figures were taken in 2000/2001. If you were 16-29 years old, less than 40% believed that the people around them could be trusted. If you were 70 or over, it was nearly 80%. That's exactly repeated in America.
But are we talking about the way things are, or are we talking about perceptions? There are perceptions that there are evil paedophiles everywhere, but the reality is that the vast majority of sexual abuse of children is done by a close relative. But if people feel people can't be trusted, the tragic result is that they end up not trusting them. So perception is significant here.
The scariest bit of it, established in both the States and the UK, is this. When my dad came through the Second World War, for his generation, the time of life in which you were most vulnerable to suicide or attempted suicide, was late in life, when as it were, the pressures grew and grew and the latest thing became one too many. I'm highly aware of that because that's the way my mum got out of the pressures she was experiencing when I was 16.
The age now, in both Britain and America, when you are most vulnerable to suicide, is teen-age. I'm up to my eyes in Soul Survivor and youth events, and this just about enrages me. I think it's an outrage, that somehow whatever changes right and wrong, and all change is not bad, that somehow in four generations we have moved to a situation when it's teenage young people, it's adolescents, who are most likely to attempt to end it all. It is evidence that there is something profoundly sick in our nation. If nothing else this should make you say something's got to change. If any of you know funeral directors, clergy and so on, ask them about the increase in teenage funerals. Many of them will give you very painful stories.
Now having said this, the danger is that this turns into a typical evangelical seminar - society is bad, all change is wrong, things are going from bad to worse, we must do something about it. That's nonsense. People are still made in the image of God and as fallen as they were one generation, two three four or fifteen or twenty years ago. There is no point of gain in trying to turn back the clock, especially to forms of society that we start to idealise. When we are losing something, we tend to remember the good bits and we forget the bad bits.
Reverse through the clock is not what we need but we do need to play our part in guiding the future.
For instance, this is an age of mobility. One writer called it the end of the era of space and the emergence of the era of speed. Who you relate to is not now dependent on who is physically near to you, but how fast you, or a message from you, can travel. And that's a reality and there's loads of good in that. It's part of a change that has happened, and you simply can't get back to the old idea of creating the traditional neighbourhood, which probably wasn't as nice as you think it was now that you think you miss it.
One writer put it like this, a professor at Roehampton. "The communities of this age generally have no local centre; people living in the same street will have fleeting relationships with each other, having widely different lifestyles and household arrangements, and have common interest only the maintainance of certain shared facilities they take for granted”. In other words if you want social capital in your street, you probably need a dustman’s strike!
People make different lifestyle choices, and like it or not, they relate largely to the people that make lifestyle choices that they do. Which means that neighbourhood is no more the issue. German sociologist Ulrich Beck wrote: “To live in one place no longer means to live together, and living together no longer means living in the same place.” David Morley says: “Places are no longer the clear supports of our identity.”
We’ve got to forget the idea that communities have some sort of distinct boundary; you know, here’s the boundary, and you’re in the community if you live here, and you’re out of it if you live there. A favourite sociologist of mine, Zygmunt Bauman writes “All boundaries are tenuous, frail and porous. … Geographical discontinuity no longer matters.” We interact with far more people and make what another writer calls ‘loose connections’ (Robert Wuthrow).
Now all that’s a given. How we handle those choices is an issue. We’re not trying to go back to some previous form of society. We’re trying to learn how faithfulness and commitment can work, out in the actual world and society we live in, and the pressures people are under.
If there has been this extraordinary shift over four generations, there have got to be substantial social factors that are involved in it; there have got to be some things at work in our society. You grow up as the next generation and take some stuff for granted that the previous generation didn’t.
Key factors in loss of social capital
I’d like to suggest there are three main factors involved in that:
Ø The first has the title ‘dis-embedding’;
Ø the second, in sociological language, is ‘individualistion’; and
Ø the third is better known, it’s ‘consumerism’.
What happens when there’s major technologically driven social change is that old forms of society begin to be taken apart. At the time of the industrial revolution people who were the rural poor were ‘dug up’ (notice ‘dis-embedding’ is a sort of gardening term). They were dis-embedded. Moved into cities to run the factories. We begun to get the development of the cities; where they were re-embedded, or replanted. So the way modernity has worked for a long time is that it breaks down traditional forms of society and re-shapes new forms of society.
