Fundraiser

On Friday our family are doing a 100km sponsored exercise bike ride in support of TEAR Fund, in reponse to the coronavirus crisis and its impact on the developing world. If you'd like to support that, please go here, or you can donate direct via the TEAR Fund website.

Most countries have a much sketchier welfare state than ours - in many places, lockdown means no work, no work means no food or money. It is a choice between infection or starvation. Or it means confinement in a refugee camp or slum where social distancing is all but impossible, and there isn't access to clean water or soap for the basic act of washing hands.

To get some idea of the challenge, have a look at this article:

South Africa, which has one of Africa’s best public health systems, has fewer than 1,000 intensive care unit (ICU) beds, of which 160 are in the private sector, for a population of 56m. In Malawi, there are about 25 ICU beds in public hospitals, serving 17 million people. The main infectious diseases hospital in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, has none.

Why is Stonewall getting money from the National Lottery?

The Sunday Times reports that the National Lottery has awarded just shy of £500,000 to Stonewall, expressly for the purpose of political lobbying (aka 'leadership, media and influencing'). Stonewall has an annual income of over £7m, and reserves of nearly £5m.

We've had a grant from the Lottery of £500k too, to help build a community centre for one of the most deprived areas in South Somerset. Our annual income (at St. Peters church Westfield) is about £17-18k, reserves are around £12k. So it would take us a few years to come up with the money ourselves, from a community which doesn't actually have those resources in the first place. One of Stonewall's founders is Sir Ian McKellen, who has an estimated net worth of $55m.

The Lottery is already a deeply flawed system for funding public goods. It is predominantly played by those on lower incomes, and the funding itself doesn't go back into the poorer communities who generate most of it. I have serious questions over why a well resourced, well connected group with nearly £5m reserves should get any of this cash at all, when we are surrounded by food banks, homelessness and local support services for children and vulnerable adults closing own left right and centre. I'm grateful to the Lottery: Building Communities team for the £1/2m that Westfield is getting, but the mission creep in other parts of the organisation is serious cause for concern.

10 Clicks for £10k

At 9am today you can start voting for the New Westfield Community Centre in Yeovil to get £10,000 of funding from Aviva.

Use this link, every person gets 10 votes, and if you can use them all for our project then that would be brilliant, thankyou! Have a look at this video if you want to know what we're doing, or just read the blurb on the Aviva site.

We've raised £820,000 towards a £920,000 target, the Aviva funds will give us the money we need to kit the Community Centre out with kitchen, seating, pop up library and toys etc., so that it can be used by 5,000 local people in Yeovil, and help bring hope, life, fun and support to a whole community.

We reckon we'll need over 5000 votes to be in with a chance, which means over 500 people voting for us. Please be one of them!

Mammon FC wins Premiership, again.

Congratulations to Leicester for a remarkable triumph. The only disappointment is that it would have been nice for them to have claimed the moment of victory on the pitch, rather than in a bar. Back in the day, all the top division fixtures used to be played at the same time, on a Saturday afternoon, rather than spread like buckshot between Saturday lunchtime and Monday evening. The reason for the change is the same as the reasons for most things in the Premiership, money. Control of scheduling is one of the things the TV companies pay stupid amounts for. 

Ranieri agrees: 

England's rich clubs will dominate the Premier League for the next two decades following Leicester City's title win, says Foxes manager Claudio Ranieri.

Leicester's squad was assembled for £57m, the cheapest of any currently in the top half of the table.

"Big money makes big teams and usually big teams win. Now we can say only 99% of the time," said Ranieri.

"Next season will be the same and for the next 10 or 20 years, it will be the same."

which is a shame. 

Rebranding Sin

"Ashley Madison is the number one service for people seeking discreet relationships."

translation: "Ashley Madison is the number one service for people seeking to cheat on their spouse/partner and get away with it". Adultery rebranded as discretion. 

"Some journalists have turned the focus of the criminal act against Ashley Madison inside out, attacking us instead of the hackers," the company said on Monday. (source)

that's right, because what you do stinks. It isn't illegal but it's destructive and evil. Every secret will eventually be revealed, so the hackers have just given 33m people a sneak preview of one small aspect of the day of judgement. People will sin if they can persuade themselves that a) they aren't really doing something that bad and b) they can get away with it. Ashley Madison is complicit in both. 

