Invisible Divides Excerpt #1
Next month marks the release of our fourth Jubilee+ book, 'Invisible Divides: Class, Culture and Barriers to Belonging'.
Bringing together two authors familiar with some of the challenges that come when church and class collide, this incisive and helpful collaboration sees Paul Brown and Natalie Williams drawing on their own experiences, combining theory with practical and spiritual application, and identifying some of the stumbling blocks we unwittingly set out for new converts.
Over the coming weeks we will share some short excerpts from the book, which is available to pre-order now!
In today's excerpt Natalie traces a familiar story in many of our churches:
Since the global financial crash of 2008, many of our churches have really stepped up in terms of social action projects that reach out to people facing poverty or injustice. In some churches, we have seen some of the people who come to our projects also come to faith in Jesus. But often we then struggle to help them find true belongingand community in the church. Specific people come to mind who have encountered Jesus, started to read the Bible excitedly and got baptised with joy, but soon found that their ways of thinking don’t
quite fit with those around them, and the gap between them and their new friends is just too large – not spiritually, but in every other
way. It can feel so overwhelming that it seems insurmountable, so they often leave, feeling that Christianity isn’t for them, when in
reality it might have simply been that middle-class church wasn’t a good fit. It is common to see people from poorer backgrounds –
people like me – saved and baptized, but not ‘added’ (see Acts 2.47).
When it comes to the working class, we are mostly absent from churches: Evangelical Alliance research found that 81 per cent of people in British evangelical churches have a university degree, compared with 27 per cent of the population as a whole*.
Churches are not reaching huge sections of our communities. And they are starting to notice.
Churches of all denominations, all across the country, have started to ask the national Christian charity Jubilee+ that I work for: how do we help people from working-class backgrounds (including those who are also trapped in poverty) to find family, community and belonging in our churches so that they stick with us and with their new-found faith?
I ‘stuck’ because of the grace of God, obviously, but I wonder if it was also because I was able to adjust and imitate the behaviour around me. Looking back, I now see that I spent the first 20 years of my Christian life learning how to become middle class because I thought that’s what a Christian looks like. Now I am having to disentangle class from the gospel and unlearn some of what I imitated, because though there are many great things about being middle class, there are also some things I never should have picked up.
Over recent years, my heavenly Father has frequently reminded me that the Christian life is about conforming to the image of his Son, Jesus Christ, not conforming to fit in with those around me. In fact, the church is supposed to be a gloriously diverse mix of people from all backgrounds, worshipping side by side with such depth of community that the world around us is astonished by it and drawn
to God.
Natalie Williams & Paul Brown, Invisible Divides: Class, Culture & Barriers to Belonging, (SPCK, 2022), p. 8
If this short extract has whet your appetite for more, please don't hesitate to pre-order your copy, and benefit from some of the multi-buy deals made available here.
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* Barna Group, ‘Perceptions of Jesus, Christians & Evangelism in England’, Talking Jesus, 2015, <talkingjesus.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/04/Perceptions-of-Jesus-Christians-and-Evangelism-Executive-Summary.pdf>, referenced in MartinCharlesworth and Natalie Williams, A Church for the Poor: Transforming the Church to Reach the Poor in Britain Today (Eastbourne: David C Cook, 2017), p. 69.
