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8 June 2023

6 min read

Eden in the East End

Belle Tindall writes of her afternoon in an East End kind of Eden, and tells the stories of how, through All Hallow’s Church, Christianity is being lived out in Bow.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A neo-Romanesque church sits at the acute corner of two roads. To its side a tower block rises over a row of low-rise flats.

All Hallows,Bow. 'Ahaba' is an old Hebrew and Arabic word for love.

Google.

Feeling increasingly restless in the comfortable confines of West London, Rev. Cris and Beki Rogers, along with their family and seven others, decided to take on All Hallows Church and make Bow their home.

Fast forward thirteen years, and here’s Cris, sat with a coffee on the corner of an intersection in the heart of London’s East End, flanked on every side by blocks of flats and talking over the sound of heavy traffic: this is Cris Rogers’ Eden.

‘I love this place’, Cris delightedly declares, ‘I love the sounds, I love the smells, I love the people’.

And why wouldn’t he? This is the place where Clara Grant, the infamous ‘Bundle Woman of Bow', founded the Fern Street Settlement in 1907, ensuring that thousands of children were warm, fed, taught and loved.

It is where, in 1913, Sylvia Pankhurst established the East London Federation of Suffragettes, fighting for the rights of working women.

It is where, in 1985, the profoundly influential grime music artist, Dylan Kwabena Mills (perhaps better known as Dizzee Rascal) was born and subsequently raised.

It’s not hard to see why Cris describes his home as a place of profound justice, of resilient compassion, of innovative creativity and of rich community. In ways that we’re likely to be unaware of, we exist in the cultural ripple effect of places such as Bow. We owe them a great debt. And yet, there is, of course, another way to perceive and speak of Bow; a perception which places its focus upon slightly different identity markers.

It is, according to the Government’s Deprivation Indices, one of the most deprived communities in the UK. It has an above average crime rate, with a particularly high number of home break-ins. The percentage of home ownership in the area is 17 per cent, which is dramatically lower than the national average of 65.8 per cent. It is also a community that, because of the establishment and closure of St. Clements Mental Health Hospital, has an increased number of residents who live with mental illness and addiction.

It is true, in many ways, Bow struggles.

And it’s not that Cris and the community at All Hallows ignore these facts. On the contrary, they’re on a crusade against poverty in the area, working to eradicate it entirely. They’re also relentlessly pursuing justice and offering support to those in their community who need it most.

No, ignorance is not the source of Cris’ perspective - Jesus is.

I’m aware that such a sentence is in serious danger of sounding eye-rolling-ly twee, so allow me a moment or two to explain further.

The playwright himself took the stage, the author jumped inside the page, the architect inhabited the plans. Admittedly, it’s downright strange.

John, one of Jesus’ four biographers, opens his work with a prologue of epic proportions. Nestled into this prologue is this line –

‘The Word (that’s Jesus) became flesh and made his dwelling among us’.

In John’s original Greek writing, the words ‘made his dwelling’ can be more literally translated as ‘tabernacled‘, or rather, ‘pitched his tent among ours’. Author Eugene Peterson subsequently paraphrases it this way:

‘The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.’

The belief that God squeezed himself into the confines of humanity is certainly one of the more mystic elements of Christianity. The premise is that the playwright himself took the stage, the author jumped inside the page, the architect inhabited the plans. Admittedly, it’s downright strange.

And yet, this is the bedrock of what theologians call Incarnational Theology, a theology of Jesus’ embodied presence on the earth. Or, what Cris Rogers would call ‘moving in and living deep’. It's the astonishing idea that Jesus is present amongst, he is present alongside.

If the Incarnation happened, as Christians believe that it did, if Jesus really did pitch his tent next to ours – in that, he literally entered into time and place – then the implications of such aren’t only spiritual. The gospel (for want of a less Christian-ese word) is also a physical encounter, it is intent on changing one’s day, one’s week, one’s life, in tangible and practical ways. It must still be found in time and place. The church (as in, the people, not only the building) is one of the most obvious ways through which this could happen, as they take their lead from the one they represent and they themselves ‘move in and live deep’.

So, with that in mind, back to Bow.

For the residents of Bow, this thing called ‘Christianity’ is not a set of ideas that floats in the ether. On the contrary, it’s the people that teach them to speak, read, and write English in their ESOL lessons. It’s as tangible as the presence of the food banks, as obvious as the building on the intersection, as relentless as the recovery courses that run week after week.

