The obituary of Bruce Kenrick in today's Guardian brings back memories. It is as the founder of Shelter in 1966 that Mary and I remember him (a fact which the obituarist believes not many do). Shelter was a charity set up to publicise the scandal of homelessness and bad housing in the 1960s. It was a happy coincidence that it was launched in the wake of "Cathy Come Home", a TV documentary graphically displaying how a poor but not feckless young family could become homeless, destitute and break up..
The obituary mentions influences on Bruce Kenrick: Donald Soper and the Notting Hill Housing Trust he inspired, Soper's disciple Donald Mason, a tall, striking young Methodist minister we met on various occasions, the hymn writer Geoffrey Ainger, Des Wilson, the first Director of Shelter and Eamonn Casey who was RC Parish priest in Slough (and a friend of Mary's father), successor of Kenrick as Chairman of Shelter and later Bishop of Derry.
We formed a Shelter Group in Slough, largely from St. Andrew's members, to help publicise locally the issue of homelessness and the need for urgent government action and to raise money for the campaign. It was at the time of town centre redevelopment and Len Gibbs, one of our members, working in the Borough's Development Department, knew which shops were empty. Thus we were able to run a Christmas shop in what had been Foster's Clothing Store. I found a place in London that sold dolls in all sizes and so came home on several evenings bearing large numbers of naked female figures. (Why are dolls almost always girls?) We recruited an army of older ladies from the congregation and elsewhere who sewed or knitted a tremendous variety of clothing for these dolls. They became our best selling product. We also had a very well made model of a hospital, which did not sell. Have you ever seen a model/toy hospital? While railways, roads, shops are favourites, it seems that hospitals reminding people of illness and death are a no-no .
We had another successful shop the next Christmas and also organised a sponsored walk to raise awareness among teenagers. Some of us also spoke at church meetings around the town.
Bruce Kenrick left Shelter fairly early on and we lost interest when it moved on from being a national publicity movement towards direct action such as illegal squatting. But it did succeed in prompting the Wilson Government to raise the priority of housing in its programme.
Bruce Kenrick was a Church of Scotland and later on a URC minister. The obituary reminds us as a student in New York he got involved in the East Harlem project among marginalized communities. In 1962 his "Come Out the Wilderness" advocated social engagement under strong lay leadership within the churches. I have pulled down from the shelves my dog-eared, yellowing copy of this book, which tells the story of the East Harlem project, initially led by Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Methodists, in the gang-dominated slums. An extract from Chapter 7: "Image of God":
To neglect the social is to be more 'spiritual' than Jesus. … It was East Harlem's crying need for social healing that had compelled so many of its people to reject the church as irrelevant, for its preoccupation with 'things of the spirit' seemed to sanctify the unjust world which they endured. … The core of the Gospel is … that the Word became flesh. And this means that that the Gospel has to be expressed in very human terms, in terms of social action, in terms of flesh and blood. Words alone are not enough.
But neither are deeds. … The point of the Gospel is not just to patch up society's wounds; it is also to grapple with the wills of the men who have inflicted those wounds, and who might well inflict them again. The Gospel has to get beneath the skin. It has to penetrate men's hearts and there renew the springs of life right where society begins. This means evangelism. It means the imperative necessity of preaching. … Communicating the gospel … is not horizontal – between men and men. It is vertical – between God and men. … While both have to be pursued at the same time, the horizontal cancer cannot be finally excised without the vertical gift of God's grace. There has to be an Advent. Sometimes it comes in strange ways.
What has changed in 40 years?
Posted by Richard Hall at January 19, 2007 03:56 PM