Think of the thriving evangelical churches in your area. Chances are they will be in the ‘nice’ areas of town and their leaders will be middle class.
Tim Chester once attended a lecture where the speaker showed a map of Sheffield. The council wards were coloured different shades, according to social indicators: educational achievement, household income, benefit recipients, social housing, criminal activity, and so on. Slide after slide showed that the east side of the city was the needy, socially deprived half, compared to the more prosperous west. Where are the churches? Counting all the various tribes of evangelicalism, the large churches are on the west side. The working-class and deprived areas of our cities are not being reached with the gospel. There are many exciting exceptions, but the pattern is clear.
According to Mez McConnell from Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh, of the fifty worst housing schemes in Scotland, half have no church, and most of the others only have a dying church. Very few have an evangelical witness.
This book is about reaching deprived, urban, working-class areas, often estates or schemes. It offers us the combined experience of the Reaching the Unreached working group, an informal network of Christian leaders from different parts of the UK.
This book doesn’t claim to be the final word. But it presents us with a vision of what can be done. We pray that it will capture imaginations and start a vital process in our hearts and minds.
