Fr Richard Springer is Rector of St George-in-the-East in Shadwell, and a member of the CTC team working on the Cultivating Hope project. This blog is based on the talk he gave to Christian leaders in Tyne & Wear Citizens at a day entitled “From Anger to Action: Effective Ministry in the North East in a Time of National Fragmentation”.
Organising the Fragmentation
We are living through a time of deep fragmentation. It is evident in our politics, in our communities, and within the Church itself. Trust erodes. Positions harden. The language of belonging is increasingly replaced by the logic of exclusion. What we are witnessing is not simply disagreement, but disintegration in our common life. The question before us, then, is not only what we believe, but how we are to live together now.
During the pandemic – at the height of the Black Lives Matter moment – a parent I know spent weeks trying to contact her son’s school. She needed meal vouchers. She needed help feeding her child. There was no reply. There were, however, repeated communications about the school’s decision to change its name. The decision itself mattered. The school’s patron, Sir John Cass, had longstanding ties to the slave trade, and like many institutions in that moment – particularly in the wake of the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol – it sought to reckon with its history. But something more searching was revealed. An institution articulating justice, while failing to attend to immediate need. A movement toward the world as it should be, abstracted from the world as it is. It is precisely within that disjunction between the world as it is and the world as it should be that fragmentation takes hold.
Community organising begins not with ideals, but with attention. It insists on the primacy of the local, the relational, and the lived. It resists the temptation to bypass reality in pursuit of aspiration. In this sense, it is profoundly incarnational. The ministry of Christ unfolds in proximity, in encounter, in the gathering of a people whose very composition resists coherence: from zealot to tax collector, held within a shared life that precedes agreement. This is not incidental to the Gospel; it is constitutive of it. In Ephesians, the claim that Christ has “broken down the dividing wall of hostility” names the formation of a new humanity—one in which division is neither denied nor allowed the final word. The Church, then, is not merely the custodian of belief, but the site of a social reality in which fragmentation is engaged and, in time, overcome through a shared life.
Nicholas Hayes-Mota argues that the purpose of organising is not simply the accumulation of power, but the formation of a people—morally as well as politically. That formation takes place through relationships, through sustained attention, and through action oriented toward the common good. The Church, in this light, is not simply a gathered congregation, but a community in which people learn how to live together across diff erence. And this formation takes shape through three interrelated forms of conversation.
1. Conversation Within the Congregation
Formation begins with attention to one another. The one-to-one conversation becomes a primary site of this work. Here, people are encountered not as positions or abstractions, but as persons whose lives carry experience, memory, insight, and struggle. Such work is slow. It requires patience. It resists efficiency. Yet without it, there is no foundation. Through this disciplined attention, a people begins to take shape – capable of holding diff erence without fragmentation. In one of our communities, it was an immigrant worker, Francelise, who spoke with prophetic clarity during the pandemic. She said that this time would make the church stronger, not weaker. And she was right. Because communities formed through truthful relationship develop a deeper resilience than communities held together by mere agreement.
2. Conversation Across the Neighbourhood
If the fi rst conversation forms relationships, the second forms agency. Hayes-Mota observes that people are transformed through the experience of acting together toward shared goals—and winning, even in modest ways. In such action, people discover that they are not powerless. The neighbour is no longer the object of concern, but a participant in shared action. The work is no longer done for, but with. Through this, a different kind of power begins to emerge. Not power over others, but power with others—relational, grounded, and directed toward the common good. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” This is not power as domination. It is power exercised in relationship, capable of restoring trust, rebuilding civic life, and reconnecting what fragmentation has torn apart.
3. Conversation Across Institutions
As communities become organised, their horizon widens. They begin to see that the pressures shaping their lives are not isolated, but connected—to the city, the region, the nation. And so organised communities develop the capacity not only to respond to immediate concerns, but to shape the wider conditions of common life. This is not abstraction. It is the continuation of the same practices: attention, relationship, and shared action. Power, in this sense, becomes the capacity to act together for the common good. And where such power is well-handled, civil society is renewed. Institutions become more responsive to the realities people face. New institutions can emerge from the life of organised communities themselves – institutions capable of sustaining participation, accountability, and shared responsibility.
What emerges through this process is not simply activism, nor merely strategy. It is the formation of organised communities. Communities in which relationships are strong, agency is shared, and power is exercised responsibly. This matters profoundly in our present moment. Because fragmentation cannot be overcome simply by assertion, outrage, or ideological alignment. Nor can the Church retreat into private spirituality while the bonds of common life continue to fray. The vocation before us is more demanding than that. To become communities capable of sustaining a common life across diff erence. To form people who can act together. To build and exercise power for the sake of the common good.
The Gospel takes flesh not in abstraction, but in a people. And where a people becomes organised – patiently, relationally, and with purpose – the possibility of a different kind of life becomes visible. A life marked not by fragmentation, but by communion. Not by powerlessness, but by shared power. Not by fear, but by the patient restoration of a common life. This is the work before us. And perhaps, in this moment, it is one of the clearest ways the Church can become once again what it is called to be: an organised body, being formed for the life of the world.
