[ home  |   belfast  |   leeds  |   glasgow  |   bristol  |   links  |   email   ]

Jesus in the City

The 2nd UK Urban Mission Congress

"Community Conflict and Celebration"

Belfast, 26-30 September 1998

House of God

Workshop focuses on churches, housing, homelessness and church related action on housing in local urban communities

Aim of this workshop is to understand what housing issues face the church in its urban mission. Opportunity to discuss your own housing / homelessness related issues. I am using the phrase 'House of God' to refer, here, to the sum total of all the church does on housing and homelessness issues.

  1. Signs of Crisis and Hope

    1. Social Exclusion

      Recent Social Exclusion Unit report outlines widening gap between rich and poor, identifies worst areas and highlights failure of government programmes against the success of 18 local initiatives This report represents a challenge and an opportunity for churches especially through 'new deal for communities' and proposed 'action teams Poor housing part of social exclusion (cf: young people, ethnic minorities, poor housing design and policies on allocation, surplus housing affects one quarter of local authorities)

    2. Churches Addressing Housing Need

      Decline is not the whole picture for the church But this masks historic and continuing importance of the church as an innovator and provider of housing and social care Historic influence on voluntary sector, for example "Every hard pressed estate is some church's patch or parish"

      Churches were the single main mover in the modern movement against homelessness and remain a creative powerhouse But many marginal people are recipients of services provided by the church without being members of the church Every social gulf between mainstream and margins is also replicated in the church Many church related housing/homelessness activists experience isolation from the church and experience stress and burnout

  2. A good practice Case Study: Food vouchers [a real case]

    Exercise:

    You are a national church related organization dealing with housing and homelessness issues

    You receive a phone call from a local project saying that their food voucher scheme for the homeless has recently been featured in a 1V programme. As a result of the coverage dozens of other people have contacted the project and are asking for advice on how to set up similar schemes. The local project is overwhelmed with the requests and asks you to find a way of helping these enquirers. What are the possibilities? What should you do?

    • Outline a possible project addressing this issue
    • Now for the real story - a look at church related food voucher schemes as example issues of church linked development.

  3. Sharing Fears and Visions

    • Urban fears, hopes and visions
    • An exercise in rebuilding community

    4. Conclusions

    • Britain is society, which is increasingly polarized and is divided into well-protected colonies of affluence and constituencies of those 'left behind'
    • The churches are active in every locality addressed by the current social exclusion report
    • The churches' work in the housing/homelessness field is substantial thought sometimes ambivalent in its relationship to homeless and badly housed people
    • Churches are a source of innovative new developments which are assisted by the existence of national umbrella bodies (eg: CCWA, CNHC, CAP, etc) but much work remains to be done on resourcing local practice and ensuring that excellent local work comes to attention of everyone else.

    Philip Wood

    [ Belfast Index page ]
© 2007 Jesus in the City