Weekend essay

Culture

Generosity

6 October 2023

5 min read

From family to flourishing community, why relationships count so much

Little local acts of listening and kindness shed light on an age-old question, writes Rob Wickham - am I my brother’s keeper?

Rob Wickham

Rob Wickham is the CEO of the Church Urban Fund, a charity helping people access a community of support. He was the Bishop of Edmonton, and has participated in community building in London and Tyneside.

A group of old and young men sit on red sofas, listening to one of themselves.

Stoke FC's Place of Welcome.

Church Urban Fund.

Every week a group of 20 or so older people gather in an ordinary church in Walsall. A small handful also attend church on Sundays, but most do not. Amongst them are clear signs of poverty, mental health issues, struggles, broken relationships, and grief. Each person has a profound story. They come to sit in a place where strangers can become friends and will listen. For almost half of this group, this moment would be the only one that week when they are personally noticed and acknowledged by another human being.

This safe space is therefore a transforming blessing. It is life enhancing and hope creating. It was born out of a simple instruction, heard weekly by the church’s congregation - “Ite, missa est” – ‘Go the mass is ended’. This simple instruction, and a belief that their role was to build community as a result, has led to lives being transformed, fueled by the Bread of Life.

But it is not just churches. Stoke City Football Club opens its doors leaving Yasmin to reflect about her Grandmother, Sandra, who has dementia:

“My Nan has made friends and this place has helped her with talking and socializing more. Especially since COVID she stopped socializing and was feeling lonely. I think this has really made a difference”.

Or in Lichfield where the local theatre provides the same hospitality, leaving Jean to reflect that:

”You get to know people don’t you, coming here. It’s lovely.”

Churches, theatres, football clubs, libraries, mosques, temples, community halls, all of them can become places of welcome, centres of hope. Countless conversations, countless lives transformed, with the majority so simple and basic that they go unnoticed.

Relational capital goes beyond self to acknowledge that together, the other is a precious gift and not a problem that needs to be solved.

Towards the beginning of the book of Genesis, just after the first murder occurs with the death of Abel at the hands of his jealous and angry brother Cain, God asks Cain “Where is Abel?” Cain’s response is a common response, a response of one who judges or ‘others’, and then washes their hands.

“My brother is not my problem, Am I my brother’s keeper?”

It is a fundamental question to human flourishing and the principles of living for the common good.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s extraordinary book, Life Together, shares that any act of love or generosity to another person begins with a posture of holding your tongue in order to listen and to understand. Bonhoeffer then speaks of meekness, bearing, listening and ultimately, and only then, to be in a position to speak. All too often, we jump to speaking before doing the hard work, emphasizing an engrained paternalistic power dynamic, and thinking that we know best. For Bonhoeffer, this is an act of service which is relational, built upon trust and a relational capital that says that each person matters. Relational capital goes beyond self to acknowledge that together, the other is a precious gift and not a problem that needs to be solved. Bonhoeffer also recognizes the prophetic wisdom and complexity of this as he shares that:

“in order to flourish, every community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The marginalization of the weak leads to a broken humanity”.

At the heart of this dynamic, a posture is decided. If I am not my siblings’ keeper, and my sibling must look after themselves, then the weak will, of course, be marginalized. A broken and privatized humanity will be the ultimate end result.

But, if I am my siblings keeper, the posture is very different. Open arms, a desire to listen, to understand.

A clear example of this remains in many housing or immigration policies, or in a highly profitable banking sector - benefitting from the spoils of the cost of living crisis, adding to the misery of the majority. Like Pilate, hands are washed, in the pursuit of profit, thankfully challenged by the growing Just Finance Foundation.

Furthermore, in housing, regeneration for human flourishing, rooted in the call upon a person’s life given in the simple ceremony of baptism, often gives way to gentrification, in which fragmentation and broken relationships become the norm. This is a far cry from the vision of Fr Basil Jellicoe, where ‘homes for heroes’ were redeveloped in inner city Euston, rented at the same price as their slum predecessors as a symbol of action and justice for human flourishing.

But, if I am my siblings keeper, the posture is very different. Open arms, a desire to listen, to understand. This reflects something of the resurrection, where generosity is found, quite simply because God so loved the world. It is often in the most deprived communities that this is demonstrated, echoing a bias to the poorest, and a desire for the justice that Mary promises as she sings at the beginning of her child’s life.

In essence, our broken and fallen self often looks inside ourselves for fulfilment, but the transformed, loved and forgiven self looks to others as an act of self-giving love, humility and grace. The vision is often to live out the fundamental challenge of Jesus to the Church, personified in its founder Peter. “Do you love me… Feed my lambs”. Jesus, depicting himself as a shepherd, says to Peter, one of his closest followers – “if you love me, feed my sheep.” This is made all the more extraordinary as Peter himself had recently carried out a knife attack, yet he was still breathed upon with the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

The stories from Places of Welcome, and the testimonies from the communities who have used the Growing Good resources which exist to provide a framework as to how and why churches can and should serve their local contexts, are a reminder that relationships matter, people matter and love matters. Much hidden Christian ministry, alongside that of other faiths, as Near Neighbours testifies, strive for this different vision. Their stories demonstrate that living the principles of presence, perseverance, hospitality, adaptability, participation and action can lead to organic altruistic and flourishing communities. Daily, safe spaces are being created for the broken soul to rejoice, dance and sing.

