This talk by Jenny Sinclair was the final keynote speech at the Salvation Army’s inaugural “Mission in the Margins Conference”. Held in Blackpool on 16 October 2024, this was an invitation to Salvation Army leaders from across the UK to explore the distinctive contribution they can make in the forgotten places, and to reflect on questions of poverty, justice and community.

Read on below or DOWNLOAD Jenny’s text HERE > > LISTEN HERE > > WATCH on YouTube here

To watch the whole session on Facebook, click HERE This includes the Q & A and subsequent panel discussion. Timings are as follows: Jenny’s keynote 00.00 – 42.30; Q & A 44.18 – 58.40; Panel discussion featuring Jenny along with Salvation Army leaders Major Nick Coke, Colonel Wendy Swan, Dr John Clifton, chaired by Captain Sam Tomlin, 1.02.48 – 1.59.00 .

Justice and Reconciliation in the Margins

It is an honour to be here with you in Blackpool. I hope that what I will say will help you as you reflect on who you are and what you do. In this time together, we’ll be reading the signs of the times, looking at the underlying causes of what’s going on, and exploring how God is calling us to respond. I’ll ask some challenging questions about justice and around the dynamics between the church and the margins. We’ll explore what reconciliation could mean in practical terms, and how we’re called to spiritual and civic renewal. My hope is to prompt you to think differently, to sense what God might be saying about a Christian imagination for this time.

Signs of the times

We’re going to start by reading the signs of the times.

Now remember there is no such thing as a neutral worldview. So let me tell you the theological position I am taking. I listen and learn across the Christian traditions, in particular from Catholic Social Teaching. A school of thought rooted in the gospel and intended as a gift for all people of goodwill, a deep theological tradition that draws our attention to God’s worldview.

Sometimes referred to as “the theology of the Holy Spirit in practice”, it began as a response to the Industrial Revolution, it seeks to uphold the integrity of human beings and creation, and to interrogate structures of power.

This tradition has even-handedly condemned all systems that dehumanise: communist, socialist and liberal as much as capitalist. This is because all are based on the materialist, spiritually empty premises established by the narrow rationalism of the atheistic Enlightenment.

When we read the signs of the times, first we say what we see.

We see that young people can’t afford a home, that social trust is breaking down. We see the symptoms of what Pope Francis calls a “malign”[i] culture – extreme inequality, the collapse of trust in institutions, subordination of the local by the digital, we see sclerotic health systems, the atrophy of local forms of human association, the disconnect between the managerial class and the population, the weakening of democracy, low productivity, massive public and private debt.

We see it in climate warming and the tragedy of displaced people, in the catastrophic damage done to the natural world, we see it in the liberalising of abortion and assisted dying, in the industrialisation of human exploitation – the commercialisation of surrogacy, the normalising of cosmetic surgery, organ harvesting, sexual exploitation, human trafficking.

And not least, we see symptoms of human distress – rises in loneliness (higher among the young than the old), rises in addiction, self-harm, depression, nihilism, indifference, lack of meaning, we see the tyranny of a social media culture incentivising a false idea of freedom.

We see governments of all parties over the last forty years enabling a system undermining the dignity of work. A system requiring units of labour to be cheap and mobile, requiring the importing of low paid workers away from their own families to prop up western economies – a system described as “frictionless” by investors is in human terms a recipe for social unrest.

Four decades ago, the idea of moving to find work was regarded as right wing – but now it is rebranded as freedom! This transactional “freedom” broke parts of our country. As jobs moved overseas to low wage economies, whole sections of our societies were discarded.

We have civic degradation on a vast scale. We see it across our post-industrial heartlands and coastal towns, not least here in Blackpool. Not only in this country but across the West. This withdrawal of jobs and investment with no meaningful replacement is effectively a politics of abandonment. In human terms its impact has been catastrophic. It was a betrayal of the working class, a breach of the common good.

We are seeing multiple forms of brokenness. Why is everything unravelling? What connects all these symptoms? Just over 8 years ago, Pope Francis said we are not entering an era of change but a change of era.[ii] The old era is breaking down and the new is yet to be born. We’re living in an interregnum. We need to understand what’s going on.

What’s going on?