In other news, Mammon continues its baleful patronage of global football. Spending £1bn on footballers in a calendar year isn't obscene conspicuous consumption on bread and circuses, it's 'investing in playing talent'. Of course.How many desperate refugees in mainland Europe you could effectively transfer to a fruitful new life with £36m, instead of moving 1 football player?

I warn you not to be poor

Does anyone benefit from the budget?

I put in my 'average' family circumstances, age, 2 children etc. to the BBC's budget calculator, and had a play around with some figures

Salary £10,000   lose £1484
Salary £15,000    lose £1182  (this is just roughly what someone working full time on the new 'National Living Wage' would earn, except it's not a living wage)
Salary £25,000    lose £1351
Salary £35,000    better off by £80
Salary £45,000    better off by £141
Salary £55,000    better off by £141

Everyone who benefits from the welcome rise in the minimum wage will be slapped straight back down again by the cuts to tax credits. If you're working 40 hours a week on the minimum wage now (£6.50) you'll earn £13,520 a year. The increased minimum wage raises this to £14,976. 81% of that increase of £1456 wont be seen. That's one heck of a marginal tax rate. Someone earning that level by working part time, at a rate already above £7.20 per hour will simply lose out with no compensating rise in income.

Whilst someone earning over £50k a year could probably find nearly £1500 of savings in their annual budget (cheaper holiday, cancel the Sky subscription, shop around for haircuts), I have no idea how you do that on £10,000 a year.

At the bottom end of the pay scale, this is pretty much a direct swap of pay for tax credits, transferring the financial burden from the state to the employer. Of course the employer has the option to sack the worker, (though the governments welfare assessment programme has been doing its best to duplicate this), which means your annual wage drops to £0. I applaud the attempt to raise the minimum wage to what, by 2020, will be a living wage, but I can't see it happening without a rise in unemployment. Meanwhile for those whose income is just above the higher rate minimum wage, it's just hefty cut to tax credits (though these are still over £6k a year to a couple with 2 children).

If you've a food bank or debt advice charity near you, and you have any spare time or compassion, please ring them up and offer your services. They're going to need you.

Lone Voice

South Somerset District Council has just agreed an £8m discount package to a housing developer, so that a local housing site can be rendered 'viable'. The alternative is that it gets mothballed (that's the claim anyway: Barratts tried that one a couple of years ago on the other side of town then declared record profits the week after the agreement was signed). So that's less social housing, poorer maintenance for community play and open space, less money for community facilities, bus routes, etc. More houses, shabbier environment.

I'm pretty disappointed and annoyed by this, especially as the viability maths was badly skewed (I'll explain if you like but it would take a while).

But I'm just as disappointed and annoyed by this. Scroll to page 4. Only one local resident wrote in to complain. One. There's been plenty of sound and fury on Facebook, of course. And a local politician who's hoping to unseat David Laws as MP next year has been in the papers opposing it. But I note that nobody from his party actually wrote in.

This is potentially a new community of 1500-1700 people. There is a massive social housing shortage in the area. And nobody cares enough to formally speak up. (Note: putting :-( at on a Facebook comment doesn't qualify as 'caring'. That wont fix the swings, provide a bus route, or house a family.)

Someone I meet up with for prayer has a saying 'you've gotta love 'em'. Even on the days when Yeovil makes me sad and angry, I've gotta love em. Drat, it would be so much easier not to, but I don't think Jesus gives us any wiggle room on that.

Wonga: The Welby Effect Part 2

After announcing yesterday that profits had more than halved, another Wonga story this morning. The Financial Conduct Authority has just put up a press release headed with the following announcement:

Wonga has entered into an agreement, known as a voluntary requirement (VREQ), with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) that requires it to make significant changes to its business immediately.

Reading between the lines, the FCA says that Wonga aren't doing enough to check people's ability to pay back their payday loans. Roughly 375,000 customers will now be released from punitive debt interest as a result, 330,000 of which have arrears of over a month - for them, the entire debt is being written off. That's 375,000 people who Wonga now admits it shouldn't have lent to in the first place. Their website now acknowledges the 5000%+ annual interest rate that Wonga previously deemed 'irrelevant'. It doesn't look at the moment as though the interest rate is changing, but they will be lending to fewer people.

