William Temple Foundation

Industrial Lancashire was characterised by cotton, and the weaving of cloth – but poverty and inequality were rife. Today, the challenge is to reweave the fabric of society so that, in a line from the recent Gather summit: ‘I see a city where the evil of poverty and injustice is being eradicated’.

Our hope is that we extend that vision across the whole of Lancashire.

The Covid pandemic posed a huge set of challenges to civic society, but also intensified and accelerated other crises – the parlous state of the NHS, the cost-of-living as an issue, an emerging crisis with mental health to name but a few. As elsewhere in the country, the faith sector is making a significant contribution in responding to these challenges. Having retired early from an academic role at the University of Central Lancashire, my ongoing Inter Faith work has led me to the nexus of the faith / voluntary sector, the health service, and local authorities, operating as what might euphemistically be termed a ‘sector connector’, and therefore well placed to offer an overview of some of these responses.

The faith sector is a huge, diverse, and often hidden asset; here in Lancashire there are around 600 churches, over 100 mosques, plus two places of worship each for Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and a small but active Ba’hai community. Often with buildings in key strategic locations, many with excellent facilities and not a few with groups of volunteers, this really is a massive resource which, with more partnership connections, could make an even greater contribution to the health and wellbeing of civic society. 

Encouragingly, there is a well-documented change in the attitude of many public sector partners to working with the faith sector (the “F” in the VCFSE – voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise sector). At the same time though, there is a recurring refrain of ‘we want to work with the faith sector, but….we don’t know who we should be talking to’. Conversely, members of faith groups often do not know how their local public sector infrastructure is organised, or who are the key contacts. 

One approach to making connections, providing information and building relationships is being developed in East Lancashire. In late 2023 I made a successful bid to the Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB (integrated care board) Small Groups funding stream, for a project entitled ‘Connecting Faith Groups with Community’ (a pilot in Pendle). The aim of this work is to

• survey and map what churches /mosques are offering by way of community ‘support activities’;
• connect social prescribers and family hubs with faith groups who are offering support activities;
• create the infrastructure of church / mosque leaders groupings

This is a collaboration with Rev Mark Cowling (centre of picture below) of the Gather movement, a Christian organization which works to bring about ‘transformation of towns and cities – socially, culturally and spiritually’. This neatly encapsulates the contexts in which faith groups operate and contribute, and indeed aligns with a model I was already propounding.

The Gather model for this transformation has five stages; we are following these in Pendle and two other districts of East Lancashire, and as far as we know, this is the first time in Lancashire that this approach has been used. The first involves an initial mapping of provision by churches / mosques / faith settings, in three specific areas – mental health; food security; family support. The data gathered, usually from telephone ‘interviews’, populates a spreadsheet, which in turn generates an interactive map, with locations being RAG rated. 

The initial mapping stage of this partnership process is now also starting to happen in the districts of Burnley and the Ribble Valley. Here a particularly encouraging development is that the Community and Neighbourhood team managers from the Children and Family Wellbeing service have allocated staff to help us carry out the mapping work. As this involves telephone or in-person contact with faith leads to complete the detailed questionnaires devised by Gather, this in itself has led to the development of relationships between those faith leads and local authority staff. 

There then follows an initial meeting of faith leaders with public sector leads, sharing the mapping information, and establishing new relationships.  Stage three involves (more) representation from the faith sector at local network meetings – in Pendle, the Family Hub network meetings and the ‘People of Pendle’ community forum are two such networks.  A fourth stage is to bring together a steering group of church / faith leaders as the beginning of a Unity network. An intentional focus of transformation ‘socially, culturally and spiritually’ can breathe new life into existing Churches Together groups, and potentially, we hope, may do the same for groups of mosques, or local interfaith groups such as Building Bridges Burnley or Building Bridges Pendle.

Finally though, and as so often with the VCFSE, what is needed (stage 5) is a dedicated, paid post to extend the basic ‘sector connector’ role which I have been filling on a voluntary basis to a ‘partnership enabler’ position (as operates elsewhere e.g. the Lichfield diocese). Such a post-holder could provide specific advice to faith groups needing to improve governance, increase capacity (e.g. training of volunteers), and manage communications, as well as make connections with local public and voluntary sector partners as I have been doing.

Beyond the social action provision which the faith sector is offering, we must return to the vision at the beginning of this blog – eradicating poverty and injustice. To realise this, then as well as social action – the response to a need, we also require social justice – the taking of steps to prevent the need arising. Here there is synergy with the professed aim of the NHS to move from a treatment to a prevention model (see NHS long-term plan), and here then is another role for the faith sector, championing social justice and challenging systems and structures which result in long-term inequality and poverty. 

Dr Peter Lumsden is a local preacher in the Methodist church, a trustee of Building Bridges Burnley, and represents Faith Networks on the VCFSE alliance for Lancashire and South Cumbria (pjlumsden58@gmail.com)

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