Yesterday, the Guardian report on a new approach to funding local council areas. They report:

Deprived towns and cities in the midlands and the north of England are the big winners in a major shake-up of local authority funding that will redirect cash from affluent rural areas to urban councils hit hardest by austerity.

Ministers said the changes put in place a fairer system that recognised the extra needs and weaker council tax raising powers of councils in so-called “left behind’ areas. It guarantees them real-terms funding increases for the next three years.

They go on to say:

The extra resources directed to once solid Labour-supporting heartlands in the north are seen as part of an aim to boost civic infrastructure in post-industrial communities. The hope is to reverse a trend of growing distrust in politicians by voters who have often switched their electoral allegiances to the Tories and Reform in recent years…

…An analysis of an earlier model of the government’s Fair Funding formula carried out by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in the summer unexpectedly found some deprived areas like South Tyneside, Sunderland, Gateshead and Wigan were set to lose out, but after further tweaks those areas are now expected to be beneficiaries.

Sir Stephen Houghton, chair of the SIGOMA group of urban councils including Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, welcomed the changes. “These reforms mark a significant step towards a fairer and more balanced funding system for councils across the country,” he said.

This, of course, makes a lot of sense. It is no good offering local councils the ability to raise council funds locally when higher cost housing and higher salaries tend to bunch together in exactly the same way as deprivation. If you have large proportions of people living in deprivation, raising council tax locally isn’t going to accomplish very much. Likewise, if you have lots of high earners within your council area you don’t need to do quite so much to raise a lot of lolly. Given this basic reality, it makes perfect sense to take some of the evident surplus available in, say, Camden, Islington, Richmond-Upon-Thames or Windsor & Maidenhead and shift some it up to places like Blackpool, Knowsley, Middlesbrough and Rochdale. Ditto for those deprived areas in the South and Midlands too, but you get the idea.

What, do you suppose, might the church learn from this? Let’s imagine you are a monied and/or sizeable church in a reasonably affluent or aspirant area, what might you learn from this new local council formula? We surely aren’t content to let the world do a better job of serving the needs of the poor and deprived areas than the church, wouldn’t we? But if government is prepared to move funds from affluent areas to deprived ones for the sake of material need, how ought the church respond in its affluence to areas of greatest spiritual deprivation? And what does it say about our priorities that the areas of greatest spiritual deprivation most often line up exactly with areas of greatest material deprivation?

Let us not be outdone by the government. If the gospel really is the greater motivator, if we really are compelled by the love of Christ, if our hearts really are captured by the urgency of gospel need and we take at all seriously Jesus’ commands on love for the poor, can we not shift some of our vast wealth (and it really is there) to the places of greatest spiritual and material deprivation in our country? If there is the will, there is surely a way.

Let me ask you seriously, what can you do this coming year to ensure the gospel is really good news to the poor? What can you do to make a dent in the gospel deficit in our country? What priority might you give to planting new churches, revitalising struggling ones or supporting existing gospel preaching churches in the most deprived parts of the UK?

If local councils can do it, what is stopping the church?