This is the next instalment of the serialisation of my book – The Teeth of our Exertions – full details of which can be found here.
Though many images conjured up in the minds of those who have never been to a deprived community are ridiculous, it would be wrong to offer a sentimental view. Mez McConnell is right, ‘When we hear about the Bronx or the East End of Glasgow, we may very well picture drug dealers and drive-by shootings. And this negativity is not without some roots in reality… but that’s not all there is to a community’.[1]
Some so idealise the working-classes that they feel it important to praise every characteristic of deprived communities no matter how objectively bad. By contrast, there are those so set against the poor that there is nothing they can do, and nothing in their culture, that is considered even redeemable, let alone good.
Tim Chester strikes the right note when he says:
We cannot give blanket affirmation of working-class culture. The gospel will challenge and transform some aspects… But neither can we make a blanket condemnation of working-class culture. There are many elements that conform to the gospel and are therefore affirmed by it. A blanket condemnation is what we issue only when we assume working-class people ought to become middle-class.[2]
He goes on to note, ‘the same principles, of course, apply to middle-class culture. It is neither wholly bad nor wholly good’.[3] But if we leave our middle-class communities and go to deprived ones, it bears asking what are some of the things we will have to give up?
Counting the cost
In Luke 14:25-33, Jesus speaks about the cost of being his disciple. He begins by telling the gathered crowd that unless they love him more than their own families, they cannot be his disciples. He finishes by telling them that if they are not willing to renounce everything they have, they cannot be his disciples. In between the two comments, he gives two stories – a man building a tower and a king going to war – calling people to count the cost of following him. This doesn’t mean, bearing in mind the context of this book, that if you don’t renounce your middle-class values and come to a deprived community you cannot be Jesus’ disciple. What it does perhaps mean is that if we are not willing to countenance the possibility that Jesus might be calling us to go, that may tell us something about whether we have truly counted the cost of being Jesus’ disciple. If his call is to go into all the world and preach the gospel, including to deprived places, Jesus is quite clear that we must count the cost before we go.
As we saw in chapter 2, deprived communities differ greatly. Moving to Basildon will not be the same as going to Bolton. Even within the same town, one area will not be the same as another. There are different ethnicities, languages, houses and schools. The culture between, and even within, towns may differ significantly. All that is to say, what you may have to give up in one town may not be what you give up in another.
The cultural divide
However, there is undoubtedly a cultural divide that must be crossed by middle-class people moving into a council estate or ex-mill towns. Mez McConnell rightly says, ‘don’t make the mistake of thinking that you share cultural values with someone just because you are from the same country and speak the same language’.[4] Steve Casey claims, ‘it took five years (with his children attending the local school) just to begin to be assimilated into the culture in Speke, Liverpool’.[5] I asked my wife, who is from a more middle-class background than me, what she felt she had to give up in moving to Oldham. The thing she mentions most frequently is the lack of easy friendship. People are often not on her wavelength, they don’t converse like she does, they don’t find the same things funny, they don’t view family or education or any number of things in ways she has always taken for granted.
Whilst it is hard to generalise about housing and schools and the like, it is inevitably true that some of us will have to contend with these issues. Some will live next door to drug addicts who leave their needles in the alley behind your house where your children play. Others will have to send their children to local schools that are failing or in which your children are the only white pupils with a decent grasp of English. You may well be entering an area in which crime is relatively high. Our little area of Oldham has been the centre of race riots, drug-related crimes and been under police cordon. Not long ago, a young lad was stabbed to death in broad daylight outside our building by people who attended the youth group of a church down the road. These are the realities of life in hard areas. But as scared as we may be of these things, it bears remembering that there is a whole community of people who fear them like you do. Just because people are poor and deprived does not mean they are any less worried by these things. The only difference between them and you is that most of them have neither the money nor worldview to countenance living anywhere else.
[1] McConnell & McKinley (2016), Op Cit., p.145
[2] Chester (2012), Op Cit., p.32
[3] Ibid., p.33
[4] McConnell & McKinley (2016), Op Cit., p.165-6
[5] As quoted in Chester (2012), Op Cit., p.158