Every era is shaped by a particular philosophy. The animating idea of the current era that’s breaking down, comes from the philosophy of liberalism.[iii] This manifests in various forms – much of which are positive – but it morphed, into an ideology which we know as neoliberalism. Its roots are in the Enlightenment, but it manifested 45 years ago in the form of neoclassical economics which follows a narrow economic logic: the pursuit of profit maximisation over everything else.

This involved the removal of constraint from finance capital which ushered in the phenomenon of transactional individualism. From this philosophy we get a particular form of financial system and from this, globalisation – geopolitical economic processes that serve the interests of supranational corporations. This generates low wage, high welfare economies, where increasingly precarious and meaningless jobs are rewarded with wages too low to live on.

But the impacts of this system are not just economic. The philosophy underpinning the neoliberal model has led to profound social and moral consequences too. Precarity of employment on top of an inflated property market has undermined family formation and weakened the confidence of the young in adulthood.

Its amoral incentives to fragmentation eat away at shared values and erode our sense of citizenship; it dissolves the particularity of place; its commodification is undoing what it means to be human; its individualism ferments multiple pathologies – relationship breakdown, loneliness, mental health disorders, crime, the breakdown of social trust, spiritual, cultural and moral confusion.

This is why we see the emergence, on both the extreme left and the extreme right, of identitarian politics, distorted forms of victimhood, authoritarian tendencies, the battle of rights and the culture wars.

There is a denial of the transcendent and an assertion of the material. This denial subverts natural law and generates an anti-human system that some call “the machine”[iv]. It generates a de-moralisation – and poverty in all its forms: economic, relational and spiritual. We see the so-called “cost of living crisis” but this is just the latest in a wider crisis unfolding across the West.

We can describe this as the era of contract. The type of operating system that this philosophy generates is inherently unstable because it is founded upon a false anthropology – a desiccated, soulless conception of the human being which generates a false idea of freedom. At the core of this is freedom from constraint – from country, from history, from religion, from God, and now, even from human nature itself.

In its extreme form, it sees family as a constraint, and tradition and accountability are seen as obstacles to “progress”, even relationship to place is reframed as old fashioned. Ultimately, it “liberates” society from truth and from mutual responsibility.⁹

Its view of the human being incorporates the idea of “the unencumbered self”, emphasising rights over responsibilities and corroding our sense of mutual obligation. It is effectively an assault on relationship.

This philosophy denies the primacy of God and creates a cult of self – individualism. How different is this from a Christian anthropology where human beings are transcendent, relational beings, made in the image of God.

This individualism drives a political economy where we outsource more and more of the things we used to do as communities – childcare, care for our civic environment, entertainment, care of the elderly. What follows is family breakdown, isolation, the fragmentation of communities, spiritual confusion. Just consider the loss.

With a relativistic and materialist logic – no truth and no beauty – its worldview ultimately brings about its own destruction and, in the meantime, generates all sorts of instability.⁷ As an old era dies, “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” [v]

Every country that follows this system is seeing the same effects. Beneath its shiny veneer, we are faced with a disintegration. The motivation of this spirit is anti-human which is why the system is now unravelling.

We can think of this as a power grab. It is important to understand the principalities and powers of our time, what we might call our modern pharaohs.

Catholic social thought helps us to see that whenever finance capital dominates it has the tendency to dehumanise and exploit. Its business is the commodification of creation and the “financialisation” of everything. Land, water, homes, human beings.

But equally, when power is overcentralised in the state, it too tends to be dehumanising. We can see this post-Covid as governments are becoming increasingly authoritarian, with more and more decisions taken outside the democratic process. Catholic social thought warns about the rise of “the technocratic paradigm.”[vi]

Why does this matter? Because this overcentralising of power erodes civil society, the human space.

And now – we see a collusion between both powers – the modern pharaohs of capital and state – where governments act in the interests of big corporations, insulating them from democratic accountability.

What some describe as “the machine”[vii], might be regarded in biblical terms as a modern Egypt. This malign spirit operates a different kind of slavery – a list of pseudo-freedoms. It says, “you can have mobility, consumer choice, rights and self-determination!” These false freedoms serve the economic interests of a few, but for everyone else, as they become captured, people trust each other less and less and are more easily manipulated.

