John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Dignity, Agency, Power

Churches Weekly Newsletter - No.148, 19 February 2023

To mark Church Action on Poverty’s 40th anniversary in 2022, Dignity, Agency, Power, an anthology of stories, prayers, reflections and liturgy, was published by Wild Goose Publications (Click here for details of the book). Here is the Foreword to that book, by Kathy Galloway, former head of Christian Aid Scotland.

"'Dignity', by the Scottish band Deacon Blue, is one of Scotland's most popular songs, sung at the closing ceremony of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Wherever the band perform it, audiences join in fervently. As well as being a great song with a great chorus, it expresses the human yearning to be treated with dignity, to live dignified lives, and most people can relate to that.

"The glory of God is a human being fully alive. So said St Irenaeus, and made explicit the link between human dignity and God's creativity. Dignity is non-negotiable and unconditional. It does not depend on the criteria the world uses. The word 'dignity' itself derives from the Latin dignus, meaning 'worth.' Market forces do not set our value.We do not require value addition in God's economy. We have intrinsic worth.

"It has always seemed to me that an unshakeable commitment to human dignity, and challenging the poverty that is a violation of that dignity, has been at the heart of Church Action on Poverty's vision, values and practice for its 40 years. And agency, an act of trust in the right or capacity of each person to act and give, is an expression of human dignity. When it comes to confronting poverty, people who struggle against it day by day, who really know what it feels like, have insights and understanding that no one else does. It gives them the right to speak and act. Their ideas for action are a gift that no one else has. 'Nothing about us, without us, is for us.'

"Church Action on Poverty has enabled people to come together, often crossing social, economic and political boundaries, to share, to listen, to learn. It has done this in imaginative and fruitful ways. Building solidarity in this way can be slow and painful and frustrating, but it builds confidence in the possibility of change and transformation, in the belief that 'yes we can!' When it seems that everything is against you - hostile public discourse, uncaring and uninformed policy decisions, remote and unaccountable institutions (and there are plenty of all of these in the current climate) believing in the possibility of resisting injustice and making effective and practical change is essential. This is power; not power over but power with and power to, the power to live fully human lives.

"A religious community which does not hunger and thirst for justice to be done bears false witness."

   In the UK, poverty is strongly associated with public attitudes of stigma and blaming individuals for their own poverty. Professor Ruth Lister describes this in terms of the 'othering' of people living in poverty. Over many decades, this attitude has been embedded not just in the welfare system, but in the way many professional agencies exercise moral judgements and highly intrusive methods of controlling the behaviour of people living in poverty (for example, the energy companies' enforcement of prepayment meters onto vulnerable customers). These attitudes have also been internalised by people in poverty themselves, to the extent that they describe a sense of shame, or in the words of Wayne Green, who spoke at CAP's first National Poverty Hearing in 1996 (which I attended): "What is poverty? Poverty is a battle of invisibility, a lack of resources, exclusion, powerlessness; being blamed for society's problems.’

The Churches have not been immune from these attitudes, too often treating poverty as a problem to be addressed through individual behaviour change, or in more theological language 'saving' people from their self-inflicted poverty. Meanwhile pioneering new research from CAP draws attention to the structural causes of poverty within church institutions, showing that church closures in recent years are disproportionately high in low-income neighbourhoods.

 This is the context in which poverty - and even many conventional attempts to tackle it - rob people of their dignity, agency or power over their lives.

In spite of this, Church Action on Poverty affirms the belief in the transformational possibilities of people coming together to reclaim their dignity, agency and power.

God in a workman’s jacket

Churches Weekly Newsletter - No.146, 5 February 2023

During last Sunday’s exceptional Church in the Pub at The Lake House - my, how we sang! - one hymn particularly stood out for me. It was requested by John Casson, fondly remembered from his schooldays. Its words are all the more powerful for their strangeness to our ears; for this is a rare hymn of Christ the Worker - full of the eschatological hope that when Christ returns he will come alongside the factory workers, the labourers, the miners, ‘God in a workman’s jacket as before’.

The hymn [1] is the creation of Geoffrey Anketel Studdert Kennedy,  born in 1883, the seventh of nine children born to Jeanette Anketell and William Studdert Kennedy, vicar of St Mary's, Quarry Hill, a deprived Leeds parish. Following his father’s vocation, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy became known for his chaplaincy to soldiers in the trenches during WW1 where his generous distribution of cigarettes earned him the nickname ‘Woodbine Willie’, and where his reflections on the intense suffering of all around led him to develop his idea of God as being the ‘comrade’ of those who struggle, as in this poem: 

The hymn is the creation of Geoffrey Anketel Studdert Kennedy,  born in 1883, the seventh of nine children born to Jeanette Anketell and William Studdert Kennedy, vicar of St Mary's, Quarry Hill, a deprived Leeds parish. Following his father’s vocation, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy became known for his chaplaincy to soldiers in the trenches during WW1 where his generous distribution of cigarettes earned him the nickname ‘Woodbine Willie’, and where his reflections on the intense suffering of all around led him to develop his idea of God as being the ‘comrade’ of those who struggle, as in this poem: ‘Only with Him, my Comrade God, beside me, Can I go forth to war with sin and pain.’ [2]

In poor parishes and industrial chaplaincy Studdert Kennedy dedicated the rest of his life’s work ‘with affection and respect’ to ‘the working men of Britain: they were soldiers once’. [3]

Studdert Kennedy’s notion of God as being alongside the ordinary person going about their everyday tasks brings to mind the poet-priest D. Gwenallt Jones whose poem Dewi Sant (1951) envisions Saint David as one who ‘went down to the bottom of the pit with the miners And threw the light of his wise lamp on the coal-face’, and who later, ‘brought the Church to our homes, Put the Holy Vessels on the kitchen table, And got bread from the pantry and bad wine from the cellar, And stood behind the table like a tramp Lest he should hide the wonder of the Sacrifice from us.’ [4]

And lastly, I find echoes of this in one of the great moments of twentieth-century British liturgy, a traditional form revived by Revd George MacLeod as a daily prayer of the Iona Community: ‘O Christ, the Master Carpenter, who at the last, through wood and nails, purchased our whole salvation; wield well your tools in the workshop of your world, so that we who come rough-hewn to your work bench may here be fashioned to a truer beauty by your hand.’ [5]

In his writings and speeches Studdert Kennedy often lamented the gulf between the Church and working people, and he devoted himself to bridging the gulf between the organised Church and organised labour, whilst his poetry and song lead us into the heart of a God who is immanent in a world of working people’s struggles. What other holy songs might we sing into those struggles today?

Notes

[1] Click here to listen to a recording of When through the whirl of wheels and engines humming by Van Wagner. Entry for the hymn in hymnary.org.

[2] Wikipedia: Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy; Richard and Sylvia Rice-Oxley, Woodbine Willie – musical reflections: The Comrade God.

[3] G. A. Studdert Kennedy, Democracy and the Dog-Collar, front matter.

[4] D. Gwenallt Jones, Dewi Sant.

[5] The Morning Service of the Iona Community from the Iona Abbey Worship Book [PDF].