Churches and civil society - raising the debate

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It's nearly three weeks since my last written posting. I've been somewhat sapped of creative energy due to a persistent virus on the one hand and persistent problems with getting the religious communities research project up to the launch pad. Slowly, mostly by trial and error, the right people have become involved and CDF, the funding agency seems to be OK with our proposed way of approach. I would have happily renounced the good fortune of a large grant to pursue an investigation I feel very strongly should be made, had I known about the hassles in advance. However, at last Wednesday's City Centre Churches Together there was unanimous support for the path we propose to take - more on this when the deals are clinched and working.

At the same meeting we had two Local Government officers from Community Planning giving a presentation on the recently launched City Centre Strategy document 2007-2010. It's the first time they've attended a church meeting, as opposed to church members attending one of their meetings. And to be fair, they seemed pleased to have been invited, even though they were given a hard time. There was some very strong articulation of concerns felt by churches about the impact of taking traffic out of the city centre - top of the planners' wish list, when there's such inadequate Sunday public transport at times to permit people to attend worship.

It was also interesting to hear people other than myself expressing concerns about the way religious communities don't seem to appear even photographically, to figure as part and parcel of Cardiff's social and cultural life. Airbrushed out of the picture, was my phrase for this kind of social engineering. I've been striving to awaken some kind of desire for dialogue between city centre churches and the local authority about plans and development policies ever since I discovered the poverty of the situation over four years ago. Now the churches are, it seems, taking notice, finding a voice. So there's all the more reason to continue with the religious communities survey project, and deliver a quality product into the public realm to stimulate the much needed debate.

Also, of late I've put more time and energy into publishing photographs, rather than writing, but even this has slowed down somewhat now. Almost all the redevelopment site has been levelled and now piles are being sunk and foundations excavated. There remains one huge mountain of rubble as high as a house, being kept in reserve for use on-site. For most of the past four months over six thousand tonnes of rubble a week has been removed by lorry to other sites. New tower cranes and piling rigs have sprung up to add to the ones on the former Toys 'r us and Ice Rink sites. Movement is now more restrained. The sense of drama conveyed by the changing scene of demolition has been replaced by a kind of calm purpose.

Swings and roundabouts

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At the end of today's midday Eucharist, noticed a government brown envelope addressed to me on the sacristy table. It informed me that I was being offered a grant of £30,000 to appoint a research worker to investigate and build a database on every kind of religious community to be found in the City and Borough of Cardiff. For some time I have been pestering local government policy-makers to revise their own ideas about how to involve all kinds religious communities in democratic consultative processes. There are no longer obviously strong institutions and structures through which religious bodies, whether non-Christian or Christian, can be solicited for their views. As a result, religious voices have long been absent from debate about what kind of city we want and how its future should be shaped. If things are as good as they are, it's because there are private individuals who practice Christian values in their work, but this doesn't amount to a coherent or collective voice.

I'm being offered this grant, as a representative of City Centre Churches Together the Parish, and the diocese, who found himself, back in November being put on the spot by a couple of LGOs who had learned about the government making funding available for 'capacity building' with a 'social inclusion' remit. The process was very rushed and made the deadline only by courier. I wasn't confident that the application was strong enough or sufficiently well presented to succeed, so when I opened the envelope, I couldn't believe my eyes.

I was about to take off with Clare for twenty four hours, visiting two different friends who had suffered bereavements, and the discovery couldn't have come at a less convenient time, since it meant having to make a series of phone calls to share the good news, and start a collaborative process that will bring together others who share an interest in developing inter-religious networks around the city, and involve them in shaping the job brief, and application process. But after an hour of excited ringing around, we were able to get away.

This is a bit of a break through, since the interested stakeholders don't usually have much of a pretext to work together on a common project. This funding, albeit only for a year, has the potential to be a real catalyst to partnership among religious communities, and hopefully the outcome will be beneficial to those in the local government scene who are genuinley keen to cast the net wider for fresh ideas and inspirations in the complex task of running a heterogeneous modern city.

So, I may not have a future working with other ministerial colleagues at the grass roots in the city centre, but the future holds new possiblities of collaboration on the wider municipal scene. All this in twenty four hours !