The recent announcement that Birmingham City Council is in effect bankrupt will not have done the city’s image much good. It may put off business from locating here and people from investing in the city. It is likely to make a lot of people reluctant to relocate here for work. This might affect your thinking if you were considering coming to Birmingham to join in a church plant. What will the impact be on your family of such a move? Will it make it harder to find school places for the children? Are you going to have to navigate great, suspension wrecking pot holes in the road? How long will it be before there’s a vermin infestation. Well to reassure you, we are not at post apocalypse days here in the city yet but we still don’t know what the long term impact of the crisis will be.
What I would say is this. Please don’t let the local authority’s troubles put you off coming here to help with a church plant. If anything, the recent news should encourage you to consider coming here all the more.
Our communities are likely even more to need people and churches at the heart of them who love them. This will become more apparent further down the line. It’s possible that the council will find ways to protect statutory services by doing the bear minimum, reducing the number of bin collections, rationalising library open hours and that kind of thing. Discretionary provision of community services will be the area where things begin to bite. Grants have probably been allocated for this year but come the winter of 2024, there may well be a lot of community groups and projects unable to continue without grant funding. That could be where churches can step in to be there for the community without depending on Local Authority funding.
More crucially, it’s because our city is in a mess that people’s need for the Gospel is all the more obvious. We have seen it made abundantly clear that we cannot depend on central of local government, just as we cannot rely on celebrities or other secular heroes. Only God is dependable, only Christ can save. Birmingham even more desperately needs to hear this message.
So, please don’t let the crisis cause you to have second thoughts. Come over and help us.
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As always, if you might be interested in church planting partnership, please get in touch.
Faithroots 