Why ‘Doing Good in the Community’ Is Both a Good and a Bad Idea: The Congregation as the Hermeneutic of the Gospel and Public Trust

The theme of the current Special Issue, ‘Faith in Action: Examining the Power and Purpose of a Public Theology in Contemporary Society’, leaves a lot of scope for definition. Here, the theme is addressed via the lens of the public life and practice of a Christian congregation and its generative qualities pertaining to public trust. Such an approach contrasts with more formal public theologies which tend to favour intellectual or academic discourse. It will be argued that the life of a local faith community and its embodied public interface provides a better starting point as it can be seen as the most directly presupposed concrete and public context of the phrase ‘faith in action’. As an analytical conduit, the congregation is a neglected category for rendering a public theology, even as it lies at the heart of the Christian faith’s constitutive practice. Here, a particular form of public exchange drawn from local experience will be set against the background of the recent trend in ecclesiology to turn away from abstracted notions of the church towards more practice-orientated understandings. The dynamics of developing public trust will be considered through reflection on an oft repeated response offered from non-practicing observers of my local church’s work: ‘You do so much good in the community’. Although a seemingly simple (and positive) sentiment, such a comment in fact bears complex layers of meaning and subtextual inflections to which a minister and congregation might give heed in search of public trust.