The other week, a little local news story appeared in Oldham. I share it here because I think it illustrates several things at once and also provides us with an opportunity for learning in the church. The particular news story I am referring to concerns the new Oldham town hall. You can read a write up here.

The background to the story is that the old civic centre in Oldham is in disrepair. The council were forced to move out and have, for the time being, been encamped in the local shopping centre. As I understand it, the cost of refurbishing the old civic centre was significant and the land will be used as part of the council’s plan to build 2000 new homes in the town centre. The old library and archive has been lying derelict for some time and so it was deemed sensible to refurbish and restore the historic old building and use it, not just for council chambers, but also as a multi-purpose building for the community.

The local response to this story is utterly predictable. On the one hand, the council are repeatedly criticised for “allowing” some of our beautiful historic buildings to lie derelict in the town centre. On the other hand, any time anybody suggests doing anything with them, it is met with a chorus of ‘waste of money’, ‘too expensive’ and the ever-popular ‘no one will use it’.

A good case in point is our old town hall. For many years it lay derelict in the centre of town. Many plans were formed to do something but the cost of refurbishing a Grade II listed building and keeping its key features is inevitably more expensive than just tearing it down and starting again. Most companies simply couldn’t justify the expense. The council were repeatedly hammered for letting it lie dormant. Eventually, they struck a deal with Odeon to both bring a much desired cinema back to Oldham (we didn’t have one at all) and to refurbish the town hall. The council promised to back it with support and funds to help. This was met with a chorus of it being a waste of money and nobody using it. As it happens, it is now a well used facility, that has restored the beautiful old town hall in the process and brought a number or new restaurants to the town. It has been (in my view) a great success.

All the same features – both the drivers to do something and the local response – exist in the refurbishing of the old library. In many ways, it is a fairly dull local news story of no great interest. But, as I say, I think it illustrates something about local attitudes in the town.

There is a deep distrust of authority. It almost doesn’t matter who the authority is, local people will distrust it. In this case, it is the council. There is a somewhat frustrating local attitude that whatever the council do is wrong and only to be criticised. The council could literally ask locals for a list of what they want, do it all and deliver it under budget and they will still complain that it is wrong, a waste of money, no one will use it, etc, etc. As night follows day, local will complain come what may whatever the council do. It is ingrained in the local psyche. The view is: everything is terrible, the authorities never change anything, therefore anything they do is not to be applauded. The attitude it not universal; but it is widespread, common and, frankly, very loud.

There is a wider issue – one that exists outside Oldham too – that people want mutually exclusive things. Or, at least, they want things that are not possible. So, on the one hand, people do not want derelict buildings to lie dormant and ruined. On the other hand, they neither want to tear them down and replace them with anything else nor do they want to spend the requisite money to restore them. What they want is an impossible combination of the full restoration of old buildings without it costing anything at all. Even if that were possible – and it obviously isn’t – they also want the building to be used with purpose but almost never a new purpose, failing to recognise that the reason the building is derelict is because the old purpose fell out of use. There are a whole host of other mutually exclusive contradictions often going on such that whatever the council do can be complained about and deemed wrong.

Complainers can broadly be placed into one of two categories. First, there are the political chancers. These are the people who have set themselves up – often opposition councillors themselves – as a champion of the people against the not-to-be-trusted councillors in control. What becomes clear very quickly is they have no actual ideas or plans of their own, they are just finding reasons to complain in order to whip up discontent that they can capitalise on politically. It is an entirely destructive form of politics for the local area.

Second – and I have much more sympathy with this group – are people who have felt their sense of place eroding. There are all sorts of reasons why people might find themselves feeling this way. But what often lies behind their complaints is a desire for the restoration of ‘the way things were’ which is really a nostalgia for a time when they understood the local context better than they do now. It is a hankering for a time when the local culture made sense to you because everyone was from the same culture and you have fond memories and a sense of security in what was familiar to you. As buildings change, systems change, local demographics change, one’s sense of place and understanding of the local community can become less clear and, for some, frightening. Some of the complaints are really a proxy for their own fears and discombobulation as the local area changes to something less recognisable and familiar. Whilst I still think the complaints remain unfounded and largely unreasonable, I have some sympathy for the underlying feeling.