Wonga made 4.6m loans last year, so the write-off amounts to 8% of the total number of loans in a year, and will cost them £220m. That's more than 5x their declared annual profits from 2013. At this rate Wonga could be out of business before Justin Welby has time to say Amen.

More from the FCA:
“We are determined to drive up standards in the consumer credit market and it is disappointing that some firms still have a way to go to meet our expectations. This should put the rest of the industry on notice – they need to lend affordably and responsibly.

“It is absolutely right that Wonga’s new management team has acted quickly to put things right for their customers after these issues were raised by the FCA.

Effective today, Wonga has introduced new interim lending criteria that should improve customer outcomes.

Wonga's press release in response is mildly worded mea culpa "we recognised that we may not have always made the right lending decisions, and on reflection some of these loans may not have been affordable", i.e. we were bleeding people dry who couldn't afford the repayments and we've finally been had up for it. 

Wonga's publicly stated priorities, after cutting out lending to vulnerable customers, include a plan 'to address the total cost of credit'  Hopefully the next wave of the Welby effect is an end to usurious rates of interest. After that, we need an end to advertising  during childrens TV programmes - the TV watchdogs need to step up to the plate now that the FCA have shown how its done. (you can lobby for that here)

And finally how about a few more stories about credit unions, so that people know there is an ethical alternative to branded debt sellers. 

If you live locally, here's a couple for starters:

Somerset Savings and Loans

Camelot Credit Union

Wonga: The Welby Effect

A plan for the church to develop credit unions has been floated, with Welby proud that the church is “putting our money where our mouth is” in developing an alternative to payday money-lenders. The plan, he says, is to create “credit unions that are both engaged in their communities and are much more professional – and people have got to know about them.”

It will, he adds, be a “decade-long process”, but Welby is ready for the battle with the payday giants. “I’ve met the head of Wonga and I’ve had a very good conversation and I said to him quite bluntly we’re not in the business of trying to legislate you out of existence, we’re trying to compete you out of existence.” He flashes that smile again. “He’s a businessman; he took that well.”

that was an interview in July last year. Since then Wonga has been fingered for sending fake legal letters to 45,000 customers, and made to pay out over £2m in compensation. This morning they've just announced that pre-tax profits for 2013 fell by 53%. At this rate Wonga will be out of business before the CofEs alternative credit union scheme has even got off the ground. Welby 1 Wonga 0.

Purpose, not profit, brings the best out of us

This is a fascinating video clip, which needs to be shown to everyone in the bankers bonus debate who squawks about the best talent going overseas if we pay them less.

[Ok, I'll sum up, because 95% of you aren't going to click the little 'play' triangle. There's repeated research that rewarding performance with money doesn't work, once you get past paying folk enough for them to stop worrying about money. Incentives work for 'mechanical' tasks (think piecework in a clothes factory), but once a task involves any thinking or creative skill, results get worse the more you reward them. Why? Because there are motivating factors that outweigh money:
 - Autonomy (being self-directed, in charge of my own work)
 - Mastery (getting better at things)
 - Purpose (making a contribution)
Profit motive detached from purpose tends to make for bad work, workplace, products and customer service.]

For church folks out there, the great thing is that we've always had the purpose thing. It's easy to lose it though, and to settle for a lesser purpose = keeping the show on the road, paying the bills, rather than the Kingdom of God.

But what about the other two. Are we giving people the chance to get better at things, do we give folk autonomy - the freedom to fly and the freedom to fail? Autonomy isn't simply leaving people to get on with a job on their own, that's negligence, and there's too much of that in the church. And we have a big battle on our hands, there are still plenty of churches where the default setting on any decision or action is to check it out with the vicar first.

Autonomy doesn't come naturally when people are afraid of making the wrong decision, or don't get encouraged. Gordon Macdonald (I think) tells the story of a young businessman who lost his company lots of money on a deal. He reported to the company boss, expecting to be sacked on the spot. "why would I want to sack you?" said the boss "I've just spent $3m on your education."