What the writers are saying now is, that the pace of social change is so great, that the “dis-embedding process continues but there’s never time to re-embed.”
Therefore people like Baumann talk about a ‘liquid society’ in his book ‘Liquid modernity’. Pete Ward’s book ‘Liquid Church’ is also written in Baumann’s terms. With things that are liquid, there is never time for them to freeze or become solid again. That implies a permanence of change.
David Lyons, a Christian sociologist, in a wonderful book called ‘Jesus in Disneyland’, a book about what happens to religion in this sort of culture, says that the danger of talking about ‘post-modernity’, is that it might imply we were in this solid thing called ‘modernity’, we’re now in this transition called ‘post-modernity’, and we’ll end up with a solid thing afterwards. He says that’s a misunderstanding, and that what we’re talking about is a society of ‘electronically mediated images that restlessly circle the globe in a constant flux’.
It’s never going to settle down. It stays liquid. Richard Scace, a Professor at the University of Kent, who seems to me to be the Professor for predicting the future of everything, says the trouble facing young adults as they hit the workplace, is that they are ‘Constantly having to live in a temporary world.’
The same thing has happened to families. Nuclear family units break down so fast and so often now, that Baumann says that ‘The chances that the family will survive any of its members gets slimmer by the year: the life-expectation of the individual mortal body seems an eternity by comparison.’
All sorts of things that were stable; in culture, family life and in work are no longer so. Read Richard Sennet’s book ‘The Corrosion of Character’; where roughly what he says is, that long term involvement in the workplace, which for a long time was long term involvement in the same workplace, and also with the same firm, used to have an indirect result of creating qualities of faithfulness and loyalty. Now with so much down-sizing, reapplying for your own job, contracting out etc, that disappears. He did a major study with some American workers and then came back twenty years later to see how it had changed. A father he interviews says: ‘If I talk to my kids about loyalty and commitment, they just laugh, because there is nothing in their experience that measures to that”.
Baumann sums up like this: “A flexible identity, a constant readiness to change and the ability to change at short notice, and an absence of commitments of the “till death us do part” style, appears to be the least risky of conceivable life strategies.’ In other words, commitment is too much of risk if everything changes so fast.
And so, I begin to get my head around why each generation is a bit less inclined to commit than the one before.
Indivualisation. The whole pressure of social change is to convince you that your personal freedom is the most important thing, that your right to make your personal choices is the most important thing, and that the key unit of society is the individual.
Now I happen to believe as a Christian that God didn’t make us as individuals; but that he made us as persons who become who we are through relationships. So we are right at the heart of a Christian understanding of being human. But the whole cultural forming of our society says to us that you are an individual.
Beck says we are all asked to seek biographical solutions, that is, personal solutions, in our own story. Personal solutions to what he calls ‘systemic contradictions’. These are fundamental contradictions in our culture created by forces that individually we cannot control. So we’re told that we’ve got to have community and good neighborhoods, but everything is actually driving us towards individualism.
You’re meant to solve it yourself. But individuals by themselves can’t solve it. A fundamental contradiction.
It also bears on this business of teenage suicide. An American sociologist Martin Seligman, quoted by Putnam, says this 'Individualism need not lead to depression as long as you can fall back on large institutions – religion, country, family. When you fail to reach some of your personal goals, as we all must, you can turn to these larger institutions for hope …” But it’s exactly those institutions that have been breaking down, and we’ve been told not to trust them, because they threaten our individual freedom and choice.
And then he says (and I find this very disturbing) “…But in a self standing alone without the buffer of larger beliefs, helplessness and failure can all too easily become hopelessness and despair”'
The biographical answer does not deal with something that is systemic in our culture.
Consumerism. Roughly speaking, shopping has outgrown it’s true territory and has become a metaphor for how you deal with the whole of life. So you choose everything, from relationships to values the same way you choose the latest style of shirt. It’s the bait for individualism. David Lyons wrote this: “Identities are constructed through consuming. We shape our malleable image by what we buy - our clothing, our kitchens, and our cars tell the story of who we are (becoming).”
