My recent trip to Manchester involved four nights in an expensive hotel and one night in a cheap Airbnb.  I had no complaints about the actual Airbnb accommodation, but the journey to reach it involved walking thorough parts of Manchester that I would not normally have chosen to visit.  The negative side of things was street rubbish and a variety of cars that were unlikely to have passed their MOTs.  On the positive side was a vibrant immigrant community who had settled in the area and to all appearances seemed settled and secure.  The predominant group that lived around the area appeared to come from the Horn of Africa; Somalis and Ethiopians.   I sat in a slightly down at heel Ethiopian restaurant which had no other customers except one man who was on the phone for fifteen minutes speaking loudly in a fascinatingly exotic language.  The sheer volume of his voice meant that he appeared totally at home in the restaurant and in the area generally. 

Having come home and reflected on this brief cultural experience, certain thoughts have struck me.  In the first place, immigrants from troubled areas of the globe have come to Britain.  They have created enclaves where they feel safe and are able to continue their cultural identity through their language and other institutions.  Britain is a country that allows them to do this and we can be proud that we live in a tolerant society.  But there is another side to this creation of enclaves in our big cities.  The greater the security that immigrants find in living in these areas, the greater the risk that enclaves become ghettos.

The word ghetto has a negative connotation.  It is partly because governments in the past have forced identifiable groups to live in particular areas or ghettos as a tool of control over them.  There is no suggestion that our government has ever thought in this way about immigrant communities but clearly there are problems for society if concentrations of particular ethnic backgrounds are always confined to certain areas.  The very freedom to celebrate their past culture becomes a kind of bondage to their heritage.  Strong adherence to tradition lessens the chance that many of these immigrants will ever move on to become part of a wider society.  The enclave has become a ghetto and this in turn has become a sort of prison.  My fellow customer in the restaurant would never have found it easy in another establishment to use his phone in the way he was doing.  Strongly rooted to his language and culture, he was likely always to want to remain in the locality and not face the wider world.

As I was reflecting on my experiences in Manchester it occurred to me that the Church has a parallel problem.  We create enclaves for people to feel comfortable with particular expressions of God-talk.  They belong in that enclave and, as long as they remain there, they feel safe.  The question for the Church is whether the belonging/sharing/community has created something resembling a ghetto.   Are we so wrapped up in our versions of truth and reality that we find it difficult to move to engage with what other people, indeed other Christians, are saying?  The answer to this question has to be yes.  So much of the language we use in Church situations is totally incomprehensible to other people.  Many churches are founded on the teaching of a particular preacher and the congregation are in a state of thrall to his personality.  The greater the attraction to what Pastor So and So or Father X is saying, the more disconnected these Christians are becoming, not only with the rest of society, but also with other Christians.

The key word in this discussion about enclaves and ghettos. is the word safety.  People want desperately to feel safe.  The problem is that the desire for safety overrides other more important values that Christianity is presenting to us.  Our desire for safety, which is another word for salvation, has to be balanced with the sayings of Jesus about losing life in order to find it.  In short Jesus does not want us to spend our whole lives chasing the parts of belief that enable us to feel comfortable and safe.  He would rather we left this desire to feel safe behind and begin to explore newness.  Newness will always involve some discomfort whether in terms of mental challenge or meeting the demands of the future.  Such exploration will prefer the path of leaving Ur of the Chaldees and travelling to an unknown country that God will show us.

In the last blog post, I asked the question ‘Is your church safe?’  The question I ask today is whether your church is a ghetto.  We have by implication spelt out the ways that some churches might be restrictive and even creating bondage.  They are the ones that deal in certainties.  But the certainties are handed out sometimes in the context of a quite sinister level of human control.  Powerful preachers persuade their congregations that if they remain loyal to the message (the preacher’s message), they are assured of salvation/safety in this life and in the next.  When we analyse the power dynamics of some of these churches, we find coercive/controlling techniques that UK law has identified as happening in abusive domestic relationships.  Such relationships, ones that use fear tactics and mental manipulation, are now against the law.  Are we wrong to suppose that similar techniques are any the less ethical when used in a church context?    Church leaders who promise to their flock safety in return for following the narrow doctrinal line taught by their group, do the congregation a massive disfavour.  They trap them for ever in a ghetto.  That ghetto is one of limited understanding of the breadth of the Christian faith. It also makes it impossible to make the short journey out of the enclave to see a broader, wider and deeper world outside.

Having seen an immigrant enclave in Manchester over the week-end, I have also glimpsed this other ghetto which exists in parts of the Christian church.  Christian leaders, (I take as an example Jonathan Fletcher) attract to themselves enormous personal followings through powerful preaching backed up by a variety of personal gifts of persuasion.  As you can tell, I am enormously suspicious of internationally famous ministries of this kind.  When the power and influence of any Christian leader goes beyond a certain point, it needs to be subject to strong external scrutiny and oversight.  The one who has many followers to mentor needs to be mentored by and answerable to others.  Unsupervised leaders are a danger to themselves and those who follow them.  These are the ministries that can lead followers into the place of bondage, dependence and control.  Just as it is the situation of many immigrants that many remain effectively imprisoned in their ethnic areas, so it is the fate of many Christians that they remain restricted in understanding by ghetto-type models of Christian ministry.  They can never travel beyond the boundaries set by the message of their favoured teacher.  Speaking generally, it is a sorry place ever to believe that any single Christian teacher has the entire richness of the Christian tradition to convey to others.  To pretend that this is in fact the case is also a kind of blasphemy.  The fullness of Christ is always bigger than any of us can grasp or understand.  To return to the words of Jesus, ‘Behold I make all things new’.   Newness will always imply that there is something fresh to be revealed.  The most inspired or gifted preacher, like the rest of us, must be alert and humbly to wait on what God still has to teach us.