Class

It's been awhile since I've blogged – I have to do obligatory blogging for my course which is infinitely more intellectual than my contributions here, so that tends to take away all of my blogging brainpower! However, over the past few weeks, a certain issue has cropped up a number of times – in class, and then the other the weekend, in church.

The issue at hand is that of class. For the past two weeks or so, we have what can happen when the working and middle classes come together united against a common enemy – the Ben Ali family fled unceremoniously from Tunisia to Saudi Arabia whilst Mubarak was hounded out of office by the Egyptian people. Power to the people! Inspiration for other nations in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa who had previously perhaps never considered the possibility that their corrupt and oppressive leaders could be forced out of office – or forced to mend their ways. But the crucial thing which my lecturer reminded a class of ours was that these revolutions have happened because the working and middle classes came together. Because the poor were not standing alone. That's when real change happens.

But the big problem is that, apart from these rare occasions when people across the class spectrum are so fed up with their leaders that they all have equal amounts of motivation to raise their voices in opposition, societies often remain divided by class. Each class has little understanding of the other – which is not surprising as the middle and working classes rarely come into contact. In Britain the concept of class has become rather complicated and muddied over the past few decades, with lines being nowhere near as clear as they used to be, but if we think of middle-class as representing graduate professionals and working class as those in the more traditional blue-collar jobs or jobs paid the minimum wage, there is still a pretty clear division.

Take Birmingham for example, the middle classes live in areas like Edgbaston and the working classes are in places like Weoly Castle and Handsworth. And as they live in separate areas, their children go to separate schools. So children grow up having friends who are all from similar backgrounds to themselves and with parents who do similar types of jobs. When mums take their babies and toddlers to playgroup or nursery – they meet other mums who are likely to be from their area – and a similar background. When we go to work, we are surrounded by people of similar qualifications and backgrounds to us, (apart from our bosses who are perhaps are a bit more qualified or maybe have more experience, and are therefore, earning more money).

It's quite easy to go through life now without ever having any meaningful interaction with somebody outside of our own class or background. In fact, is actually hard to cross those lines and find a way of building a meaningful relationships with somebody of a different class or background. Because the fact is – when would we meet? Under what circumstances? And how? The working class person might be paid by the middle-class person to do a job, or managed by them at work, or serve them in a shop. The middle-class person might treat a working-class person in hospital, provide legal services for them or produce the television programs they watch. But when do they sit down side-by-side, on an equal level, and share their problems and exchange ideas?

So people grow up bereft of personal experience and understanding of those from a different class – and ultimately have their perceptions shaped by stereotypes or by the media. Going by media stereotypes, all benefit claimants are scroungers and lazy. All bankers are greedy and elitist. I guess if you've never met somebody who claims benefits or is on a low-income or if you've never met a banker or somebody who is on a high income, the stereotypes are all you have to go on. And it can become quite intimidating, trying to break through that class barrier and just have a normal relationship as you would with somebody from your own kind of background.

All of this makes me a bit uneasy. A class ridden society, a society which is very divided by wealth, is not an attractive society. I grew up in a working-class area, surrounded by "blue-collar" working families, benefit claimants and people on low incomes. But I got a scholarship to go to a private, fee paying secondary school, surrounded by the children of university lecturers, international businessmen, doctors and lawyers. At the time, I didn't really feel like I belonged in either of the classes – I didn't like being in the position I was in and to be honest, high school was not a rosy period that I look back on with any amount of fondness. But I am grateful for one thing – that I got to know people from different backgrounds. That I was able to relate to and find friendship with those from different classes.

But how different things are now. Going to university, I could count on one hand the number of people I met who were from working-class backgrounds. And after university, as I joined the yuppy ranks, I found that the only connections I had with working class people were those from my childhood, the people who I visit when I go home to see my parents. There are a few friends from Kenya who are working class who I stay in touch with but other than that, that's it. How depressing! I'm officially in the middle-class bubble! And I don't know how to burst it – how to get beyond it.

Which brings me to a topic my pastor was speaking about last week. He made the rather controversial statement that the church in this country is a bastion of the middle classes. Sadly – I think he's right. Especially in the cities you find huge churches full of professionals with very large turnovers – with poorer, smaller churches struggling to keep going in areas of high social deprivation. And class isn't the only divider. In a city like Birmingham with a huge diversity of nationalities and cultures, you find churches which are overwhelmingly majority black or overwhelmingly majority white with very little integration. How did this happen? How did we come so far from the church in Acts 3 where…

“All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.”

I hadn’t thought about this before but when it talks about all the believers, this wasn't just 12 disciples being referred to here. This was thousands of people. Thousands of people from all over the world, sharing everything and being "one in heart and mind." That sounds like an amazing community. An absolutely radical community. It was no wonder they got a bit of a reputation as Christianity spread throughout Greece and Italy!

I don't like just writing critiques on situations. One of the things which has frustrated me about my course is that there is so much to say about what has gone wrong, about bad development practice – in comparison to the small amount of reflection on what has been done right, and what is going well. One thing that I really love about my church is its diversity…there’s so many different backgrounds there – and we literally come from all over the world. Yet we are still a little community – being in each others lives. If you look around there are some really inspiring churches, churches who love people where they’re at, breaking down barriers instead of putting them up.

The Church under the Tree is a church run by a guy who sells welding supplies during the week. The church come together in a local park…where they worship God together, learn together, grow together, and support each other. Have a closer look here… http://vimeo.com/9836915.

In the UK there’s a ton of organisations trying to help build a church which is willing to go and be light within the community – Community Mission, Love is Verb, Livability…the list goes on.

And it's so exciting!

Because I guess if we are following Jesus, following how he lived, the church should be the breaker of the class bubble. Our churches shouldn't be bastions of a certain type of class, or certain group or race of people, but a melting pot of classes and nationalities. In a country like Britain, where our Prime Minister tells us that multiculturalism has failed, the church can be a place where he is proven to be wrong. Not just in that you have different types of people turning up to a Sunday service once a week, but that you have a whole variety of people sharing their lives with each other, supporting each other, being a strength and encouragement to each other. Community like that is an awesome signpost to an even more awesome God!

Labels of Conservative, Liberal, socialist become irrelevant … if we’re Christians, it would seem logical that our actions and values be inspired primarily by Jesus, rather Karl Marx, or Adam Smith or Margaret Thatcher! Working, middle, upper class - surely we cannot be divided by some having less money than others, by some people having read more books, by people having jobs which use different skills, by having parents of different backgrounds...when we are ONE in Christ. My church is going to be taking a step beyond its building and finding ways of building bridges with the community, finding out what the challenges are that people are facing and then figuring out what we as a Christian community can do to help. I think being prepared to find out where people are at is a good first step and I’m glad the church is taking it.

But I still have questions…how, practically speaking, can the church in this country become less segregated in terms of class and wealth? How can we reflect the kind of love Jesus practised when he reached out to those on the edges of society? Do some of us middle class people need to literally move ourselves into poorer areas so we live our daily lives alongside more working class people? If I were to move to a poor country should I move into a slum or a poor area to share my life with the people of those areas? Is that radical to suggest that? Should it be considered radical to suggest that? Am I just dreaming up this whole issue? Genuine questions…if you have ideas…please put them out there!