Class and the Church: What next?
There seem to be two main areas that need to be tackled by evangelical churches if they are truly going to offer a ministry to working class people on any scale. They involve addressing the problems in existing churches, and planting new churches.
1. Changing the existing church culture
Many of the comments from working-class people point out the basic problem in church culture –that middle-class values have taken over, and are conflated with Christian values. This makes Christian churches hard to navigate or even to enter, for working class people. If that is the case, then we need to change church cultures to make them more genuinely welcoming. This means that we stop conflating Christian morality with middle classness. In turn, that means a serious push to teach biblical Christian ethics. This could involve a few things:
i. Challenging middle-class problems
There are several ways in which it appears that many middle-class churches fail to preach true biblical ethics. How much do we challenge middle class Christians about greed, which the Bible overtly identifies as idolatry? What about the assumption that life must involve growing in wealth? How much teaching is there on giving sacrificially? On challenging the idol of education and ‘good’ schools for children? What counts as a good school?
Why is it that Christians ever think it is appropriate to have a career, rather than a job? How much do we teach that work is for the purpose of feeding one’s family, and being generous – and not personal gain? How much is individualism overtly challenged in teaching and example? As one researcher points out, after interviewing working class Christians:
Interviewees identified aspects of middle class culture such as materialism, an excessive focus on career and individualism as negative and aspects of working-class culture such as a sense of community and commitment to care for the elderly as positive.[1]
In general, it seems that the poorer people are, the more they are prepared to give. The middle class does not do well in this regard. C. S. Lewis said of Christian giving, that the only safe rule is to “give more than we can spare.”
In other words, if our expenditures on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.[2]
ii. Preparing working class people for leadership
Church should be place where people get the opportunity use their gifts for the common good – the purpose for which such gifts are given. Those with gifts of leadership, or potentially with them, need chances to lead. They need to be able to learn and practice skills, and grow in confidence and capability. That does not always happen for working class people.[3] It may require conscious effort on the part of existing leadership. In many cases, even those working-class people who may be gifted don’t want to accept lay leadership responsibility, having no background that normalises or prepares them for leadership; while middle-class people are all too eager to assume it. This may mean mean pushing people forward who resist, and holding others back who are offended that they are not being given opportunities. In both cases, teaching true Christian values must be a priority.
iii. Teaching real change of identity
All Christians are a new creation in Christ. If these ‘new creations’ look exactly like the world around us, then just how Christian are we being? Every Christian must be challenged to put off the old, to question old ways of behaving, old ways of thinking, old identities. Questioning of assumptions in the face of biblical teaching should be normal. Insofar as working class people might have to change to fit in with Christian culture, middle class people should have to change just as much. There is a right challenging of all cultures and identities when coming to Christ.
Overall, our churches need to be places where Christ’s values are reflected, whatever your group. Everyone needs to be considering others better than ourselves; more needing of our attention, more worthy of our time. That requires learning a certain astuteness and sensitivity to other people and how they might be perceiving this conversation, this church, this offer of hospitality or whatever it is. It’s for all Christians to learn, for this is loving our neighbour as ourselves.
NB: how to talk to people
One specific piece of advice from Williams and Brown is that we should not always start conversations by asking people questions about themselves. I must admit, this is the opposite of what I have been taught. I was never a natural conversation-maker; I learned how to make conversation by observation and asking good conversation-makers what they do. I have been taught that in Britain the way to show interest in people is to ask questions about the person. The advice I have received is that to do so in not just polite, but that it makes the person feel at ease and welcomed. So I have persevered in doing it, even though I often feel very intrusive, and I don’t always like it when people do it to me.
Yet Williams and Brown suggest that this is a particularly middle-class phenomenon. Their example is Glenn, from a ‘chaotic working-class background’; ‘in his previous experience, it was the police and those in authority who asked those intrusive questions, and people like Glenn wouldn’t usually trust those in authority’.[4] They suggest starting conversations with something more neutral, such as the weather. I remember a wise pastor saying that to talk to anyone, you need to learn to talk about common interests: sport, gardening, and pets.
Conversations, and indeed preaching, could be consciously broader in its scope and applications. If you are telling a salutary story about something your child said, is it necessary to add that this conversation took place while you were driving your child to school? Some people do not have cars. Is it necessary include a sermon illustration about your overseas holiday? Some families do not have overseas holidays. Or holidays at all.
These are all ways in which to make our existing churches not just more open to working class people, but (I would suggest) more Christian. Yet if we are serious about mission outside the middle class, a further step needs to be taken.
2. Put resources and people into reaching the working class
Ministry to the public-school educated became fruitful because decades of work was poured into evangelising them - through Bash camps; university ministry; city workers ministries and so on. Ministry to the urban middle classes is thriving because so many churches cater for them. All of these need more work and more evangelising; there are still many middle class people who have not been reached. But if we are to reach the working classes, at least as much effort needs to be made for them.
The evangelical church was not always middle class. Bebbington reports that early evangelicalism (from the 1730s) was not middle class. That does not mean it had mass support from the working classes (it is easy to romanticise the early evangelical movement); but it did include many skilled workers, if not the ‘masses of the labouring population’. This demographic changed because twentieth-century evangelicals concentrated on the public schools, universities and professions.
That effort reaped its reward, and it is good that so many middle-class people were converted. It was hoped that converting the ‘leaders’ of society would lead to conversions throughout society; but this ‘trickle-down’ theory of mission has not worked. This is not to say that converting potential leaders is a bad thing; we should, by all means, continue to try do. But it won’t convert the country.