Of the people who flow through All Hallows Church 40 per cent are in varying stages of recovery from addiction. It’s not surprising, therefore, that a major focus of Cris’ team is helping people through those often-complicated stages. Whether that be through the AA/NA courses (including one delivered in Russian), or visits to Pentonville Prison when addiction has taken hold once again and paved the way for behavioural mistakes to be made. After all, recovery from addiction is anything but linear.

And then there’s the recovery service. Every Tuesday evening the building hosts around 40 people who attend a specifically recovery-oriented service, held by Raf, the curate at All Hallows – who himself is ten years clean and sober. This service combines the twelve step programme with the Bible, week after week after week, building a community upon the power of these two liberating texts.

Moving in and living deep means that the team at All Hallows can take Jesus’ instruction to ‘love their neighbour’ completely literally. Even when that neighbour is breaking into their church’s coffee shop for the fourth time. It means that, together, those neighbours can love their home well and refute the notion that someone has made it when they finally have the means to move out of it. It means that Cris was right where he needed to be when someone walked past their church building on the way to take their own life, and decided to ask for help instead.

This is what incarnational theology looks like on the ground. This is how Christianity makes itself known in Bow. As Cris says, ‘we are called to love the hell out of our estates as no one else can’.

An East End kind of Eden

I’m telling this story through the vehicle of Cris, his family and his team, but this piece really isn’t about him or them; it is about Bow. A beautiful place filled with beautiful people. It’s a story of a group of people living in and learning from a community they know and adore. It’s a story of the mystic nature of incarnational theology looking like a Russian recovery course. It’s a story of being enchanted with one’s home.

I say this because, as Cris has observed, words matter. The story you tell about a place matters. This is the reason that they have re-written the words to a hymn from 1885, the third verse of which goes like this:

When through the woods and forest glades I wander

And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.

When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur

And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God to Thee,

How great Thou art, how great Thou art.

Beautiful as these words are, the story they tell to residents of places such as Bow, is that beauty is elsewhere, that God is more present, and somehow easier to find, in places that look nothing like their home. In order to counter that, these are the words that ring out from All Hallows on a Sunday morning:

When through the estate and shaded parks I wander

And see the shops and people in the streets

When I look up and see the tower blocks’ grandeur

And hear the cars and the sound of dancing beats. 

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, 

How great Thou art, How great Thou art.

There is a kind of Eden in the East End, in fact, there are numerous. And while I can’t speak for them all, I can say that Bow is one of the most special places I’ve ever found myself (with some of the best coffee).

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2 October 2023

6 min read

Cost of living crisis: faith and food banks combine to tackle destitution and its causes

The Trussell Trust wants food banks in its network to reduce the need for their services. Robert Wright finds out why the trust regrets they still distribute so much food.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man stands in front of a food bank's shelves of cereals and boxes labelled by foot type.

Howard Wardle at Eastbourne's food bank.

When Howard Wardle was making plans to set up a food bank in Eastbourne, in East Sussex, he received little support from his fellow church leaders. Speaking in the industrial estate warehouse that has been the food bank’s headquarters since 2017, Wardle recalls how at a meeting called to discuss the idea he largely encountered bafflement. At the time, Wardle was pastor of the town’s Community Church.

“They said, ‘There isn’t a need in the town – you’re wasting your time doing it’,” Wardle says of the meeting in 2011.

Wardle nevertheless received encouragement from Eastbourne’s Citizens’ Advice Bureau, from the major of the local Salvation Army congregation, the local authority’s social services – and the Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest organiser of food banks. The food bank, of which Wardle is now chief executive, last year handed out 280,000 meals.

Yet for Wardle and the Emma Revie, the Trussell Trust’s national chief executive, it is a matter of regret that its members are distributing so much food – organisations affiliated with the Trussell Trust handed out 2.99mn parcels in the year to March 2023. The figure was a 37 per cent increase on the year before, a rise largely down to the cost of living crisis started by the spikes in energy and food prices following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“It’s incredibly worrying and upsetting that so many people – more people – are having to come to food banks,” Revie says.

Workers at the Eastbourne Foodbank and others nationally are following a strategy of campaigning for policies that seek to ensure no one needs to seek emergency food support. They also employ staff who help clients to navigate the benefits system, prepare for work or take other steps to find a permanent solution to their problems.

