This is the next instalment of the serialisation of my book – The Teeth of our Exertions – full details of which can be found here.
Uneasy friendships
But more personally, given the cultural and class divide, you will have to face the fact that you will almost certainly not have friends who are just like you. Working-class people will probably not share your values or interests. Few people are interested in dinner parties and discussing the finer points of ancient history (or whatever your academic interests happen to be). In fact, a lot of people don’t have dining tables, and most will eat their dinner on their lap in front of the TV. People are more interested in takeaways and the X-factor result than BBC 4 documentaries and gourmet olives.
The things that you take for granted as important will not be considered so obvious to the people in a deprived community. That may seem like a small thing on the face of it, but the reality is that for a long time it may feel as though you simply aren’t connecting with anyone at a deeper level. Friendships may feel superficial for long periods and, in some cases, as though you will never click at all. That is not to say you can’t or won’t make friends, it is to say that it will take time and not be as easy and natural as when surrounded by people who think, feel and reason in exactly the same way as you.
Social standing
You must also consider the cost to both your aspirations and social cachet. It is notable how many people will make assumptions and judgements about you based on little more than where you live and their perception of it. My wife, who works in Manchester, was once in discussion with a colleague who commented on having been to Oldham. He saw some of the newly regenerated parts of the town and thought it looked (surprisingly) decent before immediately going on to qualify the comment with a note about the people who looked shabby and rough. Another time, a colleague remarked that they were meeting somebody from Oldham. When my wife enquired where in the town they were from, she was immediately dismissed with the comment, ‘A nice part. You wouldn’t know it’. These are just a few of the publishable comments we have heard.
Thankfully, I have few, if any, middle-class aspirations and couldn’t care less what people think of me or where I live. But if you are at all concerned about keeping up with the Joneses or impressing people with your house and lot in life, you must kiss goodbye to such things. For all that most people care, you could live in a Grade II listed mansion in Oldham but that would still be met with a similar sort of response as if you’d won a prize for being the world’s least grubby tramp. Your house may be amazing, but it is still ultimately in Oldham. Any social cachet you had hoped for will count for naught.
Christian status
Of course, as with many Christian people, your desire might not be for worldly respect but Christian status. For good or ill, ministering in a deprived community is not a good way to make a name for yourself. Most people labouring in deprived communities remain obscure and largely unnoticed even within the miniscule world of Conservative Evangelicalism. Almost all struggle for money and few ever make it to ‘big name’ status, if they are even noticed at all. Churches in deprived communities tend to remain small, financially struggle and rarely give people great connections. If you have pretensions of “success” – that is, being a known figure within the Evangelical world – ministry in a deprived community simply will not give that to you. If you have designs on making a name for yourself, you may as well forget them now. At heart, however, the issues associated with background and the class divide can be overstated. What matters is not the background you come from but your desire to see the lost won for Christ. As Mez McConnell has said, ‘What does it really matter if people bringing the gospel to the poor are sipping chai-tea lattes? People are dying without Christ; that’s the bottom line. At the end of the day, it is being a person of real substance who loves Jesus and loves people that truly matters’.[1] Let’s be honest, if that is our heart motivation, the things we may have to give up will not seem so significant after all
[1] McConnell & McKinley (2016), Op Cit. p.141