The election, the poor and the church: stop moaning and get loving

I awoke last Friday morning to a shock election result.  No-one had seen it coming.  Though when you look back now the outcome seems, in some ways, to have been inevitable and obvious.  However, I also woke up to a storm of Christians bemoaning the outcome for the poor, marginalise and oppressed in our society.  What would they do?  How would they survive even more cuts?  How could Britain have done this to them?  Wake me up in 5 years because I don't want to watch... and so on.

Grace church works in just such an area, with exactly the types of people who have suffered most from the cuts that lets be honest have been needed.  And yes it's tragic that the cuts have most savagely affected those who are worst off in our society, though I haven't come across too many people advocating for tax rises, or writing to protest that their child does not need the "free" school meal for under 7s available to all and offering that instead that money be redirected to those most in need, or advocating for means tested child benefit.

It is often areas without the voice to loudly protest that lose their services first, that are least well represented, that there is less fuss about because they simple aren't headline/campaign material.  That is wrong but it is the way our society works, and we should be upset at such oppression and unfairness.  But here's my frustration, all the venting and anger about what the election result meant for the poor, marginalised and deprived is not reflected in the churches involvement with those communities in Britain.  The church in the UK is largely a middle class phenomenon, reaching middle class networks at the exclusion of the neighbourhood based poor and marginalised.  So was it just so much arm-chair whingeing?  Was it simply people expecting the government to do what they know should be done but which they lack the will power to do?

I look at it a different way.  God is sovereign and this is a God given opportunity for the church to serve the poor and marginalised in our society, to love them as we are called to.  To engage with these communities and help them have a voice, to provide services and relationships and networks through the church that are being lost elsewhere.  In Leviticus the answer to poverty and marginalisation is always community based on the love God.  That answer stands just as much today as it did then.  I think the next 5 years provide an exciting opportunity for churches to connect and create communities of grace as we meet needs and serve those most vulnerable and in need in our society.