In “Hope for the City”, I talk about reaching urban Britain as requiring “cross cultural mission”. But is it? I’ve also wanted to insist in recent blog posts that we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of a minority working class but rather about people who are simply normal ordinary members of the same society.
So, it is perhaps helpful to think about why I originally talked about cross cultural mission. There are reasons why our inner cities and our council estates might be thought of in such terms. First, the obvious, inner city areas particularly tend to be multi-ethnic due to immigration. You are likely to be experiencing other cultures in the strict sense.
Secondly, we are recognising that there is a diversity to British life because different people will have distinctive histories and collective memories shaping their community. There will be shared struggles and suffering as well as shared delights and victories. Communities tend to share past times and interests. We see common themes across the social classes we identify. There are accents and dialects. There is also a sharing in types of work. All of these things shape language, attitudes and values and those things come out in music and songs, art and stories. In other words they said cultures.
This means that there will be shared culture because we are British as well as regional diversity. Some of that shared culture will cross ethnic boundaries and some of it will not. Similarly, we might see common cultural themes that relate to class but also differences in different towns cities and regions. There will even be differences from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and family to family.
When I wrote Hope For the City, I argued that any of us seeking to engage in urban Gospel work need to have a cross cultural mindset. The aim was to encourage us to go with our eyes open and not make assumptions that create blindspots.
There are a few reasons as to why all of us need that mindset. I included in this even those who consider themselves to be working class/ from the estate/the inner city. This is so, first because some will have gone away for a time for education, work or family reasons. That will have changed them and they come back in as the outsider. In fact in some cases, the person who left and came back might find it harder to be accepted than the original outsider.
Secondly if you are say, working class but from London, then yes there will be cultural differences on an estate in Birmingham or in a scheme in Scotland.
Thirdly, even if you have not physically moved then your relationship still changes you are now a man of the cloth, a leader, one of them, not one of us.
Fourthly, there are Christian/Evangelical cultures that firm, not necessarily good or bad, not the same though as being confirmed to God’s Word and Christ. That also means that you come in with differences.
Fifth because you have your ID unique family culture.
All of those are reasons as to why we are going cross cultural. However, there are reasons not to send it as cross cultural.
First, we need to be alert to the danger of seeing ourselves as heroes off on some exotic adventure. This places us or our heroes at the centre of the story
Secondly because we don’t want to see urban mission as uniquely cross cultural. The same issues above would apply for a middle class person moving into a leafy suburb. Be careful that you don’t attempt to take city worker culture into a leafy northern parish.
Thirdly, whilst there is diversity, there is unity and commonality as I indicated above. There will be values, interest and language that cut across class or region.
Fourthly because the risk is we put in our artificial cross cultural missionary face and voice. We lose the ability to just relate normally to others.
So urban mission both is cross cultural and is not cross cultural.
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