The Centre for Theology & Community (CTC) is based in the heart of East London. Our work grew from churches in East London’s involvement and experience of broad-based community organising in the Citizens UK alliance. We now work with a growing number of churches across the UK from a wide range of denominations and traditions, and are strategic partners of Citizens UK.
Our faith-filled approach to community organising developed because the churches involved in community organising loved the fact that it allowed them to engage in a faith-filled form of social action. They saw that this method enabled them to put “roots down” even more deeply in their own faith while taking “walls down” to grow in solidarity, trust, and knowledge of people of other religions and beliefs.
We have seen that this method has also helped congregations identify and develop new leaders, especially those the dominant culture tends to overlook and exclude. As these new leaders developed, churches were growing in number, depth, and impact.
Our work at CTC equips congregations to engage in institutional renewal and broad-based organising within the wider Citizens UK alliance in a distinctive, faith-filled way.
Through our Congregational Development work, we help congregations to reflect on their distinctive beliefs and spiritual practices – so that the community organising emerges from the heart of their life and worship. That’s why we have developed distinctive streams of work for Pentecostal, Roman Catholic and Anglican organising, and have published a report on community organising and the Salvation Army.
Key to our approach is a focus on three “p’s”—prayer, patience, and people development. Our Cycle of Prayer and Organising helps churches understand the organising process as a way to listen to what God is already doing in their midst and attend to the gifts he has already given them. It’s an approach that requires a patient trust that God has given his people everything they need to do the next thing to which he is calling them.
This patience allows us to focus, not on quick, often shallow outcomes, but on the slow process of developing leaders – so that the social action which is taken builds their confidence, agency and solidarity with others. As Pope Francis has explained, this kind of work has a much greater long-term impact:
“What we need, then, is to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical events. Without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity.
Sometimes I wonder if there are people in today’s world who are really concerned about generating processes of people-building, as opposed to obtaining immediate results which yield easy, quick short-term political gains, but do not enhance human fullness…
This criterion also applies to evangelization, which calls for attention to the bigger picture, openness to suitable processes and concern for the long run. The Lord himself, during his earthly life, often warned his disciples that there were things they could not yet understand and that they would have to await the Holy Spirit.”
Evangelii Gaudium, 223–225
Our new reports on Organising for Growth, Organising, Synodality and Catholic Social Action and People of power, Walking in the Spirit – Community Organising and Pentecostalism describe the spiritual foundations for this work, and its growing impact.
We’ve also helped other faith communities to reflect on how to go deeper in their organising – working with Citizens UK to publish A New Covenant of Virtue: Islam and Community Organising, and advising the Jewish Reform Movement on their congregational development work.