Interrupting the church’s flow: hearing ‘other’ voices on an outer urban estate

Abstract

ABSTRACTHow might the Church of England – so focused currently on the language of ‘mission’, ‘action’ and numerical ‘growth’, and yet still largely entangled in race, class and ecclesiastical privilege – be carefully attentive to those voices that have been pushed to the edges of wider public discourse? What are the obstacles to such attentiveness? What theological resources are currently available? And how might we both imagine and practice an openness to interruption, so that our ‘missional flow’ – of words, of actions, of love, even – might not be all one-way? Beginning with one multiethnic outer estate context, this article surveys wider societal discourses of division along ethnic and class lines, and three broad responses within contemporary political theology to such divisions. Responding to two recent examples of an ecclesiocentric one-way flow, from a position of multiple privilege, the beginnings of an alternative approach, radically receptive to the church’s ‘others’, is outlined.