And on this issue have a look at this reflection on the 'flashmob wedding' which went viral last year. "What Kate (the vicar) has done here is to give a couple back some ownership of their wedding from a church that has been used to telling people what they want." Our culture takes 'user generated content' for granted, and we have the demanding but inspiring task of leading the dance between ancient forms and user content so that both are energised by the other.

3 challenges for me here, related to these 3 motivators:
 - how to get better at properly delegating and encouraging, to foster autonomy without neglect (simply leaving people to their own devices) or nannying (constantly checking up)
 - asking people 'what would you like to get better at?' and asking myself the same question. If I spend a lot of time doing something (preaching, leading worship, blogging, organising stuff), then a percentage of that time should go into improving my skills in that area.
 - linking what people do to purpose: e.g. how a well hoovered carpet creates a sense of welcome and care for the visitor, that doing the Sunday morning Bible reading is not a slot on a rota but an opportunity to hear the living words of the living God etc.  Rotas are a great management tool, but if they are all we have, then don't be surprised if it gets more and more difficult to fill them. People need to know why they're doing this task in the first place.

Can Mammon Be Moral?

Bankers should see their job as a vocation and adopt higher ethical standards, the governor of the Bank of England has said. 

More on Mark Carney's thoughts here, in a BBC report on the 'Conference on Inclusive Capitalism'. The conference, pulling together people who own 1/3 of the worlds investable assets between them (the brain-watering sum of £30 trillion). The 'inclusive' bit seems to be how to share the wealth generated by capitalism with more people. It recognises that capitalism has an image problem, so I'm not sure whether the agenda of a more robust ethic is simple self-preservation, or a genuine concern to do what's right, because it's right, not just because it's of benefit.

Christine Lagarde of the IMF at the same conference: said the changes required both investors and the leaders of financial firms to "take values as seriously as valuations" and "culture as seriously as capital". "Ultimately, we need to ingrain a greater social consciousness - one that will seep into the financial world and forever change the way it does business," 

That would be nice, but it's not going to happen within the current system: how do you award bonuses for moral behaviour? And if you wanted people who valued morals as highly as money, then you wouldn't be employing people whose prime motivation was to get a bonus anyway. The bonus system gives the City leverage over its employees, for Lagardes words to come true, the bosses would need to abandon the power the bonus system gives them, and the workforce would need to become motivated by something entirely different. Capitalism is about making money. It spits out social consciousness like a bad taste. Unless you hard wire fair trade, living wage, etc. into the system through legislation and as a precondition of doing business, the system will carry on as it is. The UK governments failed attempts to persuade banks to lend more to small business as a precondition of state support is one small (by global standards) example of how difficult this is. Nudge theory is not going to work, moral responsibility simply will not 'seep into the financial world'.

Meanwhile in the world of mere mortals, Justin Welby is taking the first steps on deliving on his promise to compete Wonga out of business. With 7m people using high cost credit providers, the CofE is piloting a 'Credit Champions Network' in 3 dioceses. More details here, Looks like it will be an evolving thing, a huge challenge to take on, but exactly the sort of thing the church should be involved in. 

Christians Against Poverty (CAP) in Yeovil

Just had the latest newsletter from our local CAP centre. Some fantastic work being done there, here's a few snippets from it:

Please pray for those potential clients who need our help, but can’t get appointments. We are booked up 3 months ahead and had to turn 2 away last week.

To help with the situation we are now delivering 38 Christmas hampers to our current clients, and we have opened a regular drop in centre at St John’s Church every Thursday morning from 10am to 12 noon. As well as being somewhere warm where our existing clients can drop in for a coffee, cake and friendly chat, it’s also useful for anyone with appointments in January or February, or potential clients to come and get some immediate advice. So far this has been very successful. 

We’ve managed to  make a couple of phone calls and avoid court action, bring a very urgent visit forward when we got a cancellation, and by showing what paperwork is needed make the first visit far more effective and less stressful....

..Also anyone who will otherwise be alone, and that includes a lot of our clients, is invited to the Christmas dinner in the schoolrooms on Christmas day.

Please pray for all these events, and that people experience Jesus for real at these events. I think that’s what “The Word became flesh” is meant to mean….

As we look back over another year we have a lot to be thankful for.

