I’ve just had a really interesting 24 hours
at a Seedbed conference up in Leicester. Entitled ‘Roots and Routes’ it focused
around the roots that we each put down to secure us as we journey forth, and
also the routes that we are on, or would like to be on. There was time and
space for reflections, conversations, workshops, learning from others, and
dreaming – opportunities not always available in the maelstrom of everyday
life.
One of the speakers I heard was Andrew
Grinnell, a guy from Leeds who works for the Salvation Army, and with his
family relocated to one of the poorest estates in the city, to live and work in
and amongst that community. He was sharing about his reflections on the reality
of living in a very impoverished community, and about coming alongside those in
need in a way that provides opportunity for positive support without running
the risk of being patronizing, over-bearing, top-down, or agenda-setting.
Andrew spoke about the different levels of
coming alongside people, and I found it a very insightful thought process and
one that could also be applied to a number of other settings, including between
CRED and its overseas partners. Here follows a summary of it, and mention must
be made of Sam Wells, one of the church leaders at St Martin-in-the-field, who
first came up with it, and who Andrew ‘borrowed’ it from.
There are 4 levels of coming alongside a
person in need to help them:
1.
‘working for’ the person ie
getting involved in the issues that are relevant to them eg homelessness,
poverty etc, and campaigning, writing letters, drawing attention to those
issues, but staying relatively detached from the person themselves
2.
‘being for’ the person ie
continuing to do the campaigning etc, but this time through giving a name to
the person, telling their story, personalizing the issue. To do this you have
to get a bit more involved with the person, but still very much on a
need-to-know basis
3.
‘working with’ the person -
this involves actually interacting with the person, coming up with plans on how
to help them and trying to implement those plans. So you would be spending time
with the person, but its your agenda, and you come up with the ideas on what
they need
4.
‘being with’ the person – this
is the closest level of interaction, and involves just being with the person;
no agenda, no ground rule, no expectations; just being with them (so long as
that is what they want), giving them space to talk as they wish, accepting them
for who they are and not trying to change them.
It was a very challenging talk, and I found
myself wondering how much of what we do falls into each category firstly with
regard to CRED and its overseas partners, but also on a personal basis as I try
to live out my Christian faith.
To ‘be with’ someone in need has its risks
that we have to be willing to take:
- run the risk of staying alongside them even if they have some unsavoury habit
- the risk of people judging us based on who we are keeping company with
- run the risk of stepping well outside our comfort zones and putting names to statistics and getting a feel for the reality of abstract concept
- run the risk of opening up questions about our own lives and questioning the integrity of our words and our faith, and possibly having to face up to charges of hypocrisy
Ouch! This was definitely no easy talk, and
is one that I will be reflecting on for some time to come I think. Living in a
comfy, mainly white, middle-class market town means that it can be very easy to
avoid some of these tough inequality issues, but the fact that we now have a
Foodbank that is being increasingly used shows that the need isn’t just in the
cities, or overseas. Deprivation is spreading, and there are more people than
ever who need someone to ‘be with’ them,
not just ‘working for’ them.
Who am I being called to ‘be with’? Who are
you being called to ‘be with’?
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