This system has been foolishly perpetuated by all political parties over a forty-year period. Such gross mismanagement is provoking discontent. After four decades of no correction to the devastation, the so-called “left behind” had enough of this domination and mismanagement. They literally had nothing left to lose. In previous eras their actions might have been understood as a peasants’ revolt.[viii]

But now, such reactions are framed by corporate interests as “populist”, held in contempt by an elite class which cannot accept that this is political blowback their own policies have produced.

This lack of recognition explains the disconnect – why so many people are angry and alienated. People are sick of being ignored and object to decisions being taken outside of democratic processes.

There is increasing resistance internationally to this corrupt merger of corporate and state power. More and more ordinary people feel disempowered, humiliated, their views held in contempt. This has been building for years now. Legitimate questions get framed as extremist, by a dominant cultural narrative bent on constraining the range of acceptable opinion. This is a recipe for resentment and extremism, on both the right and on the left.

So how should we respond? Yes, it is overwhelming. We are in a place we’ve never been before.[ix] Is there any chance of renewal? How can the church foster positive change in this context? How can we collaborate with our communities to address this overwhelming challenge?

What does it mean to be God’s people in an age of unravelling? Let me suggest to you an ancient concept as a way forward. It’s not dramatic, it’s not a campaign. We don’t deal in false hope. It’s deeply rooted in our Christian tradition and also resonates with other traditions in particular the Hebrew Bible, Aristotle and Ubuntu. I would invite you to consider the common good as an antidote to this malign culture.

The antidote

But what is the common good? Let’s have a look at what it means. First off, it’s not “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” That’s a utilitarian proposition – a model of justice that is not Christian.

Anchored firmly in the Gospel, the common good starts with what it means to be human—our identity in Christ – where every person is of equal value under God – everyone is worthy of love and affection. Yet we are not meant to be the same – our Christian anthropology tells us that we are relational beings designed to complement one another – God intentionally made us to need each other.[x]

This is why we say we need to build a common good between us. A taste of the kingdom. As in first Corinthians[xi], the common good conceptualises the human family as one body, in which poor people are given the most honour. The common good requires a shared life with poor communities – because this is how God sees.

The common good is not woolly: not a vague idea where all values are equal, not a “you do you, and I’ll do me” kind of liberalism, which as we’ve seen leads to a battle of rights. The common good emphasises a balance between rights and responsibilities. It is place-based and embodied, not abstract. It is non-partisan, non-tribal, non-party political.

The common good tradition places trust in ordinary people and rests on the principle of Solidarity: the common good is strengthened when we join together across our differences. It is undermined when we’re isolated, separated, or divided by identity categories. It is incompatible with identity politics ideology – the common good can’t be built in a “safe space” insulated from dissent. It requires deliberation, negotiation, diversity of opinion, listening, mutual respect, forbearance, forgiveness, and the possibility of redemption.

It is based on the recognition of natural law, acknowledging people’s realities and calls us to work together across our different interests – whether of class, socio-economic background, ethnicity, sex, age, ability, experience, and education. It’s realistic about human fallibility yet encourages virtue.

The common good is not utopian: it is not a medicine that’s good for you that justifies a top-down imposition. It cannot be imposed or delivered. It arises from people’s free participation. It insists on the human agency that comes from true freedom in God, not the false freedoms of “choice” promised by consumerism, nor the totalitarian utopias of collectivist ideologies.

At Together for the Common Good, we define it like this

the common good is the shared life of a society in which everyone can flourish as we act together in different ways that all contribute towards that goal, enabled by social conditions that mean every single person can participate.

We create these conditions and pursue that goal by working together across our differences, each of us taking responsibility according to our calling and ability.

This is for everyone. But as the People of God, we are called to a special role, a kind of reweaving in the local – to a building of civic relationships that is covenantal not contractual. We could describe this as becoming a relational church. Like a stick of rock, we must be relational all the way down.

This calling to build common good belongs within an integrated evangelisation in its holistic sense – it is about both our relational identity in God and about how we live. This speaks to our civic relationships – and how well we know our neighbours – particularly people trapped in poverty.