Rowan Williams has written about the danger of having an idea about ‘the self’ that you construct as though you are going around the supermarket on a shopping trip. This ‘bit’ I like, and that ‘bit’ I like, and my choices make me ‘me’.
Lyon believes the challenge of consumerism has simply not been taken seriously by the churches at all, and by Christian communities at all.
Now if you put all those things together: the dis-embedding – it’s all liquid, nothing stays the same for long enough; you put the pressure that it’s the individual you who must make all your choices in an increasingly multi-choice world; and you then get a consumer culture that is continually multiplying the choices; and I think you get at least some of the forces that have made it obvious to each generation that they shouldn’t trust as much as mum and dad.
What can be done?
The critical question is what can we do about it. No one who believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, as something in which God’s future for the whole world has broken into the present and starts to change it now, can be a determinist. No one can sit back and say there’s nothing we can do about it, it’s all great big social forces; individuals can’t deal with systemic problems, and so on.
We need to recognise that faith based communities are an essential resource for wider community. Putnam wrote this: “Faith based communities remain such a crucial reservoir of social capital in America that it is hard to see how we could address the erosion of the last several decades without a major religious contribution.”
British writers have taken this up as well. The reality is that if you have good social capital you get less teenage pregnancy; if you have good social capital you get less kids dropping out of school; and if you have good social capital you get more commitment in the workplace. It’s like a catalyst. It’s quantifiable that it makes a very very significant actual social difference. It is not pie in the sky where you die. It is life better and more pleasant for everyone. It is significantly impacting all sorts of areas.
So as the Chairman of the Church of England’s Working Party on Church Planting and New Expressions of Church, I’ll say this: every time you plant a church or a new Christian community, you’ve got to think about ‘bridging social capital’, you’ve got to think about establishing the possibility of new relationships of trust with people you’ve previously had no relationship with whatsoever.
If the Gospel of Christ not only breaks down the barrier between you and God, but also reconciles you with others, as Ephesians 2 says, there is something inherit in the Gospel and in Christian mission that is about the building of community and the blessing of others.
I want to be a bit more precise than this, and spend the last part of this talk, on one key issue.
If we are in an increasingly mobile community, and we can’t change that, we shouldn’t try. If people will move on more quickly from lots of things in life because that’s the shape of life; and if it’s the choices which we make under pressure from society as individuals and as consumers that is the key; then the vital thing that must happen is that we develop a character which is able to be trustworthy, which is able to be faithful when it’s right.
We need to know when to say ‘no’ to moving on when it’s the wrong thing for the benefit of others. We need to have the capacity to remain faithful to other people irrespective of whether they are faithful to us. What has actually being eroded is the human capacity for commitment and faithfulness. Not just a general thing about trust. If you don’t trust, you don’t stay in there. If you don’t stay in there, you don’t learn what commitment is. That’s the bottom line.
Our characters are formed by choices. Therefore, a loss of a sense of trust robs us of all sorts of opportunities to become people who are trustworthy and who are recognised as that. There’s a guy called Vernon White written a book called ‘Identity’. I’d recommend it to you but only if you read a bit of philosophy and theology – it is not an easy read. This last part of the seminar is based on some excellent stuff of his.
Let’s ask ourselves, are human beings capable of faithfulness? There are those who say ‘blokes are meant to be predators’, ‘animals’, ‘they move on from thing to thing’. ‘We’re just animals aren’t we?’ ‘Faithfulness and staying with anyone for long is not something that goes with being human, at least not something that goes with being male’. These are some of the versions I’ve heard.
As a Christian, I cannot accept that. Rowan Williams wrote this in “Lost Icons”: that the self is, not because of need; meaning, I need this sort of stuff and as I respond it tells me that I am me; but because of gift. If you were created by a God that is faithful and trustworthy, in the image of that God, you have within you the seed of the possibility of becoming a person who is faithful or trustworthy.
So a very belief in God and the doctrine of Creation, tells that there must be a capacity to change this; there must be a capacity to shape the future so that whatever it’s socially like, it is marked by trustworthiness.
