Introduction

Welcome to this anthology, compiled to mark 40 years of Church Action on Poverty’s work to end UK poverty. For all of that time, we have helped churches across the UK to embed a concern for poverty and injustice into every aspect of their mission, worship and communal life. We hope this publication will help more churches to make that commitment. (If you’re not familiar with Church Action on Poverty already, we hope this book will give you a good sense of our approach and values. You can always find out more – and get involved – at www.church-poverty.org.uk)

We’ve grouped the content into three chapters, reflecting the key values that underpin our vision of a world free from poverty: dignity, agency and power. Those concepts are not as widely understood and embodied in our churches as we might like them to be, so we offer this collection as a challenge to reflect and take action. Kathy Galloway summarises the concepts brilliantly in her foreword, and our Director Niall Cooper explores them with some deeper theological reflection in his introductions to each chapter.

Each chapter is split into several sections. This should make it easy for you to find what you’re looking for – whether you’re planning worship, studying scripture, or interested in people’s stories and creative writing. This is what you’ll find in each chapter:

Grounding

This section presents voices of experience – stories and testimonies from people who are active in the movement to end poverty. Some have personal experience of poverty; others are active in campaigns and projects tackling it. We hope the stories of their achievements, and the values that drive them, will inspire you.

Movement stories

This section of each chapter includes an in-depth story about an especially powerful event in the movement to end poverty: the Pilgrimage Against Poverty, Poverty Truth Commissions, or the End Hunger UK campaign. They come from different periods in our 40-year history, but they have all

played a part in building a movement, and they all show ways forward in the continuing task of ending poverty.

Each movement story also includes some prayers or poems, created as part of that event or inspired by it.

Praying

This section gathers together prayers, liturgy outlines, hymns, and poems on scriptural themes: a ‘grab bag’ of useful resources for anyone planning worship, or praying alone.

Many of the prayers were originally written for past Church Action on Poverty events, such as Poverty & Homelessness Action Week or Church Action on Poverty Sunday. We’ve always aimed to help churches reflect on poverty issues in worship at events like these, and we’d love to see some of these prayers used more widely.

Thinking

This section includes Bible studies, sermon notes, and longer reflections on our themes. There are enough Bible studies spread through the book to run a short study programme at Lent or other times, if you wish.

Writing

This section includes poems and other creative writing inspired by our themes – often drawing on people’s own experiences of living in poverty, and their insights into how to tackle it.

We hope you’ll see how the values of dignity, agency and power run through everything Church Action on Poverty does. They were also reflected in how we put this anthology together.

All of our work is led by the real experts – people with lived experience of poverty. So a lot of the content and approach of this anthology was developed in participatory workshops, where experts by experience took the lead. You’ll see the results of that especially in the ‘Grounding’ and ‘Writing’ sections. We’re grateful to Revd Chris Howson (liberation theologian and

chaplain at Sunderland University) and to Matt Sowerby (our 2020 poet in digital residence) for helping to facilitate that creative process.

Our values are rooted in a belief that God is always on the side of poor and marginalised people – and that the church is called to be the same. That is reflected strongly in some of the content you’ll find in the ‘Thinking’ sections of this anthology. Rather than presenting Bible studies exclusively written by academics and middle-class church leaders, we’ve included reflections from participatory sessions exploring scripture in a Local Pantry, among people seeking sanctuary, and in poor and marginalised communities. This work was inspired by Latin American ‘base communities’, and you can read about it in the piece ‘Radical participation in the kin-dom of God’ in the ‘Agency’ chapter.

We’ve also included four more ‘traditional’ Bible studies on the Gospel of Luke, spread across the ‘Dignity’ and ‘Power’ chapters. They follow an approach developed by Church Action on Poverty in recent years, which we call Scripture from the Margins, encouraging people to focus on the marginalised voices and perspectives in scripture that we don’t usually hear in our churches. (If you find them useful, more Scripture from the Margins Bible studies are available to download free at www.church-poverty.org.uk/bible.)

As I write this introduction, it is autumn 2021. The pandemic has been a challenging time for all of us, but especially for people who were already in poverty, or were swept into poverty by the pressures of lockdown. Those experiences, still fresh in our minds, are reflected in some of the poems and prayers in these pages.

The pandemic is not over yet, but as we move forward and think about what needs to change post-Covid, people facing poverty and exclusion must be heard, valued and included. That’s been Church Action on Poverty’s purpose for the past 40 years, and it will continue to be until we build a world free from poverty. We hope this anthology will help you to be part of the movement with us.

Liam Purcell, Church Action on Poverty October 2021