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

Books

Culture

Education

Wisdom

15 April 2025

5 min read

We need libraries: they expose our limitations

These physical monuments to our own ignorance instil knowledge and humility.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Children sit in a library listening to a story

Spellow library children's talk.

Children’s Commissioner for England.

On 19 July 2024, my wife, toddler, cat, and I moved back to our hometown of Liverpool. Ten days later, three children were killed and ten more were seriously injured following a mass stabbing at a children’s dance workshop in nearby Southport.

In the aftermath, amid widespread misinformation about the killer’s background, riots erupted across the country. With unrest intensifying, on 3 August rioters set fire to Spellow Library, less than two miles away from our new home. The apparent reason for the fire? It contained Qur’ans. Imagine that: books in a library! (There’s an all-too-easy joke about far-right thugs not understanding what libraries are that I’ll try to resist making here.)

Nothing the country witnessed in those riots matches the unspeakable horror that occurred within that dance studio in Southport. And yet, I found the library fire deeply unsettling. I hadn’t worked out why, until recently.

I’m a theology lecturer and work from home a lot. I’m often listening to music while replying to emails, planning lectures, or marking essays. Recently, however, I’ve been in a musical rut. My usual stuff feels stale and nothing new catches my attention. I mostly use streaming services, and this week it hit me: the platform is the problem.

Streaming platforms operate through search engines: I search for an artist, song, or album, and start listening. In other words, I have to know what I want to listen to before listening to it. Platforms might suggest new music, but this is invariably based on what I already like. It very rarely exposes me to anything outside my comfort zone.

In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the mythical WMDs that served as the war’s McGuffin. His answer has gone down in political infamy:

“there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.”

When teaching students, I constantly stress the importance of ‘unknown unknowns’. Good education exposes us to things we don’t know that we don’t know. It gives us increasing awareness of our own ignorance. Streaming services greatly reduce the chances of finding music I don’t know that I don’t know. Instead, I listen to music I know I know, or music I know I don’t know.

I used to love trawling through music shops, pouring over the vast sea of artists I hasn’t even heard of, imagining my favourite album was buried amid the reams of CD cases. It saddens me that I can’t remember the last time I did that. Music shops are physical monuments to my own ignorance. When I see all the artists, all the albums – even the genres! – I haven’t even heard of, I’m unavoidably confronted with my own ignorance.

So, too, with libraries. How many times I’ve wandered the stacks of university libraries and thought “I didn’t even know there was a book about this topic!” when picking something off the shelves! And this is their value to students: they are physical monuments to their own ignorance. They instil a passion for knowledge, and a deeper sense of humility, as students are forced to grapple concretely with everything they don’t even know they don’t know.

(Incidentally, this is what I’ll tell my wife next time I buy another book I invariably won’t read. I can already imagine her response: “But my love, we have plenty of physical monuments to your ignorance at home already.”)

I found the destruction at Spellow Library so disquieting. It is a supremely, nihilistic act. It is to reject engaging with our ‘unknown unknowns.’

Like music streaming platforms, libraries are increasingly digital spaces. My primary experience of reading nowadays is to type something into a search bar. My reading – just like my music – is increasingly myopic; increasingly confined to the realm of ‘known unknowns’. But true humility is only fostered through engagement with the ‘unknown unknowns’ of our life. We need the physical monuments to our own ignorance. We ignore them – or, as the case may be, set fire to them – at our peril.

There is a significant spiritual element to this, and this is why I found the destruction at Spellow Library so disquieting. It is a supremely, nihilistic act. It is to reject engaging with our ‘unknown unknowns’; a fearful unwillingness to be confronted by our own ignorance.

In a famous graduation speech entitled “This is Water” writer David Foster Wallace encourages those present to think about the ‘water’ in which they swim. What is so ubiquitous in life that it goes unnoticed? We might call these ‘unknown knows’: things we simply take for granted. On a theological level, the physical nature of our existence is one such phenomena. That we exist somewhere and somewhen is not a given; both space and time are creatures, too.

And this ought to make us reflect: why are we made to be physical if we might not have been? The Bible is clear that this physicality is a gift. So much so that God Himself chooses to dwell amongst us in physical form. The Christian story is that, in Jesus Christ, God becomes human. The Christian Gospels go to great pains to stress his physicality. He eats, He sleeps, He cries, He bleeds. He reads from physical scrolls when in the synagogue.

That God-given physicality means I can surround myself with the depth and breadth of my own creaturely ignorance; with my ‘unknown unknowns’. To my shame, I don’t do this often enough, and my increasingly digital life makes this harder. I have become physically detached from my ‘unknown unknowns’.

And so, now Spellow Library is reopen, I am going to make a concerted effort to visit and support society’s physical monuments to my creaturely ignorance. They may make me uncomfortable as I am overwhelmed by the extent of my limitations, but they may also just make me humbler. And that is the real gift of our God-given physicality.

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