“THE Church on estates is dying — and it’s dying very quickly,” the then Bishop of Burnley, the Rt Revd Philip North, warned the General Synod in 2016 (News, 19 February 2016). Far from having a presence in every community, the Church of England was “taking a preferential option for the rich,” he said. “A Church that abandons the poor abandons God.”
Urban ministry experienced a decline after the years of activity that followed the publication of the report Faith in the City in 1985, although the outer estates are acknowledged to have remained often isolated and forgotten. Those years saw the formation of the National Estates Church Network (NECN), in 1996, chaired by the Bishop of Stepney, the Rt Revd Laurie Green, author of Blessed are the Poor? Urban poverty and the Church.
The Synod first made a commitment to setting up a church on every significant housing estate in 2019, and about £140 million has since been allocated to estates or economically deprived communities. But the impact of the pandemic was further closures, and still at least 850 significant estates are not served by a Christian community.
In February last year, the Synod rededicated itself to setting up a church on all of them, in a motion highlighting the need to “raise up and support a new generation of lay and ordained leaders from estates and working class background at all levels in the Church”.
That need has been vigorously urged by the Vicar of St Matthew’s, Burnley, the Revd Alex Frost, who has long argued that the approach to ordination and selection is too biased towards the privileged and educated. Last month, he brought a private member’s motion to the Synod, calling for a national strategy supporting people from a working-class background in moving into ministry (News, 7 and 28 February).
You don’t have to look far to find joyful examples of existing estates ministry. “I live and breathe this stuff,” says Prebendary Helen Shannon, who has lived and worked on the Strawberry Vale Estate, in East Finchley, for 15 years, and planted two thriving churches: Church@Five and Families Church.
Members of Woven St Martha’s, on the Broxtowe Estate, Nottingham, in a Palm Sunday procession
“If we want to be effective on estates and in low-income areas, we need people to be in leadership from these backgrounds,” she says unequivocally. She refers to her own experience as a teenage mother who came to faith on an estate and (even back then) “thought the Church needs to come to the estates rather than asking the people from the estates to come to the Church”.
When called to ordained ministry, it was “purely by God’s grace that, with six kids and five CSEs, and not being able to do the essays”, she got through the selection process.
The advances made in local leadership have come out of local needs, she says. “We had these leaders who were just bubbling up, and we couldn’t find suitable training for them. So, we got together with local churches and started to do an estates course. Covid hit, and we moved it to WhatsApp, which is what people on the estate were using.
“We’ve been trialling it with Birmingham diocese, and it’s going live in March. It’s about building confidence and giving people tools for leadership, whether in the church or in the community.” Training is under the auspices of the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication (CCX), established in 2015 by the Bishop of Islington, Dr Ric Thorpe.
Apprenticeship schemes were traditionally the working-class way of training people, but they’ve been gentrified, she laments. “We’re trialling a new pilot of four estate apprentices, who are paid for 20 hours a week at the London living wage. They work 15 of those hours with a master craftsman on the ground, and get together five hours a week as a cohort, for encouragement and reflection.”
There are wider issues that the Church must look at, including housing for estates, and working-class clergy, she suggests. “We now live in a church house, but we’re never going to be able to afford permanent housing. We come from social housing, and, to be honest, that’s where we’ll end up when we retire.”
CANON Peter Huxtable, Bishop’s Adviser for Urban and Estates Mission, and Leader (Mission Associate) of Woven St Martha’s, in Nottingham, was Area Dean of Nottingham North when the diocese embarked on a discernment process for the future of a challenging group of outer-city and estates parishes, several of which were vacant. These included the poorest in the diocese, St Martha’s, on the Broxtowe estate.
They came up with the “Woven” concept of bringing all the churches into one family and drawing on all the resources of all the parishes, so that they can support each other. Alongside that process, Canon Huxtable was personally reflecting on what might come next in his own ministry, now that he was in his fifties. “Having helped shape a vision where we were all coming under one structure of working, my appetite was whetted. I thought I’d just love to dive in on the front line of one of them,” he says.
“There was nothing holding me back. I knew there were times when ministry on Broxtowe had died, and then opened up, and then died again. . . So I was going in with a reality check, especially as the whole place had mostly shut down during Covid.
“But I wouldn’t be going solo, to be some sort of heroic leader: rather, it would be as a team player and with an embedded wider vision. Yes, it’s a big thing to do, but it’s not automatically as awful as I think it can be painted. We need to encourage people to put down their textbooks of ’70s and ’80s estate life in Britain, and go into it with a sense of availability and openness.
“Broxtowe is a really traditional estate. It’s possible to thrive here — not to hold on too tightly to the narratives of the past, but to come in and meet the people as they are now. It’s no longer just white working-class: it’s a real blessing to have the ethnic mix of the range of people who find themselves here, for whatever reason. It breaks the monopoly of one particular culture.