And yes, community organising in its authentic form can be part of this – but I believe there is a prior step – the character of the church itself. There are still so many churches – possibly even a majority – who, having fallen out of relationship with poor communities they want to help, are “helping” in ways that are – let’s be frank – sometimes counterproductive. This dynamic between churches and poor communities needs some attention. We need to ask “whose side is the church on?”

Whose side is the church on?

Discerning our charism in this age of moral, cultural and political confusion does require hard questions. First, what do we mean by justice? To begin to think about which model of justice we’re following, let’s recall the passage from Deuteronomy, “If there is among you anyone in need…you should open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need….’[xii]

What do you notice? Down the centuries, we can lose touch with the original meaning of ancient words. You might have noticed the word lending. Some scholars believe that the ancient meaning of lending money in the original Hebrew meant something closer to our understanding of accompaniment. Lending as accompaniment! How different is that from the way we address money, poverty and debt today, where “help” looks like a bank transfer.

This prompts us to think about the differences between models of justice. The contemporary welfarist and utilitarian approaches to justice – like the way the British welfare state currently operates – are materialist and prioritise efficiency.

By contrast, the Christian model of justice is rooted in the ancient rabbinical, biblical justice tradition of right relationship – relationship with God and with each other. In God’s economy, if I’m having a hard time, you’re to walk in relationship with me – accompany me until I get back on my feet. It may involve lending money, or it may mean you help me get a job, or just keep me company.

Not just a cash transfer. Not a system that rationalises out opportunities for human connection. Not to abandon our neighbour in their flat surrounded by unpaid bills. Our primary relationships should be with each other not with the bureaucratic state.

This is not to say the welfare state shouldn’t exist, of course not. What this perspective does, is point to how it should be reformed – and how the church should respond. Many churches have got stuck on “welfarism” as their default justice tradition, losing touch with their relational calling. Others have fallen in with the dominant culture – the progressivist identitarian version of justice rooted in postmodernism. There is huge mission drift.

These materialist models – the identitarian, utilitarian and welfarist ideologies – often displace the economic justice aspect of the Christian relational tradition, undermining working-class solidarity.

Every year Pope Francis publishes a letter for the World Day of the Poor. He’s been saying we should stop outsourcing, whether to the state or to charities. He says it’s personal. Solutions are not to be found in activism or welfarism.[xiii] We are not to use the welfare system or charitable agencies as a way of keeping poor people at arm’s length.

This is challenging for those engaged with the social action service provider posture. Catholic social thought highlights the divisive benefactor-recipient dynamic for several reasons. Not least because it alienates the very people the church wishes to help – it creates a tension of “us” and “them”.

Campaigning for benefits cannot end poverty. By itself this does nothing to resist an economic system geared to the interests of capital, in fact it feeds a defeatist politics of low expectations.

Foodbanks and other forms of social action are often sources of pride in churches wanting to serve the community, justifying their usefulness. But the Church has a sacred vocation to be transformational, not to be useful.

The truth is foodbanks only mitigate injustice. This is the well-known foodbank paradox.[xiv] They meet increasing need but mask the prophetic: they’ve become a fixture of a toxic low wage economy propping up big corporations. They’re in a trap: the more efficient emergency food aid becomes, the less urgent economic reform appears.

More than distribution points, at the very least, church foodbanks should be places of welcome and conviviality, places with the opportunity to talk and to pray and be prayed for: places of communion.

But more than this, from a Catholic social teaching perspective, any activity around food poverty has got to be situated within a confident demand for economic reform,[xv] for decent jobs, retraining, place-based investment – “to restore the places long devastated” as we read in Isaiah 61. The dignity of work is central to a politics of the common good. We must not capitulate to a workless future on welfare.

Alongside these questions of justice, we need to examine the power dynamics in our charitable activity. Are we acting in solidarity or encouraging dependency? Are we taking a lead from people in poverty and supporting their initiative, or are we setting the agenda?

Too many churches, Christian charities and volunteering models, like mainstream society, have been influenced by our marketised society, falling into a transactional exchange as deliverer or rescuer – where “the poor person” is the recipient, and nothing is asked of them.

