Vicar's Letter

As you will infer from this and another item in the magazine, your Vicar is currently reading the history of the Diocese of Newcastle commissioned by Bishop Bowlby to mark its centenary.  He has not finished it yet, so he doesn’t know how it ends (!), but along the way there has been some fairly sobering revelation.

The accounts of poverty and deprivation that existed in the living memory of some remind the reader that the sorts of conditions that we might more naturally associate with the Middle Ages endured well into the twentieth century.

Coming from the South, your Vicar knew of the great Anglo-Catholic priests of East London and their work in the slums there; but in Newcastle the likes of Fr Ward Davis in Byker and Fr Moll at S Philip’s as well the ministries of some of his indefatigable predecessors in all the parishes of which he is now Vicar were engaged in just the same sort of work.

It is tempting to wonder as you read such accounts why we cannot recapture the zeal of those former generations – but this is a romantic notion.  The great building programmes of Bishop Wilberforce and others came to fruition just as the need which for which they were designed was beginning to ebb.  The city is replete with these great monuments to a generation’s attempt to resource the Church for her work, many of them now shut.  Society has moved on and the challenges have changed.

The squalor of the slums in this country has to a large extent disappeared; but this does not mean that there is no deprivation.  However, the problems are more subtle and complex and so are the solutions, in so far as we have discovered any – and they are much more costly.  Simple acts of charity no longer suffice, deemed by many to be paternalistic or patronising.  In theory, we now seek to address the cause and not the symptom of social disadvantage.

Part of the problem for us all is the fast moving character of the social welfare scene nowadays.  Fashions come and go and so does the necessary funding to underpin them.  Novelty seems to be an important factor in social enterprise and many philanthropic organisations struggle to survive the hurdle of a second round of funding bids. 

Even the most modest of projects shoulder demanding burdens of infrastructure and accountability, business plans and legal compliance.  Increasing numbers of regulatory bodies seem to have their finger in the pie and all have to receive reports of the work.  All of this adds to the cost in a world where ever greater numbers of causes compete for the available cash.

Such is the context in which the CHAT Shop operates.  It has changed considerably over the past few years and is likely to change again in the near future.  We might wonder whether, at the end of this century, when the book is written for the bicentenary of the diocese, the activities of such organisations as the CHAT Shop will be remembered as fondly as Fr Ward Davis – probably not: since the images of meetings and funding applications are not as powerful as a be-cassocked priest pushing an ice-cream trolley through the rat-infested slums of Byker. 

The advantage of the modern way of doing things is that it is, potentially anyway, more flexible and capable of responding to the fast-moving society it seeks to serve.  I would, therefore, encourage people to find ways of being drawn into supporting the work of the CHAT Shop, since it is the successor to those Herculean efforts of yesteryear.

Home page: http://stmatthewsnewcastle.org.uk/