“There are still very sad stories behind people being housed here, alongside extreme poverty. But it means I’m building a multi-ethnic church here, which is very exciting.
“There are a lot of people living on the estate who are unaware of its past. There will be flare-ups, and problems, and difficulties, but one thing that encouraged me was looking at the history of Broxtowe rather than the history of gang warfare and joyriding. It was built to relieve the slums. The vision was to build a garden city and give people a new start. The area was meant to be a gift.
“So, there’s a lot of stuff around grace and renewal of hope that can be tapped into. It’s a real gospel opportunity. Our mission is to open the doors, welcome people, befriend, disciple, and build up the generosity of God’s community.”
There is a cost, he acknowledges. The work is 24/7, which leads him to reflect: “I sometimes wonder whether the idea of living on the estates is necessarily the best one, if you want people to stay ten, maybe 20, years.” But, he concludes, “you don’t have to be a certain type of person. I’m not a cutting-edge pioneer minister. I’m not from that sort of background at all. I’m just following God’s calling, and meeting the people, and seeing what God’s doing.”
THOSE are very much the sentiments of Canon Andy Delmege, Canon Missioner of Birmingham Cathedral, who worked on estates for 20 years. He formerly chaired the NECN, and is a member of the Estates Evangelism Task Group (EETG), who described Bishop North’s warning against abandoning the poor as “almost a kairos moment”.
The diocese of Birmingham has the third highest proportion of estates, after London and Southwark dioceses. “There’s not been a sense of withdrawing or closing buildings, but of needing to look at how we’re doing that without substantial resources,” he says.
“We’ve been building up the local-ministry pathway, of discerning who might have the vocation to be either the ordained or lay leader in a particular community. We’re on our second cohort now, and it’s been successful in identifying vocations where it may need some particular encouragement to get people to realise they are being called, and then to do some sort of bespoke formation for them.
Church@Five members publicise and welcome others to their Sunday service, at the Green Man Community Centre, Strawberry Vale Estate, in East Finchley,
“I think it’s somewhere you want to deploy your best clergy, because we need people who are talented and resilient to flourish in it. But it’s a really very, very beautiful ministry. How we present it continues to be a key thing for us. It doesn’t necessarily have to be somebody who’s some kind of pioneer. Estate churches can flourish with a pastoral parish priest.
“I think there’s been enough shifting narratives to be optimistic about, but there’s still a need to be determined about it, and, if necessary, to hold people’s feet to the fire and accountability, in terms of where the money goes and where resources go. These estates can be one of the very few places where people can grow and flourish.”
The Revd Andrew Kwapong is also on the EETG. His ministry has included planting a church community on the Broadwater Farm Estate, in Tottenham, and, although he was brought up an estate himself, he reflects that that was not necessarily the reason that he wanted to be involved in estates ministry.
“It’s at the edges where the Church is being formed. People in these places are a lot more open, perhaps, than in a typical residential street, where people are just living their own lives, in many ways,” he suggests.
Stigma remained attached to the estate long after the riots that followed the murder of PC Keith Blakelock in 1985, but there was also a “real desire for places of belonging . . . a safe place for people and their families”, he says.
The church was “formed by the hopes and desires of local people, and recognising God being at work in those places already. We did a lot of knocking on doors and getting to know the school well. . . Different charisms in a growing community began to be reflected within the church and how it operated, and we had a real diversity of church traditions that people had come from, as well as none.
“There was a lot of hard work. Putting a hold on your own hopes and dreams is the hardest thing, but it was a place of real life and love and joy and celebration. It never felt sacrificial. There was never a narrative of ‘going through a dark place to bring light’.”
THE Bishop of Barking, the Rt Revd Lynne Cullens, lead bishop for estates evangelism, is heartened by some of the advances made, including the response of theological institutions in creating training pathways more suited to the learning and formational needs of a broader range of candidates, such as the Caleb and Peter streams at St Mellitus College, and the Action Learning Pathway at Emmanuel Theological College.
“I’m hugely encouraged by that, and by the anecdotal qualitative stuff that I hear, but, if we are to takes estates vocations seriously, we need an intentional strategic approach,” she says.
“We don’t collect enough data. We still have nothing we can rely on. The evidence of my eyes is that there are considerable barriers to progression, and, as we go up to the senior leadership in the Church, that really hinders the fullness of those vocations being expressed. I think we’re probably looking at another decade until we feel we have made serious cultural change — for instance, in the House of Bishops.”
A key message to incumbents and other leaders would be, “Look at who you have. Look at who are the treasures of your church. So many people never get into the formal discernment process because nobody recognises their gifts, or affirms them; so they don’t have the confidence, and they never step up.
“I’ve been really impressed by the way the people from estates and working-class backgrounds are able to access training that they’re comfortable with, and that they feel confident undertaking. You can only experience that if somebody actually touches you on the shoulder and says, ‘I think you can do this.’”