The language used in social action circles gives a clue. Terms like “outreach” and “service delivery” do not reflect a language of friendship and mutual respect. Likewise professional class terminology like “community development”, “projects” and “facilitators” betrays a managerial mindset – well-intentioned but unintentionally alienating the people it aims to help. Despite using the language of “empowerment” these interventions often leave poor communities disempowered because what is really needed is the dignity of work.

The language of “marginalised” may sound appropriate from a church activist position, but it depends where you stand. From God’s worldview, poor people are not marginal. The number of people classified as poor in the UK alone is currently around 14 million.[xvi] That’s a lot of people. It includes a broad range, from the destitute to what we might broadly term the working-class. This doesn’t feel “marginal” to me. In fact, post-Christendom, the dynamics have changed. It’s actually the church that’s marginalised.

Inadvertently this service-client dynamic can rob a person of their agency, over time it can de-skill and entrench dependency and entitlement. In a recent lecture [xvii] for Together for the Common Good, Jon Kuhrt speaks about the balance between grace and truth. He quoted a formerly homeless woman who said: “People can’t be hand-fed, they have to help themselves. It’s alright all these agencies giving people things all the time, but you have to want to help yourself… You can throw everything at them but it’s not going to work.”

This reflects the tension in Catholic social thought between the principles of solidarity – standing alongside those affected by poverty – and subsidiarity, which encourages responsibility to be taken at the appropriate level, empowering people to help themselves.

As Pope Benedict said: “Subsidiarity is first and foremost a form of assistance to the human person [which] respects personal dignity by recognising in the person a subject who is always capable of giving something to others.”[xviii]

There is a good reason for giving a hand up and not a hand-out. A working-class friend of mine says: “The church has become a woke foodbank. Handouts are soul destroying. People need dignified work so they can maintain some self-respect.”

When the church calls for more benefits, or campaigns to end poverty, and omits the call for economic reform, jobs and investment, it inadvertently fails to stand in solidarity with working-class people, whose desire to support their families is at the very heart of their moral code. This has massively alienated people from the church.

There was a time when many churches, not least the Catholic Church and the Salvation Army – and the 1889 dock strike[xix] comes to mind – had a covenantal relationship with poor families. William Booth and Cardinal Manning knew their people and understood the impact of capital and recognised it had to be constrained. They knew what solidarity looked like.

But many Christians are often more comfortable – and many have told me privately – fundraising for charity at arm’s length than they are in getting to know their next-door neighbours. Often there’s fear. There are issues of confidence. There are issues of class. Many churches have become captured by a middle-class culture and lost connection with poor communities – and don’t know what solidarity looks like.

A model of justice based on Christian anthropology does not pit working-class people against each other according to identity. No, it starts with listening to the concerns of workers and in solidarity builds an alliance that can mount a resistance to the powers. The church can help to build such an alliance. We might fail, but we will fail together.

The coming months and years are likely to be hard. We’ll need to build a greater mutual dependence at local level. But this could be an inflection point for those churches willing to join with people in the margins. Some already do this very well[xx] but too many are still unable to make this change. What we need is a new confidence – a renewed Christian imagination for our time.

A Christian imagination for our time

There is a deeper reason why Christians are called to live in solidarity with people trapped in poverty. It’s about reconciliation. Pope Francis says the Church needs to be evangelised by the poor[xxi] because someone who is poor has retained a sense of their need for others and for God that the affluent and the busy so easily lose. He is saying that in this sea of liberalism, the Church itself has become estranged from God. Reconciliation is needed and that will come through a relationship with poor communities.

In Matthew 25, Jesus invites us to live out this reciprocity. Connecting with someone in need opens us up to a closer connection with God. This is the great mystery at the heart of God’s special love for people who are poor. We need to be a church that can learn to receive as well as give.

Because we’re all a little bit broken. We connect with each other through our woundedness.[xxii] It is what makes us human. We are not like the machine. The church is not meant to be an efficient delivery system.

So how do we “do” reconciliation? It begins with humility and an intentional posture of listening – to God and to our neighbours. We need a culture of one-to-one conversations[xxiii] – as a practice within our congregations. A practice of listening – just for the honour of hearing someone’s story. Imagine if everyone in your congregation was able to do this and have one-to-one conversations in the neighbourhood every week?

