The Challenge of Faith and Poverty: Resourcing Local UK Church Communities to Challenge Hidden Hardship and Build Resilience

Churches continue to play a central role in UK local communities. Churches’ social capital can make them ideally placed to respond to poverty. However, individuals within church congregations do not always express a clear understanding of poverty, especially if they have little experience of hardship themselves. This can limit the effectiveness and appropriateness of their responses. This paper questions how local churches can be better resourced to respond to poverty, particularly in areas of inequality. It explores this through reflections on the Hidden Hardship Devotional Study Guide, developed following rural participatory research. The paper argues for the importance of local congregations first addressing language and their understanding of poverty before they act; to then move beyond the “rescuer” phenomenon to break down binaries of “us” and “them” and embrace hospitality; and in doing so to address the violence of poverty. These make the paper a matter of grassroots politics: by responding to poverty, local churches enter longstanding debates on the relationship between the state and religion, and questions around faith provision versus the welfare state. The paper concludes that sharing the voices of people experiencing poverty through participatory research presents an important yet novel opportunity to better resource local churches to respond to poverty by encouraging greater reflection and comprehension rather than an action, solution focussed mindset.