Vernon White says a number of things are the basic structure of human identity and they make it possible for us to be faithful. The first is, (in plainer language than in Vernon), there is a core, real, as created by God, undivided you, that God made. Identity is only in part something that you create. It is actually something that was given you. There is a real you in God. That real you in God, grows through life. Is it as though there is a real you, but the you that you become, is what you make of the real you. There is a real given, but you’re a partner in God in making you what you’re going to be.
Above all, the real ‘you’ grows and develops as God intended, through relationships. So the degree to which you keep people distant is the degree to which your development might become distorted. I know we’re introverts and extroverts, and I’m an introvert, but it’s not about that. Fundamentally we are made for relationships in the image of a triune God. We’re defined by relationships in community; and of course we change; but the key thing about how we change is that it is through the decisions we make in relationship with other people through our lives. We can choose under God to make choices and make relationships, so that bit by bit we grow into people who are faithful. From Vernon White: “We act largely out of a character formed by our response in our relationships and the events of our story”.
You have spent your life making yourself the ‘you’ that you are. In God there is freedom to change the direction of that story.
The church is stuffed full of social capital, and though we sometimes knock it, it’s actually full of people who have tried to the best of their ability to faithfully follow God and do what’s right all their lives. That simply makes you someone who becomes trustworthy. You might not be someone who understands; you might not be someone who is cool; you might have missed the great social changes; but something has happened in you that people can trust you.
That is the crucial element of social capital! If you start then making new relationships, getting involved in your community, making connections at festivals such as this, and being trustworthy, social capital starts to grow. In one sense it really is as simple as that. The answer is before your face.
You know the story of the new curate who arrives and is sent to the Sunday school. He decides to ask them just a few questions first, just to warm them up. He asks; ‘what’s grey and has a big bushy tail, and sleeps in the winter and eats nuts?’. The little boy sticks his hand up and says ‘I know the answer is meant to be Jesus, but it stills sounds like a squirrel to me’.
The answer is as obvious as the answer is Jesus. If you want social capital, be a person who is trustworthy and start reaching out to make relationships with people you didn’t know before. You literally start to turn the tide. It doesn’t matter if your relationships are in one community where you commute, another where you shop, another where you play, another where you go to church. Wherever you are, people will start to trust you, because you have learned to be trustworthy.
Human beings can be faithful, and we have to learn to make consistent choices. There’s an idea around that no choice you make restricts your freedom, because then you make another one. But every choice you’ve made changes you and most of them you can’t go back on. There’s some absolute nonsense about that, so learn to make consistent choices before God.
Three theological bits.
1. Live from the cross. There is a bit of me that isn’t trustworthy. There’s a bit of me that will make all sorts of self-centred choices. There’s a bit of me that will screw up any relationship or start relationships I shouldn’t start in the first place. That bit needs to go to the cross.
Theologian Miroslav Volf, writes that if you read St Paul, and Galatians 2:19-20, ‘I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live’; you find that Paul presumes that we do have a real ‘us’, there’s a centred ‘us’ that is making all these consumer choices and so on, but it’s wrongly centred, and it needs to be de-centred by being nailed to the cross, by being crucified with Christ. Volf interprets that 'Whichever way the centering takes place and whatever its result, the self should be de-centred, claims Paul ... then a recentering of that same self can take place ... The centre is Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected who has become part and parcel of the very structure of the self. ... At the centre of the (new) self lies self giving love.'
That’s very dense. Let’s go through it with the text. ‘I’ve been crucified with Christ, it’s no longer I who live’. The old me, I’ve allowed to be nailed to the cross with Jesus, because the old me is not trustworthy before God or other people. I have allowed the old me to be put out of the centre of my life, and the life I now live, I live not by trust in my ability, but by faith in Jesus Christ, who loved me and gave himself for me. That Christ is now not far away from me. He lives in the very core of my being, and his nature is self-giving love. If the one who loves me and gave himself for me, lives in me, and the old me is kept at the foot of the cross, then I can develop a character which is self giving love. It is the character of the Lord who lives in me.
It seems to me that those who would live lives that are faithful and trustworthy and grow social capital are people who know quite a lot about kneeling at the cross of Jesus. Quite a lot about seeking him to be at the centre and his character transforming.