It’s about bridging gaps where there’s estrangement, standing in the breach, feeling the pain where there is tension, putting relationships first, building trust, refusing to be tribal. Recognising that people have different concerns and may not like each other. We need to be unafraid of disagreement but determined to find areas of shared interest.

A politics of reconciliation requires truth telling, a willingness to stay in the room, to listen, to negotiate, to broker shared interests. It requires humility, saying sorry, forgiveness, redemption. It requires genuine respect for diversity of opinion, not covert intentions to re-educate.

In this dark time, people are yearning for meaning. But we won’t get much help from our culture and its leaders. The very people who should have a vision are lost in perpetuating a dysfunctional system. The unravelling is real and will get worse.

But we have a story to tell. A story of spiritual and civic renewal, of truth, beauty and goodness. Of what it means to be human, to love, to trust, what friendship means, what it means to be a good neighbour. It is important to name these things that are fast being forgotten. A story that not only calls out structures of sin, but which also builds a common good that can offer resistance to the powers that atomise and separate.

A story that requires responsibility to be taken at all levels: international, national, regional, local, personal – in line with the principle of Subsidiarity, everyone has a part to play. Let’s briefly name what this common good vision of renewal could look like:

At national level it would involve governments enabling conditions that prioritise families and communities. It would balance different interests say, between business and unions, between young and old, between urban and rural, between migrants and host communities, between the interests of capital and labour.

It would deconcentrate capital by enabling regional banks and energy providers and by shortening food supply chains. It would constrain the excesses of capital through a national industrial strategy incentivising place-based investment, job creation and retraining – balancing environmental measures with the dignity of work – to correct the abandonment of the forgotten places.

At regional level, we would see institutional collaboration between educational bodies, employers, investors, communities, religious and other regional networks all working together for the renewal of their region.

At local level, local government would create conditions that enable people to run their own local organizations – to build back that lost agency – to foster a diverse layer of local associations – clubs, businesses, schools, charities, and religious bodies – each living out their own vocational responsibility, each enabling local people to find fulfilment, each meeting local needs, and working together for the good of the community.

This local ecosystem would, at community level, cultivate family life – in all its variety – helping families help each other and their neighbours, teaching young people local civic responsibility and the importance of good relationships.[xxiv]

At the personal level each of us would buildlocal relationships, borrowing and lending, creating a reciprocal gift economy rather than weakening ourselves by outsourcing everything to the market and to the state. We need to strengthen our mutuality, our interdependence.

The people of the churches have a distinctive calling – despite determined attempts to discredit and privatise our faith, despite the pressures to conform to the new secular ideologies, we have a responsibility to be authentic, according to our different Christian charisms, not to hide away but to work together with our neighbours of all backgrounds, to live out this vision, at every level.

Our calling

In this malign culture, we’re called to be non-tribal, to live out our countercultural story, to be a light in the darkness. As the new era unfolds it’s our job to stay human.

We can shape the world by the language we speak and living it out authentically. We must mean what we say. We must speak the language of covenant not contract, of solidarity not division, of mutuality not individualism, of relationship with each other not the cult of self.

We must know that we are relational beings and not be shy about our God-given identity. Each of us is called to a unique vocational responsibility, if we really surrender. God calls each of us in surprising ways. Discerning our vocational responsibility requires an examination of conscience – perhaps with colleagues, or with your congregation: how is God calling us in this place?

Can our congregations learn to be intentional about building civic relationships, can they become a people who practice reconciliation? Do they have the courage to be authentic?

Are we alert to what’s going on, are we holding to a Christian justice tradition, or is there mission drift? Are we joining with people in the forgotten places and demanding investment and decent jobs?

Do our congregations know what it looks like to stand in solidarity with the poorest in our communities? Not as service providers, not as rescuers helping victims, but as neighbours and friends who share in each other’s local concerns, joys, hopes and fears – and who feel each other’s anger and pain – and act together to build a place where our children can make a life.

What needs to happen to make this possible? At a time when many people in our country feel dislocated, our churches and centres are called to be places where people feel at home. Places where people can work together, building structures of grace, where we regard everything we do as an occasion for communion.

Jenny Sinclair

Founder and director of Together for the Common Good and co-host of the Leaving Egypt podcast