• We’ve now been open a month longer than 2½ years which is the national average.
• We’ve dealt with 102 clients.
• 17 of these are now debt free.
• 10 have made a first time commitment to Our Lord Jesus Christ as their saviour as a result of the Grace they’ve been shown and an explanation of the Gospel.
• 43 are on a debt management plan and are somewhere between initial contact and becoming debt free.
• 4 have parted company in a very positive way as they now feel empowered to work with their debts themselves and no longer need CAP’s help.
• 42 are still living in their homes, when they otherwise would have been evicted by their landlord or mortgage provider for arrears.

We were challenged at our 'clergy gathering' last week by a Kiran Martin from India, whose work in the slums was showing what the kingdom of God looks like in terms of transformation of everything - health, work, education, relationships, hearts, relationship with God, government, homes, from whatever angle you looked at it, it was good news. Reading the summary above I get the same feeling. 

Christmas Gifts: Archbishop v Advertisers

There's a Justin Welby interview with money saving expert Martin Lewis due for broadcast this evening, which is already making the news. Here's some of it:

The archbishop said that if he suggested that people should stop giving Christmas gifts, no-one would listen.

"It's obviously not what Christmas is about but to be absolutely honest, there's not that much point in saying it because nobody's going to pay attention," he said.

He added: "Giving at Christmas reflects that generosity of God. So be generous in a way that shows love and affection rather than trying to buy love and affection," he said.

"You can't buy it, you can show it, and when you show it, it comes back at you with interest.

"Save up for the Christmas budget, be sensible, don't put pressure on your finances - don't make your life miserable with Christmas.

"Share love and affection with reasonable gifts that demonstrate you really care for someone. That makes for the best Christmas you could ever have."

The CofE daily bulletin also has some of the coverage. There is a relentless attempt by advertisers to define what Christmas is about, and of course their false paradise includes us spending more money than last year on stuff we never knew we could manage without. I hope the Archbishops voice is heard above the beeping credit card machines.

Diocese of Bath and Wells: 'Our Common Fund' DVD

This is a video put together by my home diocese to give local parishes a sense of the work being done across the Diocese, and how the 'common fund' (contributions pooled from parishes) supports this.

It would be interesting to hear from people outside Bath and Wells how this comes across. The idea is to communicate across the diocese about where the money comes from, and goes to, to get past the idea of 'us' and 'them in Wells' to a greater sense of common purpose.

I'm aware of how vicar-centred it is, that most of the Diocesan outgoings on parishes are to put clergy in place. It would be great to see an updated video in 10 years time which has fewer dog-collars and more lay leaders.

The Moral Culture of Banking: Selling Ethics by the Pound

A young man I know was interviewed for a City job earlier this year. He was turned down for it not because he wasn't able, but because he 'wasn't sufficiently motivated by money.'

We've got used to thinking of everything in terms of economics: earlier this week Ed Balls spoke of preschools and nurseries as part of our 'economic infrastructure', and betting companies like BrokeLads are classed as 'financial services'. But isn't there something wrong with an economic sector, no matter how much it contributes to the economy, fuelled principally by greed?

The latest warnings of bankers fleeing overseas as a result of a bonus cap are pathetic. Who would you rather have working for you: someone who'll work hard and do their best because of pride in the job and personal integrity, or someone who'll only do it if you throw enough cash and share options at them? Do we want people who need an 'incentive to behave prudently and responsibly' running our biggest companies? Since when did ethics become an optional extra, sold by the pound?

It shouldn't therefore be a surprise to find the same people dodging taxes. After all, greed means there's no such thing as 'enough', and whether its the badly paid cleaner in your office or the taxpayer who pays the price, who cares? Why should financiers change their behaviour when it comes to HMRC? Bonus culture and tax avoidance are two sides of the same coin.

George Osborne talks of rebalancing the economy. That's not the only thing that needs rebalancing. If we continue to celebrate being a 'leading financial services sector', driven by companies who hold greed and avarice as key values and motivational factors, then we will not only breed a class of rich but very selfish people, but we'll attract more than our fair share of similar people from other countries. Shouldn't we have an economy where the brightest minds are attracted, not to the jobs which reward greed, but jobs which do most good and are most worthwhile? There are higher values than economics, but we're struggling to give them a look in. There's a reason why Dragons Den, which celebrates inventiveness and enterprise, is on BBC2, whilst the Apprentice, which rewards ruthlessness, cheating and moral short-cutting, is a flagship BBC1 programme.