The human urge to be in relationship with others is paramount. When such relational stories are told, actions follow. Good action is justice focused, co-created and participatory. This requires a mutuality, and a desire to learn, knowing context, listening to the local, and daring to ask the difficult questions of why certain communities are impoverished in the first place. It is in asking these questions, developing a learner’s heart, filled with curiosity, that will lead to the flourishing of all. Staying quiet when you have heard is not a viable option.

The posture is simple. Am I my siblings’ keeper? The answer no inevitably leads to death of relationship. The answer yes has the potential to lead to true human flourishing.

Article

Community

Culture

Sustainability

Wildness

2 June 2025

5 min read

Hedgerows are boundaries, but they don’t divide so much as abound

The lines we draw between land and lane connect us.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Down in Devon.

Craig Cameron on Unsplash.

In May and June, the Devon hedgerows that hold the landscape outside my window are at their fullest, most colourful state of being. Walking the narrow lane that runs away from our house means walking between high hedgerows that rise like soft green walls either side, which really, means walking between ancient living things, because these hedgerows are old. Devon has some of the oldest hedgerows in the country, and so the world – older than the Parish churches whose towers I can see to the south, east, and west, which rise like old-growth trees out of a blanket of green fields.

Early Bronze Age farmers had to clear woodland to make their fields, and sometimes they left strips of woodland to mark boundaries. These are our oldest hedgerows. They are often found on parish boundary lines, and can support over 2,000 species, also acting as important wildlife corridors for many of them. To roughly date a hedgerow, you count the number of species in a 30m stretch – one species equals 100 years. I have taken to counting random 30m stretches of the hedges that line the lanes near us, and have concluded that we are surrounded by hundreds, in places thousands of years of history – of braided hawthorn and blackthorn, hazel and oak, pink campion and bluebell whose bulbs hide in ancient earth banks that many of the hedgerows sit on.

Now, in these spring hedges, hawthorn is in blossom, nettles overflow with prickly exuberance, and somewhere deep in the tangle a blackbird tunes its song. The hedges are thick with memory stitched together from centuries of hand-laying, stock-keeping, quiet watching. They are Devon’s old boundaries, but they do not divide so much as abound. Life spills from them: wrens and mice, vetch and violet, and so many more things unseen. These are not just boundaries that mark where other things like fields and roads begin and end then; they are living spaces in their own right. They are pathways for diverse life, they are structures that hold home and shelter, food and safety, they are corridors that contain history and story. They are not just edges, they are the centres of whole lives and worlds.

Walking here one May morning, I find myself wondering about the lines we draw – between land and lane, but also between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – and whether these lines too might be porous like the hedgerows, which have lived for so long not through independence but through care and relationship.

The hedges speak paradoxes that I am confronted with every time I go for a walk – of division and abundance, of separateness and connection, of containment and invitation. Lately, I am sitting with these and am coming to understand a threshold that the world offers me: between independence and interdependence. But the truth is I’m not very good at interdependence. I have so often retreated behind the wall of my self-sufficiency, but I am trying to pull that wall down and replace it with a porous and lifegiving hedgerow.

We draw lines – around ourselves, and between people, nations, beliefs, social classes, politics. Sometimes these lines are for safety, sometimes for exclusion. But the hedgerows tell me that it is possible to hold a line and also to let light and life flow through it and shape it. They tell me that these lines are not end points but invitations to communion.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin wrote:

“…I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry?”

Le Guin’s work of science fiction is about otherness and connectedness, with different species having to learn empathy in order to collaborate and communicate. The darker the events in the book, the brighter the hope and relationship. The book feels like it was written for now, for this world.

On my hedge-edged walks I am in the presence of lives so unlike mine – plants, creatures, the people who have tended and cared for these hedges through generations.

In a world whose people are persecuted, othered, tired, it is easy to believe that the way of things is division and separation. But hedgerows suggest another way to live: layered, porous, complex and interconnected, creating space not just for encounter but for new life through that encounter. This is how I picture the Kingdom that Jesus speaks about and so often found solace in: a world of intermingling and ever-growing aliveness. I think Jesus would have walked with the hedgerows had he lived in Devon. I think he would have used them to speak of boundary-crossing between heaven and Earth, clean and unclean, Jew and Gentile. I think he would have pointed to them and said, see the tangled beauty of these? They are what the Kingdom is like: held and open, living and lifegiving. This is what I want our future to be too.

As I walk these old lanes, I am deepening into my hedgerow apprenticeship. I am learning to sink my roots in, to tend boundaries with care, to make space for life. I am also finding that there is nothing in the hedgerows that speaks of self-sufficiency. These ancient, interwoven green features that have defined this landscape are here because of relationships between species. It is easy to talk about the interconnectedness of everything, it is another thing to try to live it – to live like gifts, reciprocity, community, are things that might take the weight of our time. These old hedgerows give me a foothold though – they enliven the overused but hard-to-live idea of interconnection, they show me what it looks like and that it is an approach to life that is patient, strong, sustaining, real.

When I reach out my hand I can usually find something edible or beautiful in the hedgerow depending on the time of year: blackberry, hazel, oxeye daisy, pennywort, primrose. Yesterday, it was the cow parsley that really caught my attention: its frothing, foaming flourishing. In a few weeks it will give way to what comes next, just as it has always done, just as this world will always do. On my hedge-edged walks I am in the presence of lives so unlike mine – plants, creatures, the people who have tended and cared for these hedges through generations. I am also in the presence of relationship, and of hope.

Now, with so many crises bearing down on the world, and with anxiety and despair blooming, it is the hedges that remind me of other, older, wiser ways to be. It is the hedges that show me how to root deep into solid ground, and how to reach out to others, and to light, which are so often the same thing.

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