Not only does it up attendances, but it reminds us all what churches are for. In The Guardian, Rev. Chris Chivers writes about the act of distributing seasonally themed literature for his congregation, John Keble Church in Mill Hill, London.
The Christmas leaflet dropping season is upon us. It’s the time of year for suburban vicars like me to join congregants trudging the streets. We’re competing with junk mail from pizza and curry houses in the hope of upping the Christmas attendances. Statistics show it works.
“I see you’re marketing your church like a nightclub,” a colleague caustically remarks. “Well, it is late night activity we’re advertising,” I reply, with a seasonal riposte whose reference to midnight Mass seems lost on my listener.
Our leaflet is unashamedly unchurchy in design. Of course it does list service times and a children’s activity slot after Christmas for parents desperate to escape broken gifts and cabin fever. But the message on the leaflet’s reverse side seeks to speak a prophetic word into a world where human worth is too often given a purely cash value. Such a denial of the uniqueness recognised in each person through God becoming human inevitably means that an increasing number are made to feel worthless.
In jargonese, the message is “resonating” with residents of all faiths and world views. It’s also opening up some helpful conversations about what a church is for.
Seventy-five years ago the Guardian for 18 December 1936 reported our birth somewhat blandly: John Keble church consecrated in Mill Hill.
The writer acknowledged our origins in a hut built on Deans Lane in 1932, lined then with elms, and “now covered with shops and dwellings, though here and there is a patch of land with straggling and untidy vegetation marking what was untouched country a decade ago”.
London had reached rural Mill Hill and Edgware, transforming them into suburbs. Net curtains and privet hedges had arrived.
But so too had the church. The story of how in four years a hut became a hall and then a house of prayer for the whole suburb – with a building Pevsner regarded as one of the best inter-war designs – is an amazing one.
A home for uniformed organisations, study and play groups, amateur dramatics, community and voluntary organisations, now for Gamblers Anonymous, dance classes and a nursery, it was the “big society” before the prime minister sought to hijack the value of localism as a mask for his cuts.
The context has changed a good deal. At Deansbrook school across the road 46 first languages are spoken. But we remain a focus of hope and aspiration in difficult times. We’re treasured by the community not least, it seems, for speaking out this Christmas on rampant executive pay at a time of lower living standards for most and increased deprivation for the poorest. But, to be honest, we’re largely forgotten by the church.
“He came to his own and his own knew him not,” writes the author of the fourth gospel. The Church of England has produced headline reports called Faith in the City and Faith in the Countryside, but never one entitled Faith in Suburbia.
Like others in society perhaps it sees “suburban” as a sneeringly dismissive term for too narrow a mindset. Yet this manifestation of church is part of the backbone of Britain. It offers embedded community stories and values as well as the possibility for a conversational meeting point that’s safe and transforming. In an age when the adoption of ever more entrenched views is how many destructively respond to massive social change, suburban churches allow the fears of indigenous citizens to rub up against the reality of different ethnicities and cultures in a way that’s dynamic and reconciling. The understanding and friendship it brings makes the leaflet dropping well worth the effort.