Live in the Light of the Resurrection
If Jesus raised from the dead in the middle of history is God’s absolute guarantee that all those who believe in him will be raised from the dead at the end of history; that the whole universe will be transformed; then it’s worth keeping going. It’s worth making consistent choices in the light of my faith. If you don’t make consistent choices in the light of your faith you won’t become someone who is part of society’s social capital.
It’s ‘hope’ that keeps you going. So the response to four generations of decline in social capital is not ‘O my Lord, what if that keeps going’; but to thank God for the resurrection of Jesus. Whatever happens to society I’m going there.
So there is an encounter with the cross; there is hope in the resurrection; and the last thing is Paul’s challenge to walk in the Holy Spirit.
Walk in the Holy Spirit
Walking by the Spirit means keeping in step with the Holy Spirit. Eugene Petersen, who wrote ‘The Message’, calls it ‘the long obedience in the same direction’. A life that, understanding the ways that Christians should live, open to scripture, open to the Christian tradition, but with habits of prayer where you hear God; a life that says as it were “yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord…” It is literally ‘the long obedience in the same direction’.
Paul says: if your life style is one of obedient trust to the Spirit, through the long obedience in the same direction, something grows called ‘the fruit of the Spirit’. One key element of the fruit of the Spirit is faithfulness. Faithfulness grows by a life before the cross, a hope based on the resurrection, and a daily obedience to the Spirit of God. Which puts you into a transforming relationship with God.
So we are back down to a basic evangelical version of being a Christian. I don’t care whether you’re high, low, radical, middle, evangelical, charismatic or have buried the chandeliers. But live in the light of the cross and the resurrection, and live every day to the best of your ability in humble obedience to the Spirit. Paul says, ‘faithfulness’ then becomes part of you.
The role of the church
The key to the reversal of the decline in social capital is people whose character makes them trustworthy. The church of Jesus locally, and on wider levels, is actually a production plant on faithfulness.
Now I know you’ve seen a few that work in the opposite direction, but if they only but know it, one of the keys to reversing this decline is ordinary, un-exciting Christians. Ordinary who have learnt to be trustworthy through walking with God. If we just learn to be trustworthy: and most of us are doing it because we know no better, we don’t know we’re the answer to a social problem, we’re just doing what we do because we’re Christians. In might just be going to the Book of Common Prayer, to Holy Communion at 8 o’clock every Sunday morning, something you’ve done for the last sixty years; but all other things being equal, it’s turned you into someone you can trust.
If those who are trustworthy, will now not only use it for ‘bonding’ social capital (we get on very well when we all believe the same thing) but turn it into ‘bridging’ social capital (we will take the risk of getting involved in different areas of our community, with people we don’t at the moment know), social capital will spread.
Trustworthy people are trusted. Ordinary church members without special projects can actually be part of the reversal of this thing, everywhere that they are. Of course there are projects that help, bridging projects that you do together, but the fundamental issue is not projects, it is trustworthiness.
A last illustration. Rowan Williams went to speak at the national memorial to the Victoria and George Cross. Rowan’s not big on violence, so going to something about heroes, he really had to think very hard about what he as going to say. He made the distinction in his talk between ‘what comes naturally’ and ‘second nature’. He said he had no respect for violence, even violence that expressed great courage, if it was just what came naturally. You were a really aggressive bloke and you ended up in the army and you went for it. Heroic or not that didn’t touch him. But when people have lived a way of life, so that at whatever the cost they would give themselves up to others, as ‘second nature’, it wasn’t the first nature, it wasn’t the way they were, it is what they have become, it is almost contrary to what you are inclined to be, that he said is a courage he treats with the highest respect.
I believe we need Christians who are trustworthy by second nature. Who have actually made serious investments in their life before God to become people of trust, and then become people like Jesus who cross boundaries to folk they don’t know. Most of the rest of what we want to do as Christians, in terms of evangelism and social change, will work a lot better if we do that anyway.
If you going to share good news, you’ve got to be good news. In a time of decline of social capital, the best news you can be is to be trustworthy in a culture where less and less people feel that there is anywhere that they can trust.
Seminar given by Graham Cray, Bishop of Maidstone, at Greenbelt 2003. Transcribed with the author’s permission.
posted by Mim @ 10:22 AM
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