“We were absolutely resolute that enough is enough. We needed to do whatever we needed to do to reduce the number of people needing to come to food banks.”

Emma Revie

The Trussell Trust centrally provides organisational support for affiliated food banks but deliberately does not undertake functions such as purchasing food.

Revie says it adopted the strategy of trying to put itself out of business five years ago, after experiencing significant growth in demand for its services. The trust was founded in 1997 in Salisbury by Carol and Paddy Henderson, a Christian couple. Christian principles have been core to the trust’s operations ever since.

“We reached a decision point where we either had to accept that this situation was likely to increase and would always be needed or we had to decide that that was not acceptable and change the way we thought about our work,” Revie says.

The trust recognised how inadequate food parcels were to the fundamental needs that member food banks were seeing among clients, she adds.

“The reason people are coming to food banks is they don’t have enough money to afford the essentials,” Revie says. “They know it’s not going to put credit on the gas meter. They know it’s not going to pay for school shoes.”

The organisation had to decide whether it accepted as inevitable that so many people needed its services or would reorient itself towards working to end that need, she adds.

“We were absolutely resolute that enough is enough,” Revie says. “We needed to do whatever we needed to do to reduce the number of people needing to come to food banks.”

“We’re not just here to get people on benefits. If we think they can work, we try to encourage people to get into work.”

Robert Crockford

In Eastbourne, the strategy of reducing dependence on food banks has been in place from the start, according to Wardle.

“When we started, we felt it was one thing to have a food bank giving out food but another to have people not need to come to food banks,” he says.

After receiving some grant funding, the food bank took on staff to help clients to resolve their financial problems and ensure they were receiving all the welfare benefits to which they were entitled.

“We built a welfare benefits team, a debt team and a medical benefits team so that we could help clients,” Wardle says.

Robert Crockford, the food bank’s senior advocacy officer, says he helps food bank clients to navigate issues such as the two-child limit and the overall benefits cap that restrict the amount benefits recipients can receive.

The two-child limit stops parents from receiving child benefit for any more than two children if the additional children were born after 2017. The benefit cap - £283.71 for a single person living outside Greater London – was introduced in 2013. It limits the total amount a person or family can receive from the system.

Crockford explains that he seeks to help clients to explore whether they count as disabled, a carer or have some other status that might enable them to receive higher benefits.

The group also works with People Matter, a charity that helps to prepare people for work.

“We’re not just here to get people on benefits,” Crockford says. “If we think they can work, we try to encourage people to get into work.”

Revie bemoans the overall inadequacy of the benefits system, pointing out that many recipients of Universal Credit – the main income-support benefit for most people who are unemployed or on low incomes in the UK – cannot afford food.

“When almost half the people on that benefit are unable to afford food, something systematically is failing,” she says. “So do you tackle the symptoms or do you tackle the actual problem?”

That emphasis on tackling problems is clear at another food bank affiliated with the trust – in Kingston, on the south-western edge of London.

Ian Jacobs, director of Kingston Foodbank, says his organisation works closely with Citizens’ Advice to try to develop permanent solutions for people seeking help.

“We do deep-dive investigations into people’s circumstances to try to see if we can get more money into people’s pockets,” he says.

Kingston Foodbank currently operates six foodbank centres and one pantry, where referred clients can select and buy reduced-price food. Jacobs says he would like one day to reverse the proportion, so that it operates six pantries and one food bank.

Jacobs, a member of the Doxa Deo Community Church, an independent evangelical church, also makes it clear that many volunteers are working at the food bank out of Christian conviction.

“We’re always open to pray with clients,” he says.

Revie says the trust is “deeply rooted” in the local churches.

“Many of our volunteers and staff are motivated in the work that they do by their Christian faith,” she says. “Our values of community, compassion, dignity and justice are deeply rooted in the Christian faith.”

Revie points out that the trust was founded by Christians and that its network grew through approaches by individual churches to the trust.
"We as an organisation work with people of all faiths and none and we certainly support people of all faiths and none," she says. "But we are deeply rooted in the local churches and many of our volunteers and staff are motivated in the work that they do by their Christian faith,” she says.
Faith has a "very special role to play" in the trust's work, Revie adds.
“Our values of community, compassion, dignity and justice are deeply rooted in the Christian faith," she says.

“We don’t believe there should be food banks in today’s society,” Jacobs says. “That’s why we do all the extra work to make sure people aren’t dependent on the food bank.”