If our education system and our society is merely producing brilliant minds who have no moral issue with working this way, then we have a problem. History is littered with the victims of people who were brilliant scientists, engineers, educationalists, politicians, even religious leaders, who had lost their souls along the way.

Even if the bonus cap is flawed in other ways, if it means less of a culture of greed in the UK, then the Treasury should be looking for a way to work with it, not oppose it. No, wait, Treasury, the clue's in the name isn't it?

Payday Lenders start defaulting after OFT investigation

Well, who'd have thought it? No sooner does the Office of Fair Trading start investigating the payday lending market, than 30% of the top 50 companies in the sector throw in the towel, rather than face the scrutiny:

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said that 14 of the lenders have told it that they are leaving the payday market and another firm which failed to meet the deadline has said it is no longer operating as a lender.

The watchdog has been carrying out a probe into "deep-rooted" problems within the industry, such as lenders encouraging struggling borrowers to roll over loans they cannot afford so that the debt balloons. Last month it referred the sector for a full-blown investigation by the Competition Commission.

A 12-week cut-off point set by the OFT for 50 lenders, which account for 90pc of the market, to show they are acting responsibly has now passed for all firms.

The 50 companies includes Wonga, and not one of them emerges with a clean bill of health:

The watchdog identified areas of concern with each of the 50 firms and in some cases it sent them annexes of up to 70 pages long.

A loan shark is a loan shark, whether they have a Rottweiler or a saturation advertising campaign.

Citizens Advice is now capitalising on the high profile of payday lenders with a campaign to encourage people to complain about mistreatment to the Financial Ombudsman: 

Citizens Advice chief executive Gillian Guy said: "Citizens Advice sees people day in day out who have been left in absolutely desperate situations by irresponsible lenders.

"Saddled with years worth of debts, many people are left feeling completely powerless."

Debt charity StepChange said the payday problems it is seeing are continuing to worsen. It helped 6,663 people with five or more payday loans in the first half of this year, which was almost the same number it saw for the whole of 2012.

StepChange's head of policy Peter Tutton said: "The number of people we help with payday loans looks set to almost double this year, while problems such as multiple borrowing and inadequate affordability checking by lenders continue to grow.

"The OFT's action including its compliance review and referral to the Competition Commission have both been welcome. However, the OFT should now issue a detailed progress report on how it plans to address the continued consumer detriment caused by payday loans."

Richard Lloyd, executive director of Which? commented: "“The fact that many lenders would rather leave the market than face scrutiny from the regulator shows just how bad practice has been in this fast-growing industry. People are increasingly turning to high cost credit just to pay for essentials or repay other debts, so it is vital that the Government and regulators continue to get tougher on irresponsible lenders."

This is good news, but clamping down on irresponsible lending is only part of the picture. There need to be less toxic alternatives, which address the reasons for people getting into serious financial difficulty in the first place. Despite the minor diversion into the CofE's investment policy, there seems to be a head of steam now behind Justin Welby's intervention last week, and a move from bland acceptance of Wongaville as part of modern life, to a serious questioning of the whole industry.

Welby vs Wonga

From an interview with Total Politics

His engagement in the financial world goes further still. A plan for the church to develop credit unions has been floated, with Welby proud that the church is “putting our money where our mouth is” in developing an alternative to payday money-lenders. The plan, he says, is to create “credit unions that are both engaged in their communities and are much more professional – and people have got to know about them.”

It will, he adds, be a “decade-long process”, but Welby is ready for the battle with the payday giants. “I’ve met the head of Wonga and I’ve had a very good conversation and I said to him quite bluntly we’re not in the business of trying to legislate you out of existence, we’re trying to compete you out of existence.” He flashes that smile again. “He’s a businessman; he took that well.”

It's quite something when an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury is reported with headlines about a showdown with one of the UK's most toxic businesses (see also here and here), rather than about sex. Welby has already succeeded in changing the agenda. And if the Church can do something to dissolve the market for 6000% APR loans then maybe there are more worthwhile things to do than argue about bishops in dresses. 

