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Welfare: Churches and Faith Communities

My Lords, I am more than grateful for the opportunity given to us by the right reverend Prelate to discuss, albeit briefly, this very important matter and to give a little more publicity to the important Von Hügel report, which raises questions that need more ample discussion than I suspect we have time for now. As a Methodist minister, whose only virtue has been that he has served for 40 years at parish level with ordinary people living on ordinary streets with ordinary needs, I have viewed with some alarm since coming into your Lordships’ House the prevailing attitude of so many Members of this House who take a secularist, dismissive and presumptuous view of the Christian religion. While it may be true that loving God can be dismissed to the level of private belief or, as the right reverend Prelate said, a hobby, the conjoining injunction of our Lord that we are to have a dispassionate love of our neighbour is by definition impossible to carry out in private. It has to be done in the streets. The multiform ways in which the disinterested love of the neighbour is practised in our society through the Christian churches, with no proselytising aims whatever, is astonishing. Any public body in this land that would want to suppress any of that or, by increasing bureaucracy and red tape, make it virtually impossible to practise it would be shooting itself in the foot. It is disinterested service, offered voluntarily, by thousands and thousands of people in the name of the public and common good. As it happens, I have had responsibility for significant projects through the course of my ministry. Some have been paid for by government. There was a bail hostel in north London, for example, which was run along exemplary lines by a man who had been a Roman Catholic priest but who was now a probation officer and, in conjunction with a professor of criminology at the University of Cambridge, offered real, serious added value to the care of people who otherwise would be in prison on remand. There was also a day centre for homeless people. These were not just run of the mill homeless people, but those over 25—the old lags. There was a range of services built in, so that the needs, from delousing to psychiatric support and plugging the clients in to statutory services, were all met. As a result of that long experience, I have come to realise that, while some money must be gained contractually through partnerships between those of us in pastoral ministry and service providers, I have a penchant for paying for it ourselves. It is much more difficult for Methodists than for Anglicans to get near the source of public funding. We want to find real, serious pieces of work that we can do well, going to who John Wesley said were not only those who need us but those who need us most, doing quality pieces of work and showing the public what could be done if we resourced things adequately, then withdrawing and finding something else to do. Instead of institutionalising our responses and becoming the slaves of them, we should simply do quality pieces of work and take the matter forward. There is so much to say and so little time to say it. As I close, I repeat that it would be a sad day if some of the materialistic views of the society in which we live led us to diminish the enthusiasm of an army of volunteers who, in the name of their belief, are doing good work in our community.