James Cleverly – the current Home Secretary – last week got himself in a bit of bother. The MP for Stockton North – Alex Cunningham – was asking a question to the Prime Minister concerning why 34% of children live in poverty in his constituency. Clearly and audibly, the Home Secretary – who has since admitted (minimally) making a similar-sounding, nevertheless derogatory remark – can be heard answering, ‘because it’s a s***hole’. Charming, eh?

Of course, the people of Stockton were less than impressed. The MP for Stockton North raised the matter as a point of order later in the day. The Conservative mayor for Tees Valley was clear: ‘I’m not interested in excuses and I will always put our area above party politics, and it is clear to me that the home secretary should apologise for dragging Stockton’s name through the mud.’ Thus far, the Home Secretary has failed to apologise for anything more than his ‘unparliamentary language’ whilst denying what is audible and on record and failing to apologise to the people of Stockton.

What many take from this is little more than the mask slipped. For all the talk of ‘levelling up’ and ‘the Northern powerhouse’, people are hearing derogatory language about their areas and a seeming lack of any political will to do anything about it. Some expect little else from a Conservative government, others expect much better. But it is hard to be a resident of places like Stockton and feel anything is going to change when the attitude of those elected to help seems to be your town is rubbish, it’s basically your own fault and we aren’t interested in doing anything about it.

Christians, of course, would never make these sorts of comments. Certainly not in a room full of other Christians at any rate. But some of the attitudes on display here are rife in the church. The negative comments and attitudes that come towards areas like ours, ironically from people who want to insist ‘we just take people as we find them’ whilst simultaneously dismissing large swathes of them because they think, act and live differently to accepted middle class norms. When some of us are asking why there is such gospel poverty, and huge deficit between the number of churches in affluent areas and those in more deprived communities, whilst nobody would use such “unparliamentary language”, the attitude is clear enough: we aren’t going there because your area is a s***hole. Some will even be upset that I allude to that word (even though I have purposefully starred it out) as though their affront at that word is somehow worse than the attitude that underlies it which leads so many to leave towns like mine to their fate outside of Christ because they just think they’re too rough and ready.

Of course, there was another place that would have had industrial language applied to it 2000 years ago. I’m not sure of the Hebrew equivalent of what James Cleverly said (no doubt some Hebrew scholar can enlighten me), but whatever it is, that’s what they called it. Nazareth wasn’t considered much cop either. Unlike the Home Secretary, Jesus decided it was worth going. Indeed, it’s not as if looking down from Heaven, the world was in any great state to be called much else. But Jesus came, not just into the world, but to one of the rougher parts.

Not only did he come into a broken world and grow up in a tough area, but Jesus came specifically to do something about the problems. After all, however bad an area is, governments are at least theoretically elected to help improve them. To simply write them off as dumps unworthy of bothering with is quite the governmental call and one for which the Conservative Party have form, given the way Margaret Thatcher treated Merseyside (props to Michael Heseltine who at least tried to keep the government honest on that and actually do something against the prevailing view that it was a dump with no votes in it to bother helping). Jesus determined that not only was a broken world enough to keep him away, nor that coming to one of the looked down parts of it would be a problem, but came with the specific intent of resolving the very heart of the problem. Jesus came to deal with the problem of sin and specifically NOT to write off the world as some bin fire that was too far gone to bother going near or helping.

The question is whether we, in the church, are more like the Home Secretary or the master we claim to follow? Are we more prone to write off places in desperate need of the gospel as filthy backwaters we want nothing to do with or are we taking Jesus’ lead, having compassion on needy areas and actively working out how we might reach them? Sadly, the spread of gospel churches, and the weighting of evangelical numbers, tells its own story. It doesn’t have to remain like that, it needn’t always be this way, but I fear many of us are more prone to write areas off than we are to have the compassion of Jesus that compelled him to come in the first place.