It's worth reading the interview in full, it covers a lot of ground, and has a lot of thought-provoking stuff, including about safeguarding, politics, the monarchy, and the future of the church:

“People still tend to turn to the Church in pretty large numbers when something important happens: birth of children, bereavement, or on other occasions. Just before I became archbishop I did what we call a prayer journey through five cities: in Norwich, Coventry, London, Truro, Chichester, and in total over those five days 12500 people came. 

What that said to me was when we are actually very hospitable, when we do manage to give the impression of being signed up members of the human race, when we're not bossing people around too much there's a very strong response and all the churches I have been in, have been a member of, or for that matter have been involved in leading have grown, and I know an awful lot of rapidly growing churches. The Diocese of London numbers have grown 70 per cent over the last 15 years. You can do it. There's no reason.... my new adviser on evangelism, my old friend Chris Russell, is absolutely brilliant. What he says is they come in because it's community. When people find a community where they are loved and cared for they find that very attractive.”

Diocesan Church Growth Strategies 4: Case Study - Exeter

Part of the Church Growth Strategies conference is an invitation to participating dioceses to talk about what is and isn't going on in their county. Here's a bit about Exeter, which was really encouraging:

Very rural diocese, had first round of Diocesan strategy in 2003, trying to draw 500 parishes & 613 buildings (!) into 150 'mission communities' - clusters of local churches with a mission priority and plan.

2008 set a target of 25% growth in weekly attendance by 2013. There was quite a bit of harrumphing around the Diocese at the time. In the end growth 2008-12 has been 11%, which is short of the target (but, Exeter are the 2nd fastest growing diocese in recent years. Setting a target may have poked the diocesan culture with a sharp stick, but it seems to have been a catalyst for growth)

A Million for Mission: the diocese chose to give away £1m of its historic reserves to churches to use in mission. Grants from £1,000 - £100,000 were offered, in two waves over the course of 9 months in 2011-12. Nearly 200 bids came in, and 87 grants to mission projects were made. "there's nothing like throwing some money at Anglicans to arouse interest"

The projects are currently being reviewed, 12 months in. The first 26 have been looked at: these are engaging with 2,146 brand new people, as a direct result of the projects the money has enabled, that the church had no contact with before. Half of these are children (the majority of the projects were aiming at children or all ages) with roughly 500 youth and 500 adults. Already 60 have made a clear profession of faith (e.g. confirmation, a decision to follow Christ following a course) - considering the time that the process of coming to faith takes, that's a very encouraging start.

Giving money away from the Diocese was a "hugely impacting p.r. exercise". Parishes are so used to the  diocese taking money away from them, the idea that they were being offered money and asked to come up with ideas was a real novelty, and communicated powerfully that the Diocese was on their side. It also got churches thinking about mission that had previously been asleep.

"being cautious with money is not something the Bible exhorts us to do" (Chair of Finance at Exeter. That's the spirit!)

The biggest impact is with families. The Diocese now has 63 Messy Churches.

What next? A new set of priorities from 2013:
 - "create and develop pathways into deeper discipleship and sacramental membership of the church for all those reached through new missional initiatives" i.e. the whole diocese is now addressing the question of discipleship in fresh expressions of church. There's work being done to find the right resources for people on the fringe of faith, Alpha is too far away from the starting point for many.
 - leadership training, including asking CPAS to run the leadership training programme (great call)
 - developing ministry teams in the mission communities, this can't all be done and run by clergy.

The Million for Mission video is an excellent bit of diocesan communication, and an encouraging 6 minutes viewing!

use the diocesan church growth strategies tag below for other posts from the conference, including the ABofC on evangelism and renewal.

Future of Britain Report: a Tick for the Archbishop and an Opportunity for the Church.

The recently published 'Future of Britain' report backs up Justin Welbys comments about the recession being a depression. Page 1 of the report claims that the results:

“support the suggestion that Britain has entered a depression as far as our outlook and expectations are concerned”

There are all sorts of fascinating things in the report - unfortunately not available online at time of writing, but if you email them for the findings then they seem pretty helpful. Here are a few of them, and some comments...

