We ought to be aware that there aren’t enough churches in our deprived communities. Plenty of them have no church in their midst and no viable means of getting to one. So, without putting too fine a point on it, we need people to plant churches in deprived communities and, one way or another, they need supporting with resources. But we don’t help deprived communities if, in our laudable desire to support new plants, we fail to resource existing churches.

I am delighted more people are talking about church in deprived communities. This is long overdue. But there are still several ways we continue view and treat deprived communities that are not serving the cause of gospel ministry. Here are three of the key ones:

Treating all areas like they’re the same

Deprived areas are not all the same. The idea that a council estate in South London is the same as an ex-mining or mill town in Yorkshire or Lancashire is just nonsense. In fact, not only are different areas of the country notably different, even within the same town there may be distinct differences. Some areas are multiethnic, others are not. Some areas are monocultural while others are very multicultural. There are monoethnic, monocultural white areas and monoethnic, monocultural BME areas too. Even within my deprived town, such things can exist in areas that are right next to each other.

The issues these places face are not all the same either. They will all inevitably have issues, but the nature of those problems will differ. Not all will have knife problems, not all will have high levels of child poverty, not all will have low levels of literacy, not all… well you get the idea.

All too often though, we talk about deprived communities as though they are a monolithic bloc. This means the solutions we propose for trying to reach them can tend to be a bit one-dimensional because we speak about these places as if they are one.

Read More