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Welfare: Churches and Faith Communities

My Lords, I am glad that the right reverend Prelate has given us the opportunity to discuss this issue briefly today. It is some 25 years since I had the privilege of working with him at Church House on a committee on social responsibility. With so many right reverend Prelates present, I hesitate to move into the realms of theology but, as an Anglican and a former president of the YMCA in Britain, I believe it is absolutely impossible to be true to the Christian faith without being engaged in society. I should like to make just three observations from my own experience. The first is that we must always resist the temptation to try, directly or indirectly, to win recruits to our faith by what we do in society. That is totally unacceptable. I believe that we do what our faith demands of us in fulfilling our own beliefs. In fact, it seems to me that cultural sensitivity is an absolute practical manifestation of the real spirit of love. If Christianity does not claim to be about love, what else is it about? Secondly, I have had experiences in the voluntary sector of a secular type—I was a director of Oxfam, for example—but I have a certain unease about the way in which we have slipped into the language of partnerships. I am not quite sure that the concept of partnership adequately describes what it should all be about. Essentially, we are about empowering—we are capitalists in society. There is now, on the part of government and others, a tendency to talk quite overtly of being there to deliver services more effectively, but we are not service deliverers. Of course, in what we do, we should provide a service—that is what it is all about—but we are about empowering people and enabling society to change. As part of that, we must be uncomfortable advocates. I am very glad that charity law now recognises the role of advocacy in fulfilling charitable commitment. Sometimes advocacy based on the authority and experience of engagement can be one of the most powerful of all services for the disadvantaged. In this new talk about the interrelationship between the voluntary sector, faith communities and government, we must not throw away the different elements that contribute to the totality of social reality. We must also involve language which could ever be interpreted as a kind of arrogance. I know from experience that some of the finest voluntary work has been done by my friends in the Islamic and other communities, and indeed by people who, although I do not endorse their position, are proud in their personal integrity to say that they are agnostics or atheists.