1. Mindful consumers
One of the effects of the recession has been to make people think again about how and where they spend their money:

We have fallen out with big companies. We no longer trust them, we don’t want to work for them and we’d much rather deal with local, ethical, established community-focussed businesses. (emphasis mine). 

If you swap 'business' for 'organisation', then that sounds like quite an accurate description of a local church, or at least of a local church that's doing a good job. So perhaps there is an opportunity here to reconnect with people. 

2. Flexible working and living
In another section, there are questions about how people see the future, and how jobs, qualifications, residence etc. will shape up. 

-          62% think a job for life is a thing of the past

-          53% see themselves changing jobs every couple of years

-          54% envisage changing where they live in order to get work

-          47% see being self-employed as being more attractive than working for a big company

-          44% think that most jobs in the future will be created by entrepreneurs

This should give churches pause for thought. We are already seeing these trends, but it looks like they are accelerating. How does a 'permanent' church thrive in a place where jobs and residence are temporary? 

A few thoughts:
 - we will have to become much better at welcoming new people into communities, and into churches, and reduce the 'probation' period before folk get the chance to use their gifts and skills in the life of the church
 - with a greater value on autonomy and entrepreneurship, can the church become more enabling, giving people more leadership responsibility and support?
 - is there a place for 'temporary church', pop up congregations which aren't designed to last forever? Do we need a few more tents and a few less temples?

3. Good Company
And finally: part of the survey looked at what sort of businesses we would like to work for, or deal with as customers. The first affects how we look at ministry, the second how we look at outreach:

The Ideal Job: is one that is secure, fun, relaxed, financially rewarding and flexible. Given that we're dealing with a lot of volunteers, so the 'financially rewarding' isn't such a big part, is this how are churches are to work or volunteer for?

The Ideal Company to buy from is one that is ethical, flexible, well known, secure, established and local. I personally think that or church is probably more flexible than it appears, and think we score fairly high across the board. A good local church fits very well the profile of the kind of company/business/organisation that people like to engage with as customers. 

Again, there is an opportunity here. Maybe what is missing is that church engagement with most people is based on our issues rather than theirs. The Bible is packed with teaching about wellbeing, finance, ethics, community, environment etc., all the issues that people say they care about. But how often are we heard talking about these things? Nobody else will do this for us - the media reporting of this report is evidence enough: 2 newspapers used it to sneer at the church, whilst failing to mention that the church is 6 times more trusted than the media. 


the findings are based on interviews with over 2000 adults. 

Justin Welby: Banks, Service and Society

There's an excellent article by Justin Welby on the banking crisis and our response to it, summarised in the Independent yesterday. He makes several good points (quotes in blue):

 - The free market has failed, and always will, because it's got people in it (it is clear that rational market theory and its relatives have been undermined by the events of the past five years. Adam Smith’s general cynicism about the tendency of any group of business people, when meeting together, to create a cartel and ensure maximum profitability, has been shown to be justified, both in its own terms and as a general reflection (which he understood well) of the susceptibility of human-made systems to human failings.)

 - we had an economic blind spot to financial services, and came to rely on them too heavily. When you realise that betting shops are included as a 'financial service', that should ring a few alarm bells.

 - Financial services have served only themselves, and lost sight of a wider social purpose. Welby notes the failure of financial services to enable society to flourish -- what in Catholic social teaching is known as the “common good.” Much of the financial-services industry became essentially self- regarding, and one result was that small and medium-size businesses as well as poor areas were neglected, often unable to obtain credit.

Welby's prescription includes:
 - see banking as a utility (separated from investment banking) like water or gas, and treat it as such. 
 - avoid complex regulations - they tend to be hard to enforce, hard to follow, and serve as a job creation scheme for lawyers but not much else. 
 - have professional qualifications for the financial sector, including an ethical dimension: qualifications that enable people to reflect on their own conduct and examine their own consciences as a matter of self-discipline, in the same way as they seek to balance their book at the end of a trading day.

He concludes:
There are no simple answers to the current crisis in banking, but there are simple principles. They come down to saying that financial services must serve society, and not rule it. They must be integrated into the economy, not semidetached. They must recognize human fallibility, not assume the effectiveness of human imagination.

These three principles would work well for most organisations, including the church. A church which serves society, which is integrated into it, which recognises its own fallibility and doesn't assume it's right.