What could be the result if we made a similar effort, over generations, in working class areas? What if evangelicals took the conscious decision to move house and plant churches, where the unreached people are? If they moved to council estates or schemes, to awkward rural areas (not just the pretty villages), lived there and got to know the people?
It would probably not be easy. Moving to a council estate might make it harder to keep the children’s well-ordered routines going. There may be late-night interruptions and raucous people around. It also might be a place where there is warmth of community and a real chance to share in people’s lives. We need to live with people in order to be allowed to preach to them.[5]
It may mean a different kind of evangelism
To reach the working classes, have evangelistic events that serve pie and peas, not wine and cheese. Have them in the pub, not the church hall decorated with bunting. Have them around bingo, not art events. Find what will genuinely interest people – which means getting to know people. Don’t charge admission if you’re trying to attract poorer people. We need to find out what kind of evangelistic resources will catch people’s interests, and through what media. We need to find out what time of day is best for invitations, or even if invitations to events are the way forward at all. It means talking to working class people, to the working-class Christians who are already converted and know their culture, to the small number of pastors who are already doing the work, and to the non-Christians who may have never even considered church. Why not?
Also, ‘Don’t farm out evangelism among the poor in your community to para-church organisations’[6] says Mez McConnell. It doesn’t establish churches, and that is what is really needed. ‘Local children need a healthy local church in their communities far more than they need our yearly holiday Bible clubs or weekly drop-ins’.[7] So, we need to look at how to do that.
It may mean a different kind of church
‘Churches should be vibrant communities of Christians who are meaningfully involved in each other’s lives’.[8] Of course, some of them are; but we all need to be aware of the human tendency to be tribal and work against it. A great deal of the New Testament, in fact, is about just that. Brown and Williams ask a useful diagnostic question: do the people you are trying to reach consider you as ‘us’ or ‘them’?
Knowing what kind of church to create, with what kind of teaching and ministry, may mean going back to Scripture with the aim of finding out just what it says to the questions that middle class people do not normally ask. Scripture does have the answers, for all sorts of lives. As one working class Christian discovered:
Michael recalled the surprise he had initially felt when he found answers in the Bible to help him care pastorally for people in relation to the everyday issues they face on the estate. He had not heard such issues spoken about in other churches or within the wider evangelical movement: Oh the Bible does talk about this! It was then that I kind of was like, hang on a minute there is a Christianity for council estates but it's not in the middle-class churches, they don't know ... the Bible is so relevant to my culture and all this stuff has been hidden from me and that was then what really got me thinking that the Bible is relevant for council estate culture. The middle-class churches I've been in, I don't think they ever think through these issues. It doesn't seem relevant to them but I want to mine the Bible and find all this stuff that speaks to my culture.[9]
The Bible answers all those questions that current church culture is ignoring. It may take being confronted with the seemingly impossible problems that drives us to look for them.
It will mean putting money and time into mission
If we want to reach the working classes – the council estates, the rural poor, deprived areas or simply the people in cities and towns who do not feel middle-class – we need to devote resources to those ministries. Plant churches, set up courses, run missions. If there are not enough working class pastors to start with – and it seems that there are not – then we need to train up more. The first generations may have to suffer middle-class educational techniques because we can’t get our heads around how to do it properly any other way. But then they can work out how to do it better to train up more and more. It will take vision and determination to do it.
It must involve working class people
‘It is frustrating for those of us who have grown up in poverty on council estates to be secondary to the conversation on reaching our own communities’.[10] So let us go and talk to some working-class Christians. Be with them, and let them take the lead. It may take work to do so, especially if they have been brought up to believe they can never be leaders, especially leaders of working-class people. It will be frustrating because they will make mistakes, and they will do things less well than you can do them, or do them the wrong way (or what you think is the wrong way). It will require middle class people learning, instead of assuming they know the answers.
Conclusion
We are not serving the working classes. There is no secret about that, and no lack of analysis to see that it’s needed: in that sense, my articles have not really been necessary (or at least, they are nothing new). We need to get on and do it. Let us learn, and try. It will require sacrificial missionaries. It will require being uncomfortable. It may mean talking to people you don’t want to spend time with, at times of day you don’t want to be sociable, in places you don’t want to be, wearing clothes you don’t like and with food and drink you don’t enjoy. Cross-cultural mission can be like that.
Not everyone will be able to do this. But for those who can, the mission field is there, waiting.
[1] Joanne McKenzie, ‘A different class? Anglican evangelical leaders’ perspectives on social class’, pp. 169–189 in Abby Day (ed.), Contemporary Issues in the Worldwide Anglican Communion: Powers and Pieties (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), p. 179.
[2] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (William Collins: 2016, first published 1942), p. 86.
[3] McKenzie, p. 183.
[4] Natalie Williams and Paul Brown, Invisible Divides: Class, Culture and Barriers to Belonging in the Church (London: SPCK, 2022), p. 58.
[5] See Andy Prime’s excellent chapter in Mez McConnell, The Least, the Last and the Lost: Understanding Poverty in the UK and the Responsibility of the Local Church (Leyland, Evangelical Press; 2021).
[6] McConnell, p. 31.
[7] McConnell, p. 31.
[8] Williams and Brown, p. 80.
[9] Joanne McKenzie, ‘'The Person God Made Me to Be': Navigating Working-Class and Christian Identities in English Evangelical Christianity’ Sociological Research Online, 22 (1), 1-11, p. 9.
[10] McConnell, p. 259.