Learning to ask questions of the Status Quo
As I write, the Church of England is engaged in the meeting of its General Synod, deeply immersed in the latest round of conversation and decision-making about its ‘Living in Love and Faith’ process. Understandably, feelings are running high, and the challenge of how the state church can hold together different ways of grappling with theological understanding is inevitably a key strand of these discussions. Estate-based priest and theologian Rev. Al Barrett wrote thoughtfully ahead of this week, ‘It’s important, I think, in these conversations for each of us to try hard to locate ourselves a little – to resist the temptation to speak from an imagined (and illusory) abstract, objective or universal place.’ Al paused before speaking further to locate himself in this way, and to acknowledge ‘the structural privileges and experiential ignorances that accompany that location’.[1]
For social scientists – and, I am learning, practical theologians (although, despite having unavoidably and accidentally reflected on life through a theological lens for as long as I can remember, I still feel new to this world) – such pauses for self-location are an obvious step. The acknowledgement that the way we see the world is affected by factors such as where our seat is and what glasses we’re looking through is essential when thinking about how we can know things. But the importance of that was something I was slow to realise in life – a fact that no doubt speaks to my own privileged location across multiple domains.
I grew up in a family whose belief was firmly that the world was as it was simply because it was how it was. I went to medical school, where the biomedical (and even the biopsychosocial) approach taken upheld positivist scientific principles – the conviction that empirical research from a neutral position could reveal the true nature of reality. I spent many of the years that formed my Christian faith in a church of people with whom I shared many cultural similarities – nationality, education, class – who relied on a selection of ‘sound’ theological scholars to shape their faith understanding. Only in my twenties did I begin to realise the truth so eloquently expressed by American poet and activist Amanda Gorman in her Inauguration poem The Hill We Climb – that ‘the norms and notions of what “just” is, isn’t always justice’.[2]
It’s hard for me to know absolutely whether I’d have found my way to this realisation simply as a result of spending more years in the world, but I am convinced that a key trigger for beginning to ask questions of my existing understanding of the status quo was moving to a housing estate (which was full of beauty and colour, but was also amongst the top 1% most socioeconomically deprived areas of the UK, with many of the commonly-associated challenges), where I suddenly found myself living life alongside people from a vast array of different backgrounds – the majority very different from my own. In her book that captures some of the experience of evangelical Christians intentionally relocating into communities experiencing marginalisation, Reimagining Mission from Urban Places, Anna Ruddick talks about how people’s experiences in such areas often ‘don’t fit with [their] inherited narrative. What they encounter in mission – real relationships with real people who don’t claim to be Christians – challenges their expectations of what mission is and how God works’.[3] This was my experience, too; it began with asking questions about missiology, then about the theology of poverty and hardship, then about how different people make sense of the world, how we know things, and whose knowledge is ‘heard’ where.
I didn’t have an option to insulate myself away from those questions because they were embodied by real humans, knocking on my door and making me laugh and sharing food with me and sometimes stealing my plant pots. Some of the encounters that led to the questions felt prickly and uncomfortable, but they also often led me into new, joyful ways of looking at things. For example – some of my most profound moments reading scripture have involved doing so alongside local children, with their distinct ability to see things (and ask tricky questions!) with perceptive clarity – or with people who’d experienced deeply challenging life circumstances, who came to the Bible afresh through that lens, which illuminated it in ways previously invisible to me. Living alongside people whose view of the world came from a very difference place to my own changed me: proximity changed me. There was such deep wisdom in my community, which just wasn’t always expressed in language I was used to. I saw researchers and services come to consult here and felt frustration that sometimes the way they worked seemed to put up barriers that prevented them from connecting deeply with the people who could most easily answer their questions. I remember sitting in meetings with members of my community and council workers and academics and feeling frustrated that the community members didn’t seem to ‘speak the right language’ to be heard; these days, I would be much more critical in asking whose job it was to speak what language. I became acutely aware of power imbalances I’d never previously noticed when I was the one holding the power.
With all that in mind, starting a PhD in the social sciences has been a revelation for me. Suddenly I find myself thick in a world where reflexivity isn’t just a bonus – it’s essential. In this new world, there is a wealth of language for exploring and wrestling with the complexities of our positionality, and how they shape the ways in which we understand everything. Of course, I could have encountered this way of thinking earlier had I spent time earlier in different academic disciplines – but discovering it now helps me make sense of my community experiences in a new light. Paul Keeble, who has lived in inner-city Manchester for multiple decades, writes in his book Mission With about how when he reflected theologically on his personal experience, he found himself having to engage in what he calls ‘theological backfill’ – a process of reflecting and sense-making after action.[4] I feel like I’ve been doing similar work – theologically, but also in terms of making sense of my philosophical standpoint as a researcher.
These reflections now shape my ideals for my own research (although I realise I am yet to dive into the complex terrain where ideals collide with gritty reality, so I hold space for them to be refined and changed!). My PhD research seeks to understand how faith groups (other than churches, who have been well-researched already) are responding to hardship. Pausing to locate myself before undertaking my fieldwork (and frequently during it, as I listen and learn and grow) seems essential. How will I be deliberate in seeking out the voices that are all too easily missed because of structural injustice? How do I acknowledge the power that I hold in multiple dimensions – neither denying, nor (intentionally or otherwise) abusing it? How will I be open to learning from different ways of knowing? How can I receive the gifts of the community into which I will enter as I undertake my research in a way that provides mutual benefit, rather than merely extracting knowledge to serve only academic understanding?
All those questions are ones without straightforward answers, but I suppose what I’m saying here is this: I’m glad that a combination of life experience, and the wisdom of scholars and researchers whose work I often feel like I’ve simply stumbled across, have taught me the importance of at least pausing to ask them.
References
[1] R. A. Barrett, “This estate we’re in: Living in Love & Faith: what kind of body?” This Estate We’re In (10/11/2023).
[2] A. Gorman & O. Winfrey, The hill we climb: An inaugural poem (Chatto & Windus, 2021).
[3] A. Ruddick, Reality is good enough in Reimagining Mission from Urban Places: Missional Pastoral Care (SCM Press, 2020), 12.
[4] P. Keeble, Introduction in Mission With (Instant Apostle, 2017), 24.
© Jennifer Johnson, 2024.
This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Cover Image: Created by the author.
After a decade living with her family on a beautiful but economically-marginalised estate in the east end of Newcastle, Jen is enjoying discovering the gifts of a new community, having transplanted to south east Northumberland. She’s currently reading for a PhD entitled ‘Beyond the foodbank: an analysis of faith-based approaches to hardship in the UK’ at Coventry University, and she’s fond of finding the sacred in ordinary places. She writes at https://joyinthecorners.substack.com/ and can be found @joyinthecorners on social media.