I think the moves being made by the council are good. They are hitting several birds with the same stone. They are seeking to restore some of our beautiful and historic buildings. They are seeking to release land that can be used for building to address our ever-growing housing shortage. The council themselves do, indeed, need to be housed somewhere and proper governance does need to take place. They are creating a multipurpose site so that it can be used for other local benefit too. What is more, they are actively moving on big building projects that creates jobs and brings investment to the town and they are doing it via capital spending, which is not able to be used for any other purpose than what they are putting it in. Moreover, if we want people to spend time and money in the town and serve the local economy, we have the town centre a nice place to be with buildings and infrastructure that draw people in. I do not believe the council are beyond criticism, but I find it particularly difficult to criticise them over this. It is, to all intents and purposes, a good local news story that will be good for our town.

This brings me the long way round to my other observation about how we can mirror this kind of attitude in the church. It is very easy to adopt a similar anti-authoritarian attitude and assume everything our church leaders do is wrong. It is increasingly common, in fact, for church leaders to be criticised regardless of what they do. Rather than assuming good intent and giving the benefit of the doubt, there is an inbuilt assumption of incompetence and wrongdoing. This is not to anybody’s good.

Similarly, we may not realise the mutually exclusive views that exist within the church. For everybody who wants exclusive psalmody, there are those who insist on modern worship songs and nothing else. You cannot exclusively have both! This is just one small example, but you name it, there are a range of views in the church. Very often, mutually exclusive views such that your church leaders have to take decisions that will ultimately not be to someone’s liking. Beyond even just individual preferences, church leaders are often balancing all manner of things and their decisions may be the best option given the mutually exclusive things we might want. In the end, they have to decide what is best and then do it.

When we receive complaints, they often fall into the two kind of categories I outlined earlier. There are, without question, political complaints. These are people who have an agenda and they are looking to complain at every opportunity in order to advance it. However, there are those who complain and, even though their complaints may not be credible, the things they are saying are proxies for other perhaps more legitimate underlying concerns. We still may not agree with the underlying concern (though we might and, if not, we may at least have some sympathy over it inasmuch as it isn’t a stupid thing) but it is important to understand what is driving the complaint. Again, figuring out what kind of complaints we are dealing with will help us to address the concerns most helpfully.

Indeed, it is possible – in my experience, likely – that a lot of complaints will stem from a similar feeling of place and community eroding in the church. A complaint about a ministry ending is often not really about that ministry in particular but more a concern about old patterns no longer being fit for purpose and our being at sea in our current cultural moment. Sometimes it is the products of sadness that what was once thriving now isn’t and, even though that world has long since gone, we are striving to recreate what was once a blessing to us. There may be other similar driving things.

Even where such concerns are not credible or it is impossible to resolve in the way hoped for, we can at least sympathise. I can understand the feeling of a person who has grown up in a church full of people like them and in which they had lots of friends and now, some years later, they are the only person of their age, stage, ethnicity and culture in the room. That isn’t to say their complaints are altogether legitimate or we ought to do exactly as they want. But I we can sympathise with the shift and sense of discombobulation even as we seek to lead people to understand that, though it is different, it is right to be as it is.

If we are raising complaint, we also need to think about how it might be heard and why. Are we criticising something that actually makes sense? Are we criticising without full knowledge of the facts? Are we criticising without having credible alternative plans or suggestions? Simply complaining is rarely helpful. Not only is it deeply discouraging, it isn’t constructive. Most complaints will simply be ignored if they are voiced without credit and in a way that isn’t constructive. You need to make sure your complaint is valid before raising it and, if there is actually some other issue driving it, better to lead with the real issue rather than present with one that simply isn’t that significant or may be read as standing in the way of necessary progress.